In a podcast conversation with former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade out today, The New Republic’s Greg Sargent brings up a point that he rightly flags as generally downplayed by the press: “Media has largely failed to cover Trump potentially canceling prosecutions of himself as a big story in its own right. How many voters know that what's on the ballot is whether Trump can place himself above the law?” This is something I’ve observed as well — the way, as Sargent puts it, that journalists and others mention that if Trump is elected, he will order the Justice Department to cancel investigations of himself, a point from which they move on from immediately as if it’s a given, a simple fact of nature. But Trump’s obvious plans to do so are in fact a gigantic story, displaced only because of the sheer number of competing outrages currently perpetrated or planned by the former president. Maybe I’m an optimist, but pre-Trump, I’m pretty certain that most Americans would have agreed that it would have constituted an abuse of power for a president to make charges against him go away.
This point also goes directly to the dire threat that a Trump restoration would pose to the rule of law and the security of ordinary citizens. If a president can cancel investigations of himself, we can justly say that the rule of law no longer truly exists, as the basic principle that it applies to all would be subverted. And while this may seem abstract to many people at first glance — “Well, he’s the president, so why can’t he protect himself? How is that going to actually hurt me?” — it starts to become a lot more concrete when you pursue the logic a bit further. It’s not a great leap to see that it means that Trump could also try to have cases against allies dismissed — or have false cases against opponents filed, which in fact he has already vowed to do. How many steps removed from an ordinary’s citizen’s life do such outrages have to be before people realize that without the rule of law, no one would be secure?
It’s in this light that we should view Trump’s recent comments, flagged by Sargent as well, making it clear that the former president is gleefully aware of the Supreme Court’s decision granting him broad immunity from prosecution. To hear Trump talk about it, he certainly sounds like someone who believes the Supreme Court has declared that the law can’t touch him. This should serve as a corrective to the way the Court’s horrific empowerment of a second-term Trump has been generally shunted to the side in campaign coverage. We have never before had a presidential candidate who thought himself unbound by any constraints, either of law or of morality. The reluctance to foreground the obvious danger of such a person speaks to a media and political system unable to adequately acknowledge and address an existential threat to democracy. At last, in the final two weeks of the campaign, we are seeing the charges of “fascist” and “authoritarian” gaining a bit more purchase, through the words of unimpeachable generals and the Harris campaign as it seeks to highlight Trump’s fundamental unfitness for office. Whether America should have a president who can do anything he wants, who knows he can, and who has promised violence against massive swaths of the population if he returns to office has no serious rivals as the central question of this election.