Having had the Supreme Court of the United States reject Colorado’s attempt to ban him from the presidential ballot, former President Donald Trump predicted that the Supreme Court will also grant him broad presidential immunity in the federal case against him for election subversion.
“Another thing that will be coming up very soon will be immunity for a president,” Trump said. “And not immunity for me but for any president.”
Trump contends that a president needs immunity to make decisions — even the wrong ones — to ensure the ability to make those decisions “free of all terror that can be rained upon them when they leave office or even before they leave office.”
Trump: Another thing that will be coming up very soon will be immunity for president. Presidents have to make decisions, and they have to make them free of all terror that can be rained upon them pic.twitter.com/JRf0nA4yTm
— Acyn (@Acyn) March 4, 2024
Trump’s interpretation of the president’s power and potential culpability didn’t fly with the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which rejected Trump’s immunity claim before the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in to hear the case, scheduling oral arguments for April 22. (The delay is seen to hand Trump a scheduling victory — if not a legal victory — in the prosecution’s race to begin some of Trump’s criminal trials before the November election.)
Trump’s unanimous win on the Colorado ballot issue was no surprise, as every account of the hearings showed the justices exhibiting “skepticism” during the hearing.
But in taking the immunity case, according to constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe, the SCOTUS created an abstract question to answer rather framing Trump’s claim as a single, narrow question: “Whether a president charged with criminally seeking to remain in office beyond the end of his term has absolute immunity from prosecution.”
The answer to that question lies in the primary American supposition that no one is above the law, not even the president.