Port: Would Trump be a dictator? Let's ask his lawyers – INFORUM
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MINOT — Imagine, if you will, dear reader, that former President Barack Obama argued that, by dint of being the president, he was absolutely immune from criminal prosecution.
Imagine he did this not in a bombastic way, not in some throw-away line from a stump speech to sympathetic partisans, but in an official way that would give the argument, if agreed to, the weight of the law.
How do you imagine Republicans would have reacted?
Apoplexy. That would have been the word for it. Fox News pundits would have railed about tyranny. Republicans in Congress would be railing against Obama’s monarchical ambitions. “Nobody is above the law,” they’d no doubt tell us.
So what, then, to make of Donald Trump making that same argument? And not delivering it as bluster to an adoring crowd of MAGA-heads, but as an argument before the courts that, if agreed to, could set a legal precedent whereby whoever might be the American president has no legal culpability for anything they do?
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Trump is facing federal criminal charges for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. As a part of his defense, Trump and his lawyers have argued in court filings that the disgraced former president has “absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the ‘outer perimeter’ of his official responsibility.”
Set aside for a moment your feelings about Trump and whether or not he is guilty of the charges against him. Think about what he’s arguing and how that argument might apply to every other individual to hold office in the White House, whatever their political affiliations.
Trump is saying that presidents are not accountable under the law for the things they do as president.
If the courts accept this reasoning — federal prosecutor Jack Smith has immediately put the question before the U.S. Supreme Court — it would be an astounding expansion of executive power in America. One that Trump’s supporters are seemingly comfortable with when it applies to Trump, but how would they feel if it applied to current President Joe Biden? Or former President Barack Obama? Or, should he ever be elected to the office, President Gavin Newsom?
“Defendant’s four-year service as Commander in Chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens,” district court Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in her opinion rejecting the Trump team’s arguments.
“By definition, the President’s duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed’ does not grant special latitude to violate them,” she continued.
There has been much debate, of late, about whether or not Donald Trump, if elected to a second term, would govern as a dictator. It’s an open question as to whether or not he would — Trump has always been far more interested in the celebrity of that office than the realities of governing the country — but based on the arguments he’s making in court, he certainly believes he could with impunity.
Trumpism is an exercise in hypocrisy, and there may be no example of that more odious than the MAGA movement, made up as it is of chest-thumping “conservatives” who rail against so-called Republicans-In-Name-Only for betraying the cause of limited and restrained government, lining itself up behind Trump who is, literally, arguing that the presidency bestows upon its occupant “absolute immunity” from prosecution for criminal conduct.
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Those are the words of Trump’s legal representatives. “Absolute immunity.”
When Gov. Doug Burgum ended his presidential campaign, North Dakota’s Sens. Kevin Cramer and John Hoeven were quick to endorse Trump. Cramer positively gushed about it on Trump sycophant Scott Hennen’s show. “So I just wanted to let everybody know that my favorite president is still my favorite president and I want him to be the next president,” he said, indicating that he was pretty much just being polite to a fellow North Dakotan when he was backing Burgum.
Trump’s beliefs about his ability to break laws without consequence apparently didn’t weigh on Cramer’s decision at all.
Would Trump be a dictator — a term defined as “a person with unlimited governmental power” — if re-elected? I don’t know. He may be too lazy to be one. But he thinks he would have the power to be one; he thinks he could run roughshod over the laws that govern the rest of us with impunity. Do we need to know anything else to understand that this man is not fit to hold that office?
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