Should anyone who has been a US president be granted immunity for life?
That’s what trump’s attorneys are arguing.
So think about that. Lifelong immunity from prosecution means you can do any damn thing you want without fear of ever being held accountable for it. You can shoot someone on 5th Avenue, trigger an insurrection, try to convince your VP not to certify election result, make a frantic call to the Georgia Secretary of State and instruct him to hold a new election or find those 11,600 votes he needs to win your state.
In watching trump’s legal nightmares unfold, in a judicial system that’s supposed to be equal for everyone, I’m shocked by the preferential treatment he gets. Any other person would have been jailed at the first violation of the gag order.
Just how is all this going to play out, anyway? Unprecedented territory: that’s what the news says constantly. But they’re right. Nixon brought us to that place. From Wikipedia:
Proclamation 4311 was a presidential proclamation issued by President of the United States Gerald Ford on September 8, 1974, granting a full and unconditional pardon to Richard Nixon, his predecessor, for any crimes that he might have committed against the United States as president. In particular, the pardon covered Nixon’s actions during the Watergate scandal. In a televised broadcast to the nation, Ford, who had succeeded to the presidency upon Nixon’s resignation, explained that he felt the pardon was in the best interests of the country and that the Nixon family’s situation was “a tragedy in which we all have played a part. It could go on and on and on, or someone must write the end to it. I have concluded that only I can do that, and if I can, I must.”
I remember that day, remember watching it on TV, Nixon doing his silly salute and then disappearing into a plane.
The difference here is that trump hopes that by playing the victim being persecuted by “the radical left” he’s doing it so that we, the voting public out here, won’t have to. Odd, coming from a man known mostly for his orange hair and his narcissism and oh, drink some bleach, it will take care of Covid.
As Trump’s dictatorial rhetoric becomes more frequent and vile, I get texts and emails from friends who are freaked out and depressed about this. The men who wrote the constitution, those founding fathers, never anticipated someone like trump. And that left huge holes in the laws that govern this democracy. That’s the kind of territory we’re in. Democracy is on the line.
I’ve never understood Americans who support this bozo, especially now. Do they all have daddy issues? Do they all need a father figure who dictates what they can do, say, how they can live? One woman with whom I grew up in Venezuela chastised me for criticizing trump. So I asked her, Do you prefer to live under a Trump dictatorship?
Her answer? Yes.
We haven’t spoken since.
What am I missing here about the human psyche?
