2023-12-04 18:25:00
(CNN) — Donald Trump is highlighting the profound dilemma that voters could face next year, with sweeping claims of unchecked presidential power alongside increasingly brazen anti-democratic rhetoric.
A claim made over the weekend by the former president, who refused to accept the result of the last election, that Joe Biden is the one destroying democracy earned a rebuke from the current president’s campaign on Monday. The exchange showed how Trump’s political career is built on an edifice of blatant falsehood that is nonetheless effective in motivating his voters. It is also a telling example of how Trump, who has promised to use a new term to go after his opponents, sees no limits to his power if he wins next year.
The Republican front-runner, for example, is arguing in multiple courts that, by virtue of his role as former president, he is immune from the laws and precedents under which other Americans are tried. This has enormous consequences, not only for the accountability in court that is yet to come over his turbulent first term. Given that he has a strong chance of winning the presidential election again—he leads President Joe Biden narrowly in some polls—he also raises serious constitutional questions about the limits of presidential power.
That is why the 2024 elections will represent such a momentous episode in the history of the United States. The entire constitutional premise of American governance could be at stake.
Trump’s concept of the indomitable presidency sheds light on how he would behave in a second term, given his apparent belief that any action a president can take is, by definition, legal. He has already promised that he will use four more years in the White House to implement “retaliation” against their political enemies. If the twice-impeached former president wins the Republican nomination and the presidency, it is already clear that a second term would risk destroying the principle that presidents do not hold monarchical power.
Judge destroys the theory of Trump’s immunity after the presidency
The courts may end up being the only institution that stands in the way of the former president, who faces four criminal trials, two of them for alleged electoral interference related to his false accusations of fraud in the 2020 race that he lost. He has pleaded not guilty in all cases against him and maintains that he committed no crime.
In a blow to Trump’s strategy, his power grab was rejected last week in a landmark opinion by U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who will preside over his federal election subversion case due to begin in March. But, in keeping with his attempt to delay his criminal trials until after the November election, Trump is likely to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which would face one of its most important rulings on the scope of presidential power in decades. if he decided to take on the case.
Chutkan rejected several strands of Trump’s argument in his sweeping opinion and got to the core of the former president’s view of power when he wrote that his “four-year service as commander in chief did not grant him the divine right of kings to escape criminal responsibility.” that governs his fellow citizens”.
The idea that presidents are subject to the same legal restrictions as any other citizen and that all Americans are equal before the law is one of the foundations of the United States legal and political system. But it is one that Trump systematically tries to overturn.
The former president’s attempt to destroy the fabric of American democracy is also evident in the way he tries to present efforts to hold him accountable for his attempts to destroy the integrity of the 2020 election as an attempt by the Biden administration to make cheating in the 2024 elections.
This weekend, Trump, for example, took aim at arguments by Biden and other critics that his behavior poses a threat to the survival of American democracy if he wins next year’s general election.
“Joe Biden is not the defender of American democracy,” Trump said during a campaign stop in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on Saturday. “Joe Biden is the destroyer of American democracy and… it’s him and his people. They’re the destroyers of the American dream. The American dream is dead with them in office, it’s sad.”
The idea that Trump is a defender of democracy is absurd, given that he attempted to interrupt the long tradition of peaceful transfers of power after the 2020 election, the result of which was confirmed by all the recounts and courts that ruled on his false claims of electoral fraud. But it is characteristic of Trump to accuse an adversary of transgressions of which he himself is guilty. And the effectiveness of his unique ability to fabricate false realities and use them as tools of power can be seen in the attitude of millions of Trump supporters who now believe the 2020 election was stolen despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. .
Biden campaign spokesman Ammar Moussa warned in a statement that “Donald Trump’s America in 2025 is one in which government is his personal weapon to lock up his political enemies. You don’t have to take our word for it.” “Trump himself has admitted it.” Moussa added: “After spending a week defending his plan to take healthcare away from millions of Americans, this is his latest desperate attempt at distraction: the American people see this clearly and it will not work.” Trump recently promised to try again to kill the Affordable Care Act (ACA) if he wins next year, and then spent several days backtracking on an issue that many other Republicans consider a political ballast.
Trump’s main opponents fear raising their threat to democracy
Six weeks before the Iowa elections, the first competition for the Republican nomination, new signs are emerging of the autocratic inclinations of the former president and possible future president. Trump’s opponents in the Republican Party, who still trail him by a considerable margin, have barely mentioned his anti-democratic rhetoric or his attempt to defy the will of voters in 2020, which could scare away moderate voters in swing states during the general elections. The former president’s rivals appear to want to avoid alienating Republican Party voters who sympathize with Trump’s claims, consistent with the party’s long-standing failure to constrain or punish his repeated attacks on democracy.
In an extraordinary moment in Iowa on Sunday, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis exemplified the way candidates are afraid to bring up Trump’s undemocratic behavior.
Surprisingly, the governor suggested that the former president’s transgression was not in trying to steal an election he lost, but in failing to do so successfully.
“Am I going to let them steal an election for me?” DeSantis said. “Of course I’m not going to do that. I’m going to do everything I can to make the people’s voice heard. I’m tired of whining about it, when nothing is done about it. Why do you let them get away with it? “I don’t understand it. If you didn’t stop it when you were in office, how are you going to stop it when you’re out?”
One Republican who has criticized Trump — and has effectively paid for her comments with her political career — is former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney, who said in an interview that aired this weekend that the new Republican House speaker Representative Mike Johnson was “absolutely” a collaborator in Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election and that his party was unfit to hold the House majority because of its cowardly attitude toward Trump.
“I believe very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican Party, but today’s Republican Party made a decision and they didn’t choose the Constitution,” Cheney said on “CBS Sunday Morning.”
“And that’s why I do think it represents a threat if Republicans are in the majority in January 2025.”
Cheney warned that if Trump were re-elected for a second term, he would not be limited by the political system. He said people don’t “fully understand the extent to which Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted…One of the things we see happening today is a kind of sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.”
However, one of Trump’s closest allies in Washington, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, told CNN’s Dana Bash on “State of the Union” on Sunday that he believed Cheney was acting out of personal animus. towards Trump.
“I think Liz’s hatred of Trump is real,” Graham said. “I understand why people don’t like what he does and says sometimes, but in terms of actions and results, he was much better than Biden… And if we have four more years of this, Liz Cheney, then we won’t recognize America, and the world will really be on fire.”
The presidency is not a “lifetime get out of jail pass”
Chutkan is not the only judge who is trying to stop Trump’s effort to parade his former position as what she called “a lifetime get-out-of-jail-free pass.” In another case on Friday, an appeals court in Washington ruled that the former president could be sued in civil courts for events related to the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
Chief Justice Sri Srinivasan contradicted one of Trump’s core beliefs that everything a president says or does in office is protected from claims.
The president “does not spend every minute of every day exercising official responsibilities,” the opinion says. “And when he acts outside the functions of his office, he no longer enjoys immunity… When he acts in an unofficial, private capacity, he is subject to civil lawsuits like any private citizen.”
In another case, stemming from the indictment of Trump and his accomplices in Fulton County, Georgia, Trump’s lawyers argue that the indictment is an attempt to interfere in the 2024 election. And they warn that the case may not be tried until 2029. , given the possibility that Trump will win the next election and the constitutional principle that federal laws take precedence over state laws. “Under the Supremacy Clause and his duty to the president of the United States, this trial would not take place at all until after his term ends,” Trump’s attorney, Steven Sadow, told the judge. .
Trump’s arguments about the protections offered to him simply because of his former position do not convince the justices, as is evident in Chutkan’s opinion.
“The defendant may be subject to federal investigation, indictment, prosecution, conviction and punishment for any criminal act committed while in office,” Chutkan wrote in response to claims by Trump’s lawyers that his falsehoods about a fraudulent election represented a attempt to ensure electoral accountability as part of his official capacity as president and are therefore protected by presidential immunity.
But Trump has long been more adept at manipulating the political system. And if he triumphs in 2024, his legal arguments will have been a warning of a second term that he imagines almost unguarded.
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