If you’re a Democratic partisan, things are tough right now. Voter disapproval of President Joe Biden is near an all-time high. In head-to-head general election matchups with his Republican rivals, he’s usually trailing or tied. But this week offered a useful reminder that there is hope for fretful Democrats — and his name is Donald Trump.
If current polling is any prediction, Trump will almost certainly face off against Biden next November. And while the prospect of another Trump presidency is enough to make Democrats (and anyone who looks positively upon American democracy) cower in fear, Trump continues to offer the best hope for another Biden term in office.
Biden can run ads claiming that Trump believes he has the right to kill his political rivals — and they would be 100% true.
This week alone, his criminal lawyers went to federal court and argued that a president has near complete immunity from crimes committed in office. Only a president, they asserted, who has first been impeached by the House and then convicted by the Senate can be charged and prosecuted for a crime committed while in office.
This led to an inevitable question from one of the three federal appellate judges conducting the hearing: “Could a president who ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival and is not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?”
According to Trump’s lawyer, D. John Sauer, the answer is: only if he were impeached and convicted first.
Let’s put aside for a moment the legal insanity of this argument, which is akin to arguing that the president can only be held accountable for criminal offenses in office if two-thirds of the Senate agrees.
From a political perspective, this is an even more insane argument. Next fall, Joe Biden can run ads claiming that Trump believes he has the right to kill his political rivals — and they would be 100% true. One has to imagine that outside the MAGA cult, there are a few Americans who might find the…
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