Trump derangement fuels immunity hysteria

Trump hysteria labors. You can see it trying. You can see how hard the idiots are pumping the bellows to inflate today’s fake crisis. They know that it’s fake; and you know that it’s fake; and they know that you know that it’s fake; and you know that they know that you know that it's fake; but still, everyone runs around with their hair "on fire" because there’s a horrible crisis. I have no language to express how tired all of this makes me feel.

So, Donald Trump is claiming that the president of the United States has legal immunity for his official acts and this is shocking and unprecedented. Nothing like this has ever happened before, and it’s an absolute outrage.

Everyone who tells you that Donald Trump is the first former government official ever to claim legal immunity for his actions while in office is lying to you.

Let’s watch someone make this argument.

Ankush Khardori is hopelessly respectable, an Ivy League law grad who worked for a white shoe law firm in Manhattan before becoming a federal prosecutor. After that, he wrote for the whole menu of respectable publications, starting with the New York Times. Today, he’s a senior writer at Politico, so his voice is heard in the halls of power, even if Politico makes my skin crawl. If you were his mom, you'd be proud of him.

What all of that adds up to, though, is that Ankush Khardori works in the crisis factory, pumping the bellows to inflate today’s fake crisis. Watch him do this in a piece on the latest legal developments in the Democratic Party’s cluster indictments of presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump:

While it is likely to be too much for even the conservative justices to endorse Trump’s absurd argument for immunity, they could send the case back to [District Court Judge Tanya] Chutkan with instructions to conduct some further analysis of the allegations against Trump to ascertain whether some of them might plausibly be covered by a newly created zone of presidential immunity for crimes committed while in office.

The link in the middle of that paragraph is Khardori linking to himself. Trump’s claim for immunity is absurd, Ankush Khardori argues, because Ankush Khardori has said so. He is the authority he cites.

In the linked piece, published by New York Magazine, Khardori writes:

Trump’s claim to immunity from criminal prosecution is so over the top, so absurd, and so inconsistent with our country’s founding principles — as well as our democratic traditions and aspirations — that even the conservative justices would have to know that endorsing the theory as Trump has presented it could prompt serious and widespread civil unrest.

See, Trump is a madman, making “over the top” claims in a state of complete absurdity. As Khardori says at Politico, Trump is arguing for some “newly created zone of presidential immunity.” He’s suddenly inventing the novel idea that the president of the United States might have some kind of legal immunity, can you believe it?

Khardori is pulling a maneuver that you can find all over social media coming from almost every member of the political class.

Here is Nancy Pelosi’s version in the form of a complaint about our highest court agreeing to hear arguments regarding Trump’s claims of presidential immunity:

The Supreme Court is placing itself on trial with its decision to hear the former president’s total immunity claim. It remains to be seen whether the justices will uphold the fundamental American value that no one is above the law – not even a former president.

So, OK, here are the principles: no one is above the law. Official immunity does not exist. Everyone can be prosecuted for illegal acts under all circumstances, and no one but Donald Trump has ever been crazy enough to make any kind of claim that there’s some kind of legal immunity associated with his office.

Now, Barack Obama ordered a drone strike that killed a 16-year-old American citizen, Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi, which led to an unsuccessful lawsuit from the ACLU. Liberal publications found the Obama administration's drone strike policies appalling — writing, for example, that “the Obama administration still regularly kills people without even being completely sure who it is they’re actually killing.”

Come up with your own list of examples, because they go on and on.

George W. Bush and the policies of “extraordinary rendition” and waterboarding. Bill Clinton's order to destroy a pharmaceutical factory in Sudan on the contested premise that it produced chemical weapons, using cruise missiles to end a poor country's ability make medicine for itself.

No one has ever seriously entertained the possibility that Barack Obama would be marched out of his mansion on Martha’s Vineyard in handcuffs to face murder charges for the drone strike on Abdulrahman Al-Aulaqi. The argument over waterboarding never included the empanelment of a grand jury to consider indicting George Bush.

Why? You know why. The presidency comes with — has always come with — a substantial presumption of official immunity. Everyone simply knew this, right up until the moment Trump suggested it, at which point the thought became bizarre and insane.

In fact, everyone in every form of official life routinely functions inside a deeply layered structure of official immunity. A police officer who hurts you as he arrests you usually isn’t at risk of losing his life's savings when you file a lawsuit over the injury because police officers have qualified immunity.

A prosecutor who withholds exculpatory evidence in your case risks having the charges dismissed, but he isn’t going to be sued or arrested — because he has prosecutorial immunity.

A judge who makes a serious error that causes you harm has nothing to worry about, personally, because of his judicial immunity — which is absolute.

And a member of Congress who slanders you in a viciously defamatory speech on the floor of the House or Senate can’t be sued because of their legal immunity under the speech and debate clause.

Everyone in politics and everyone in the political press knows all of this. They all work, all day and every day, in a set of circumstances that bring them into regular contact with the many forms of official immunity. And then, Donald Trump suggests that the president of the United States has legal immunity, and they pretend to stagger around and roll their eyes and laugh out loud.

"Immunity?! What is he even talking about? Is he crazy?"

This is a deliberate and calculated narrative strategy. Everyone who tells you that Donald Trump is the first former government official ever to claim legal immunity for his actions while in office — which he is doing absurdly, even madly — is lying to you as directly and obviously as it’s possible to lie.

There are arguments against Trump’s claims, but no one is making them in good faith. Trump derangement is the art of finding endless outrage in the unremarkable, and it’s time to stop tolerating it.