Well, there it is. This is what’s in store if Trump wins this November. He’ll appoint himself King, and that’ll be that. Attorney General Stephen Miller will tell everybody it’s perfectly legal.
I guess this is yesterday’s papers by now, since we’re already on to the next news cycle, but I’m still wrapping my tortured mind around the argument that Trump’s lawyers just made to the D.C. Circuit, concerning the supposedly infinite breadth of Presidential immunity. I’m paraphrasing a wee bit here, but it went more or less like this:
Trump Lawyer: Your Honours, my client, who sits humbly before you now, was nevertheless your Absolute Monarch, governing according to the Divine Right of Kings, and nobody save God Himself has the power, right, or authority to hold him to account for any action he took while ensconced behind the Resolute Desk, however ghastly and criminally illegal it might have been. Unless, that is, a bunch of dumbass political hacks in the fiercely partisan and dysfunctional U.S. Senate have first convicted him upon his impeachment, which, frankly, fat chance.
Court: So, the former President could, say, have sacrificed a virgin every morning on the Truman Balcony, and he’d be off the hook?
Trump Lawyer: Just so, Your Honour. Unless, that is, the Senate convicted him upon his impeachment in the meantime.
Court: He could have begun his every work day by pitching an infant into a wood chipper, live on Fox and Friends, and we’d all just have to learn to live with that?
Trump Lawyer: Unless impeached and convicted, Your Honour, yes, he could have done. Indeed, may well have done, I’d have to check.
Court: OK, but say nobody impeached him. In that case, he’s sitting pretty?
Trump Lawyer: Not at all, your Honour, not if he was impeached.
Court: Yeah, I get that, but say he wasn’t impeached? Then he’s cool?
Trump Lawyer: Not if he’s been impeached and convicted, no.
Court: Look, are you simple or what? The premise of the fucking hypothetical is that he wasn’t ever impeached.
Trump Lawyer: I don’t think I follow, Your Honour. I’m saying he’d be in legal jeopardy if he was impeached.
Court: Jesus Christ, is there anybody beside you we can talk to here?
Trump Lawyer: If it please the Court, I’d be happy to let Mr. Trump, your once and future Monarch if I may remind Your Honours, speak on his own beha –
Court: Sweet shit in a basket, no. Fuck no! He needs to shut the fuck up! In fact, so do you, you purportedly Ivy League pinhead. I gotta say, the “Harvard” that appears on your C.V. has me confused. Is there more than one Harvard? You don’t mean the one in Cambridge, Mass., right? Did you, by any chance, actually attend “Haarverd”, as in the “Haarverd Institute of Animal Husbandry” in Altoona, PA? That might explain a few things.
Trump Lawyer: You can’t talk to me that way! I represent your once and future Monarch, and therefore, by extension, God Almighty Himself!
Court: Oh for fuck sakes, sit down and and put a clamp on your pie hole.
Trump Lawyer: He will smite thee! Ye shall all be turned to pillars of salt, sharing the deadly fate of Lot’s wife! God as my witness! And client!
Court: I’d say “we should be so lucky”, but we’d probably wind up right back here, only this time in Hell, with you still yapping…hey, wait a damned minute…
Like I say, I’m paraphrasing a bit, but that’s pretty close to verbatim.
Now, this is why I never got anywhere in life, because at that point, if I’m on Jack Smith’s team, I’m rising to say something like this:
Your Honours, if that unreasoning mound of orange Crisco wins this argument, and you rule that Presidential immunity really is that fucking limitless, it follows that Joe Biden’s best move is to send Delta Force over here, right after you’re done banging your little gavel, and have the stupid bastard perforated by 600 rounds of hot lead. You as well, while they’re at it, and SCOTUS too, in case any of you honourable morons wakes up to the monster you just created, and tries to undo the damage. Best to appoint a whole new slate, full of judges who can be counted upon to do the right thing, yes? Then, under your New and Improved immunity doctrine, he’ll be sitting in the fabled catbird seat, won’t he? ‘Cuz I can guarantee you, he wont be convicted if he’s impeached. All he has to do is keep 35 Senators on his team, and shit, man, Josef Mengele could hang on to more than that in this bullshit Congress. Yup, it’s going to be open season on all y’all, and you know what? You’ll deserve what you get.
Oh, if only. Believe me, I could use the catharsis. They’d probably have me hauled off to the slam, but still.
Anyway, it looks as if this panel of the D.C. Circuit merits no such dressing down. After hearing oral argument – Judge Pan sounded like she was about to throw a stapler at Trump’s lawyer – I’m positive they’re going to rule against Donald, and I even hold out some hope that SCOTUS will decline to hear his inevitable appeal, since there’s really no substantive legal issue to argue about. The whole point of the American Revolution, after all, was to be done with this Divine Right of Kings horse shit. No way the Founders then turned around and drafted the Constitution to create a new American Monarchy. Nobody who’s not half a bubble off plumb would even entertain such an argument.** Certainly no Court ever would. Same thing goes for that “except if he was impeached and convicted” claptrap, a strange and illogical back door created out of whole cloth to make the argument seem less extreme, I guess, which derives from a very twisted, extremely lawyerly reading of the relevant clause in their craptacular Constitution. Nope, Trump is royally screwed on this one (see what I did there? Hyuk!). This will be especially delightful, once it’s all nice and legal, since it will have been a panel of three women who laughed him out of court, only one of them Caucasian, and that’s gotta brown our Donny something wicked. That’s gotta have him filling his diaper from D.C. all the way back to his cheesy Florida golf brothel.
Fuck ‘im. I hope he pouts so hard he gives himself a stroke, and Melania has him buried at the first tee of his crappy golf course in Bedminster, right next to where he dumped Ivana. If she can hire a homeless guy to come by once a day to take a dump in front of his headstone, better still.
** Moreover, any lawyer who would stand there and advocate for what amounts to the eradication of the American experiment, the tearing-down of the entire edifice of U.S. democracy, and the installation of a new totalitarian dictatorship in its place, ought to have his licence yanked. It’s not a good faith argument, and it’s beyond mere zealous representation of his client. It’s evil. The profession should kick his ass to the curb.
the needlefish 