To fend off former President Donald Trump’s election subversion charges, his lawyers have argued in recent weeks that presidents should be immune to criminal prosecution. Trump himself has now made the case directly to the public, and in signature fashion: a lengthy, all-caps social media rant that envisions the presidency as autocracy.
“A president of the United States must have full immunity, without which it would be impossible for him/her to properly function,” Trump posted on Truth Social Thursday morning. (Edited to remove all caps.) “Any mistake, even if well intended, would be met with almost certain indictment by the opposing party at term end. Even events that ‘cross the line’ must fall under total immunity, or it will be years of trauma trying to determine good from bad.”
The big-picture takeaway from Trump’s post is that he imagines the president not as a civil servant constrained by the law but as an absolute ruler.
“You can’t stop police from doing the job of strong & effective crime prevention because you want to guard against the occasional ‘rogue cop’ or ‘bad apple,’” Trump added. “Sometimes you just have to live with ‘great but slightly imperfect.’ All presidents must have complete & total presidential immunity, or the authority & decisiveness of a president of the United States will be stripped & gone forever. Hopefully this will be an easy decision. God bless the Supreme Court!”
Trump’s argument that it’s impossible to function as a head of state without immunity to criminal prosecution is dangerous. As my colleague Jordan Rubin has explained, presidential immunity is a real concept, but the Supreme Court has only granted it “in the civil context, and in limited circumstances at that.” Then-President Richard Nixon was sued by a U.S. Air Force analyst who said he was unjustly fired after testifying before Congress about cost overruns, but in 1982 the Supreme Court ruled that a president is immune to…
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