In its most general sense. immunity is defined as having "a high degree of resistance." The former president — in Trump's case a misnomer, in its general sense — possesses such immunities when confronting the law, acceptable business practices and widely embraced standards of human decency. His resistance to each is remarkable.
Another area in which Trump is highly resistant is the acquisition of even the most rudimentary knowledge of history, any history, but particularly American history — strikingly odd for anyone who has occupied the highest office in the land. The U.S. presidency is centrally rooted in America's past, thus most presidents have sidelined as amateur historians (Wilson, once, a professional), meditating on what has passed as a way to gauge the present and set a course for the future within history's monitory constraints.
Trump has had no need for such counsel; the narcissist genuinely believes he has all the answers and that all his answers are unassailable, a characteristic of the clinical disorder. This unfortunate trait is especially disturbing when we find it before the U.S. Supreme Court, where at least four justices also appear to suffer from Trump's insulated delusions of infallibility.
Because his donors pay for his legal defense before state courts, district courts, appellate courts and the Supreme Court, Trump also possesses a sort of financial carte blanche to argue his innocence to near infinity. What begins as an ironclad case of his guilt, worthy of summary judgment in any sensible system of justice, soon becomes a yearslong serialization for television.
His lawyers, knowing of bread, sides and butter, are of course sensitive to Trump's legal needs, which always come down to the singular: lying — lying in all its creative variations: outright lies, deceptions, fabrications, manipulations, exaggerations and omissions. One, some or all of these his lawyers haul out before the courts.
Thursday was Omission Day for the ex-president's pettifoggers. And lucky for us, one of Trump's lawyers, John Sauer, admixed before the Supreme Court his client's ignorance of history with the legal tactic of omitting "the rest of the story," (per Paul Harvey). Lawyerly Team Trump wished to hang its asinine claim of a president's "absolute immunity" from criminal prosecution on the one U.S. president who never told a lie.
Yes, in his 1796 "Farewell Address to the People of the United States," George wrote, said Sauer to the court, a warning against "the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities.”
And yes, George did write that. And here before the court, said Sauer, was a concrete example of a horrid enormity stemming from a dominant Democratic faction whose spirit of revenge has been sharpened into the ugly, unwarranted persecution via prosecution of Mr. Trump. (No cameras, but rumor has it, Sir, that there were tears in the eyes of The Four.)
Listening to Sauer's rubbish was former CNN anchor John Avlon, now a Democratic candidate for Congress and author of a 2017 book on George Washington's farewell address. Being intimately knowledgeable of its words, Avlon realized that Sauer had stopped short in reciting them. Washington went on, yet the following part, Sauer omitted. After "has perpetrated the most horrid enormities," were the words,
"is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty." (Italics mine.)
Before the court was Trump's January 2021 attempt through "absolute power" to secure "his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty" (though you would not have known this essential fact listening to the justice's questions directed at the competing sides). Rather than bolstering Trump's argument, Washington's words condemned his actions.
Sauer's omission was so egregiously misleading in its intent, Washington biographer Alexis Coe summarized his argument as "bonkers," telling CNN that "Washington ... certainly did not think that he would avoid being held accountable for his actions in office."
Yet corrupting history is easy for those who are themselves corrupt, which in Trump's case(s) include his attorneys. And its corruption becomes exceptionally easy when one is so ignorant and disrespectful of the discipline it's nothing more than another weapon with which to deceive. There are many "truths" in history that remain elusive, but others are well agreed on — and one of them is that the Founders would be appalled by Trump's claim of absolute immunity.
Their 18th-century disgust, however, would overlook that this sorry excuse for an ex-president is extraordinarily immune, which is to say, highly resistant to, virtually every scientifically discovered gene of what goes into the making of a decent human being. His best and most legally plausible defense? Insanity. From birth.
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