The Best Interests of a Nation Be Damned

Opposites don’t just attract; they create each other. There would be no high without low, no wet without dry, no immunity without guilt. Immunity predicates guilt. Innocence, by contrast, in no way conjures the notion. Jesus did not plead immunity for the flowers of the field or for the flocks of sheep munching them. Immunity from what?

Nor do lawyers plead for immunity when their client is innocent, has been framed, or is not in his right mind. They plead for justice. Only when their client has been caught red-handed, incriminating evidence is copious, and damning eyewitness testimony incontestable might lawyers take a crack at pleading immunity. In today’s legal system, rather than indicating any reasonable expectation of success, making the far-fetched plea indicates there is ample budget left to try. 

That is a fitting description of Donald J. Trump’s circumstances. The man’s track record does not conform with the character of an innocent man. At the time he was elected president in 2016, he was embroiled in over 4,000 legal cases. As president he was impeached twice. In his brief post-presidency phase, he was found guilty in three civil cases and ordered to pay a total of over half a billion dollars in damages. In the single criminal case brought to trial against him to date, he was found guilty of all 34 charges. In the three criminal cases currently pending against him, he stands charged of 54 felony counts. Rather than being a target of persecution as he likes to pretend, Trump appears to be the plague himself and his target — commensurate with his ambition — all of society.

The Supreme Court’s illuminating judgment reveals its own presumption that the president of the United States can perform to the best of his ability only when he knows he can act outside of the law.

In perhaps the weightiest case pending,¹ Trump’s lawyers argued their client should be immune from criminal prosecution for actions he performed as president. As those are the actions for which he stands charged, their request is both an admission of Trump’s guilt and a declaration that it shouldn’t matter because Trump was president when he committed what would be considered crimes if performed by any other actor. In a 6-3 ruling on July 1, the Supreme Court concurred so far as to declare that for core functions the president is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution, for his official acts he has presumptive immunity.

The Supreme Court’s illuminating judgment reveals its own presumption that the president of the United States can perform to the best of his ability when he knows he can act outside of the law. Only with that reassurance can he take the bold, expeditious, but perhaps extremely unpopular, perhaps illegal, actions necessary to further the good of the country he was charged to defend and protect. The Supreme Court is also quite sure that furthering the good of the country is all a president will ever be doing with his core functions and official actions. 

In the case for which this issue of immunity was raised, that of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2020 election, a singular act performed by the man stands out as perhaps the hardest to defend. As the armed mob stormed the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, Trump watched it on TV from his private dining room in the White House. He watched mayhem erupt, and he watched what ensued: injury, pain, consternation, anguish, despair, and exhaustion as enforcement officers did their best to hold back a violent mob in an attempt to protect the property and personnel of the government whose best interests Trump himself had been elected to defend and protect. Trump watched the crowd call to hang Mike Pence. He watched the mob do its utmost to crush a police officer unluckily caught in a doorframe of the Capitol Building. He watched a rioter batter another police officer with a fire extinguisher. He watched for over three hours.

We have ample evidence that Trump doesn’t know enough about the country to be able to serve its best interests.

What might Trump have been feeling as he watched? A slightly unofficial but heady, deeply gratifying, mysteriously sensual satisfaction of venting wrath? While all the other aspects of the case have been highly publicized, this is the facet we will never know, can never know: the state of a man’s consciousness as he watches a mob — his mob — flood government grounds, breach the Capitol Building, cause death and destruction as it bashes to bits the property, bodies, and brains of the nation and its citizens whose best interests he took an oath to protect. A person may strive to convey the complexities and vicissitudes of that private experience a la Proust or choose to lie about it. It remains, nonetheless, impenetrable ground, a very lucky circumstance for Trump. His lawyers can insist his watching the assault of the Capitol on TV was no act of sadistic glee, but a painful and necessary performance of a core function as president to stay abreast of developments involving national security. And for such acts, the Supreme Court has declared the president’s immunity a necessary precondition.

The Supreme Court is mistaken in its assumption that through his performance as president Trump strives solely to serve the country’s best interests. We have ample evidence that Trump doesn’t know enough about the country to do so. Instead, his presidential acts recall the abandon of someone grooming a large dog. To tend to the country, Trump clips taxes. Shaves environmental regulations. Chops off travel from Muslim countries. Trims federal agencies. Curtails international treaties. Purges illegal aliens. Each gesture and flourish is calculated to amplify the praise of fans, open the coffers of powerful donors, and generate more headlines.

But the country is not a poodle getting fancied up for a show. While shaping a dog’s tail and fluffing its ears have nothing to do with each other nor directly affect the welfare of the dog, each of Trumps’s policy interventions influences the others as well as the functioning of the huge and complex thing a country is, a complexity animated by the operation of hundreds of millions of autonomous agents, who in turn are affected by those policy changes and the state of the nation as a whole. One twist of a policy has wide-ranging consequences not subject to prediction. Twist two policies and the probable outcome is beyond calculation. To advance the interests and well-being of the country, new policies must reflect its complexity. Those responsible for tweaking existing policies must also have some idea of that complexity and respect it. Does Trump? Is he even aware there are complexities to be considered? No, because he doesn’t understand how a country, its government, its economy, the labor force, its industries, international trade, foreign affairs, or national resource management functions. Nor is he interested in demographics, poverty, water treatment, infrastructure, or species diversity.

No matter. Trump’s sketchy understanding of how the United States of America works and what it needs is irrelevant. Trump does not covet the presidency to serve the country’s interests. Nor would he need immunity from criminal prosecution for any official act to advance them. For what Trump does have in mind, however, immunity will come in handy. The six canny conservative justices on the Supreme Court seem to know this. 

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1. United States District Court for the District of Columbia on four charges of attempting to overturn the 2020 U.S. presidential election. ↩︎