Mrs. Betty Bowers @BettyBowers
I got my first "Donald Trump / Kristi Noem" campaign swag.

As the day came to an end, the Republican decided to wrap things up with a call-in interview to “Greg Kelly Reports” on Newsmax, where the two touched on a variety of topics, including Trump’s alleged reluctance to prosecute Hillary Clinton after the 2016 election.
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1783669839728349590
.....To the extent that reality still has any meaning, let’s review the receipts. In Trump’s first year in the White House — after the 2016 election was over and Clinton largely withdrew from public view — the then-president publicly pleaded with the Justice Department to go after Clinton.

A year later, in 2018, the then-president told the White House counsel that he wanted to order the Justice Department to prosecute Clinton.

Ahead of Election Day 2020 — nearly four years after Clinton’s defeat — Trump again publicly called for the Democrat’s incarceration and lobbied then-Attorney General Barr to prosecute Clinton for reasons unknown.

None of this was kept secret. It happened out in the open. We all saw it play out in public.

And yet, there was Trump on national television last night, patting himself on the back for showing restraint, saying it would’ve been “terrible” and “horrible” if he’d targeted Clinton after the 2016 election and tried to have her prosecuted.

The problem, of course, is that Trump targeted Clinton after the 2016 election and tried to have her prosecuted. It’s not a matter of opinion; it’s simply what happened, whether the Republican assumes we’ve forgotten or not.

Summarizing his position, Sauer at one point declared, “I’ll say in response to all these kinds of hypotheticals, [a president] has to be impeached and convicted before he can be criminally prosecuted.”

It is, to be sure, a difficult argument to take seriously. The presumptive GOP nominee’s defense counsel apparently expects the judiciary to agree that a former president might be subject to prosecution — for some of the most outrageous felonies imaginable — but only if a majority of the U.S. House and two-thirds of the U.S. Senate act first.

But it’s not just foolish. It’s also the opposite of what the Republican’s lawyers said during Trump’s second impeachment trial. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes was understandably exasperated by this as the oral arguments progressed.
https://twitter.com/chrislhayes/status/1783515539370819620
This might seem a little complicated at first glance, but it’s actually entirely straightforward:

In early 2021, Trump’s lawyers said during his second impeachment trial that there was no need for the Senate to convict the former president, because the matter was better left to the judiciary.

In early 2024, Trump’s lawyers said the former president’s alleged crimes can’t be left to the judiciary, because the Senate didn’t vote to convict.

......In other words, Team Trump effectively argued in 2021, “Congress should leave such matters to the courts.” It’s now arguing, “The matter can’t be left to the courts because Congress needs to act.”

How are the former president and his lawyers resolving the contradiction? By ignoring it and hoping others don’t notice.

The latest national poll from Quinnipiac University, for example, asked respondents about the trial and the charges of falsifying business records, including a hush money payment to a porn star. A combined total of 60% of the public said they consider the charges either “very” or “somewhat” serious, though that probably wasn’t the result that raised eyebrows at Mar-a-Lago.

Forty-six percent of voters believe former President Trump did something illegal, while 27 percent believe he did something unethical but nothing illegal, and 18 percent believe he did not do anything wrong. Voters were asked how it would impact their vote if Donald Trump were convicted in the New York City criminal trial. If Trump were convicted, 21 percent say they would be less likely to vote for him, 62 percent say it would not make a difference to their vote, and 15 percent say they would be more likely to vote for him.

In other words, as Trump insists he did absolutely nothing wrong in this criminal case, only about a fifth of the public believes him.

This is roughly consistent with the latest national survey from the Pew Research Center, the results of which were also released this week. It found that 45% of Americans believe that Trump’s actions were illegal, while an additional 15% see the Republican’s actions as wrong but not illegal. Only 23% agreed with the former president’s contention that he did nothing wrong.

This data comes on the heels of the latest national New York Times/Siena College poll, conducted shortly before the trial began in earnest, and which asked respondents, “Thinking about the investigations into Donald Trump, do you think that Donald Trump has or has not committed any serious federal crimes?”

A 54% majority said the presumptive GOP nominee has committed serious crimes, while 37% said the opposite......

But if Trump and his allies believe they’ve convinced the great American mainstream that he’s an innocent man who shouldn’t be on trial, there’s ample evidence to the contrary.

When this flopped at the circuit court, the presumptive GOP nominee and his defense counsel took the matter to the U.S. Supreme Court, where as NBC News noted, the same question returned to the fore.

In a question to Sauer, Justice Sonia Sotomayor posed a hypothetical: If the president ordered the military to assassinate a rival he views as corrupt, “is that within his official act for which he can get immunity?” Sauer answered that, “it would depend,” but “we can see that could well be an official act.”

He was, by all appearances, quite sincere about this.
https://twitter.com/Acyn/status/1783499770490720657
.......All of which left us with an unsettling dynamic:

Trump’s defense counsel concocted an audacious immunity claim, rooted in the idea that a president can commit some of the most outrageous felonies imaginable.
Every federal judge who’s ruled on the argument has fundamentally rejected it as ridiculous.
Team Trump continues to double down on the claim as if it has merit — and it’s at least possible that an untold number of Supreme Court justices might be willing to rule in the Republican’s favor.
Most high court observers tended to agree yesterday that the justices will not endorse Trump’s expansive claims to absolute immunity. It’s more likely that the Supreme Court will come up with some kind of new rule related to prosecutions and “official acts,” all of which will send the matter back to the district court and delay the process further.

And since the entire point of this absurd series of appeals is to run out the clock before Election Day 2024, the justices will be playing their part in effectively immunizing Trump from pre-election accountability for the most serious of the former president’s alleged felonies.

It was nevertheless against this backdrop that Team Trump once again confronted the “assassination” question, and answered it in a head-spinning way.