According to a senior editor at The Atlantic, Ronald Brownstein, Donald Trump’s legal team had a successful day last month presenting arguments on presidential immunity before the U.S. Supreme Court. Brownstein’s article, titled “Trump Is Getting What He Wants,” suggests that the former president may not face federal court trials before the upcoming November elections. In an interview with CNN, Brownstein elaborated on his analysis.
“Political analyst Ron Brownstein’s new piece out in The Atlantic is about the Supreme Court‘s impact on Trump‘s future and the future of the presidency…let‘s start there. Ron, because after yesterday‘s Supreme Court arguments, you concluded that Trump is getting what he wants and more how and why,” asked host Kate Bolduan
“Well, look in practical, your attorney in the near term, what he‘s getting is we‘re kind of getting numb to this, but that at that hearing yesterday, five of the Republican-appointed justices, really all of them except Amy Coney Barrett, gave very clear signals that they are going to protect the Republican presidential nominee from a trial before the November election on the charges that this poll and other polls show are the most serious is to the American people,” Brownstein claimed.
“I mean, in practical terms, at almost any of the rulings that seemed possible out of that hearing are going to make it extremely difficult, if not impossible, for there to be a trial on whether Trump tried to subvert the last election before he faces voters in the next election,” he continued.
“The implications for what happens if he is re-elected may be even more profound. I mean, you saw that hearing how virtually unlimited is their view of presidential power,” he went on. “His lawyers argued that unless he was first impeached and convicted, which is impossible in this current partisan environment, he could sell nuclear secrets, assassinate a political rival, or even stage a coup without facing criminal trials and the legal experts that I spoke with pointed out that when you‘re starting with someone who has that level of view of what he can do as president, trying to draw a very fine line between what can and can‘t be prosecuted after he leaves office is kind of a doomed effort.
He wrapped up: “He is going to take almost any kind of immunity as a license to truly push at the boundaries and read just a portion of because of that, you wrote this: those who went into the hearing wishing to preserve a pre-election trial against Trump emerge from the proceedings reduced to hoping that the court doesn‘t eviscerate the possibility of criminal consequences for any president who breaks the law.”
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