Yesterday, Isaac Arnsdorf reported that Trump was warning of “bedlam” and even violence after the DC appeals court hearing appeared to go badly for his spurious claims of immunity. Arnsdorf wrote that he “threatened unrest if the criminal charges against him cause him to lose the 2024 election. Speaking to reporters after an appeals court hearing in which Trump’s lawyers said he should be immune from prosecution for trying to overturn the 2020 election, Trump claimed without evidence that he was being prosecuted because of polls showing him leading President Biden. He warned that if the charges succeed in damaging his candidacy, the result would be ‘bedlam.’”
“I think they feel this is the way they’re going to try and win, and that’s not the way it goes,” Trump said. “It’ll be bedlam in the country. It’s a very bad thing. It’s a very bad precedent. As we said, it’s the opening of a Pandora’s box.”
…His repeated evasions of ruling out political violence come amid a rising menace of threats and attacks throughout American politics. Biden on Friday condemned Trump for refusing to reject violence.
“Trump won’t do what an American president must do; he refuses to denounce political violence,” Biden said. “So hear me clearly, I will say what Donald Trump won’t: Political violence is never acceptable in the United States— never, never, never. It has no place in the democracy. None.”
The specter of violence also came up during the court argument itself. One of the three judges on the panel, Florence Pan, asked, “Could a president order SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival?” D. John Sauer, a lawyer for Trump, said a president could be prosecuted for such an action only if Congress first impeached and convicted him.
The lawyer representing special counsel Jack Smith argued that Trump’s view of immunity would mean an “extraordinarily frightening future.”
If that’s the case, Justice Department lawyer James Pearce asked, “what kind of world are we living in?”
Trump defended his lawyer’s arguments in his own remarks.
“As a president, you have to have immunity,” he said. “If it’s during the time [in office], you have absolute immunity.”
Without immunity, Trump said, Biden or former president Barack Obama could be prosecuted for actions as president such as the 2021 Afghanistan withdrawal, border policy changes or drone strikes. Trump has repeatedly threatened to retaliate by prosecuting Biden and his family if he returns to office.
“Joe would be ripe for indictment,” Trump said in a video posted to social media late Monday. “… He has to be careful because that can happen to him also.”
In his remarks Tuesday, Trump repeated a years-old allegation that Biden, as vice president, withheld $1 billion in U.S. aid to Ukraine to pressure the country to remove a prosecutor who was investigating a company whose board included Biden’s son Hunter. In reality, Joe Biden leveraged the aid to push out the prosecutor because he wasn’t aggressively pursuing corruption.
Trump also repeated false claims about the 2020 election, and afterward an aide passed out copies of a report that he published online last week and his lawyers cited in a court filing. The report contained allegations that were not new and had already been disproved.
Meanwhile, the 3 judges panel that heard Trump’s appeal yesterday seems read to unanimously reject his nonsense. A quartet of NY Times reporters wrote that they “expressed deep skepticism about [his] claim that he is immune from charges of plotting to subvert the 2020 election, suggesting that it is unlikely to rule in his favor on a central element of his defense.” They appeared to set up a good opportunity for the Supreme Court to refuse to take the case when Trump appeals there next.
Trump almost immediately started posting videos for his MAGAt followers ranting and whining about how unfairly everyone is treating him.
Writing for the New Republic yesterday, Greg Sargent contemplated what it could mean to the country if the courts grant Trump’s claims of immunity. If they do, “he’d be largely unshackled in a second presidential term, free to pursue all manner of corrupt designs with little fear of legal consequences after leaving office again. That Trump might attempt such moves is not idle speculation. He’s telling us so himself. He is openly threatening a range of second-term actions— such as prosecuting political enemies with zero basis in evidence— that would almost certainly strain the boundaries of the law in ugly new ways. Now imagine him pursuing this project with a get-out-of-prosecution-free card in his pocket. ‘It really would permit him to be completely unconstrained if he were reelected,’ Neil Eggleston, who served as White House counsel under President Barack Obama, told me.”
Trump’s lawyers, wrote Sargent “cite civil law precedent to claim that Trump’s acts were within the ‘outer perimeter’ of presidential duties, and thus immune from criminal prosecution after he left office. If not, they suggest, future presidents will be constrained in office by fear of nakedly political prosecutions later… Trevor Morrison, associate White House counsel under Obama, says the key is whether the courts rule that Trump has immunity on the theory that his alleged criminal conduct does fall in the outer perimeter of presidential duties— and how the courts define that perimeter. If they accept Trump’s broad version of immunity or something like it, he might argue that future potentially criminal acts also fall within that perimeter. For instance, could a victorious President Trump urge the FBI to investigate Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis, who has also criminally charged Trump, and order the seizure of documents related to those charges to sabotage her effort? That would be similar to Trump’s corrupt pressure on the Justice Department to fabricate a pretext for halting the January 6, 2021, electoral count.”
“If he is found immune from these charges, there is at least a great risk that the courts will have endorsed an immunity that could cover a number of otherwise criminal things the president might do in the future,” Morrison said. Similarly, Cardozo Law School professor Kate Shaw suggests a ruling for Trump could encourage him to abuse his powers to purge the civil service and invoke the Insurrection Act to target all manner of domestic enemies.
Kristy Parker, counsel at Protect Democracy who served as a lawyer in multiple administrations, notes that Trump has signaled clear intent to do exactly this sort of thing. He has attacked Willis’s prosecution of him as corrupt, hinted at full-scale persecution of “vermin” Americans who oppose him, and openly threatened to prosecute President Biden as retribution. “If I don’t get immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn’t get immunity,” Trump recently raged.
In saying this, Trump essentially declared that if he is denied immunity, he will prosecute Biden on a fake finding of corruption, just as he invented corruption as a pretext for his alleged election crimes. What happens if those efforts to name and target fabricated corruption are in some sense deemed official acts?
“Trump has threatened to use the presidency to punish enemies, reward friends, and protect himself,” Parker told me. “If the courts recognize immunity for the broad array of official acts of the presidency, that will incentivize Trump to abuse those powers further.”
Parker doubts the courts will side with Trump. “But the very nature of his claim further underscores his extreme view of the presidency as being completely above the law,” Parker said.
There’s a strange tendency in our “LOL nothing matters” discourse to treat Trump as fearless and invulnerable in his corruption and (alleged) lawbreaking. In reality, Trump fears prosecution and accountability. As special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on the Russia scandal documented, he took extensive steps to ward off that possibility, bullying his attorney general, trying to get Mueller fired, and ordering an underling to deny that effort.
He was so eager to avoid legal consequences that he might have criminally obstructed justice to avoid it. These fears didn’t stop him from transforming his first term into an extraordinary spree of corruption, self-dealing, and likely criminality, including trying to destroy lawful constitutional democracy, but he and his allies have taken extensive steps to cover it all up throughout.
It’s sobering to imagine what Trump might be capable of during a second term— if it’s decisively confirmed to his satisfaction that the law will not apply to him after all.
"bedlam" and violence? a sure thing. why? because nothing was done about anything for the past 56 years. And most importantly, nothing was done about the LAST time they incided bedlam and violence. So... when you don't do jack shit about it last time, the next time becomes inevitable.
That rolling snowball will continue to get bigger and heavier until it can and will flatten everything in its path.
And it's all because nobody stopped the snowball when it was little and relatively harmless.
So... go ahead and keep electing the party that shoved both thumbs up their ass in 1968 and watched as the snowball started with nixon's treason and is about to destroy the republic with trump as…