If this were an actual emergency, you'd be instructed to kiss your ass goodbye

Never mind the man behind the curtain; he has Absolute Immunity Forever and Ever, Amen ©

I’m old enough to remember a time when, even if a Republican candidate was elected President, I never even considered the possibility that he’d lead America down the dark path of lawlessness to a destination marked by authoritarianism and dictatorship.

Was I excited about having a Republican in the White House for four years or, worse, perhaps eight? Oh, HELL no. In 1980, when I was still in college, I was HORRIFIED when Ronald Reagan defeated Jimmy Carter. I can recall seriously considering (or as seriously as any 20-year-old can be about anything) moving to Australia.

I’d never been to Australia, nor did I know anything about Down Under, and at that point in my life, I’d rarely ever left Minnesota. Even so, I knew that four (or eight) years of a Republican in the White House, while an odious prospect, was survivable. America would still be more or less America on the other side.

Ronald Reagan didn’t kill America. Nor did either Bush, despite their best efforts. They might’ve had some damned poor ideas, but our representative democracy emerged relatively intact from the trauma.

Then along came Donald Trump, who damned near killed America the first time around and wants to finish off the bitch during a second term.

This time, it’s not a simple matter of people like me fervently disagreeing with a Republican President while also knowing that the ship would ultimately right itself, as it always has.

No, this time, there’s AN ACTUAL PLAN TO KILL AMERICA’S DEMOCRACY. And the more than 72 million Americans who voted for Trump in 2020 don’t care that he instigated a (thankfully inept and failed) coup at the US Capitol on January 6, 2020. Not only did they not care, but most supported the insurrection and would’ve been there if someone had given them bus fare.

There were also other plots intended to subvert the certification of the 2020 election and keep Trump in power. Why would so many risk so much for a man worth so little? It’s a question historians will tie themselves in knots trying to answer.

Those indicted include former Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, attorneys Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman and Christina Bobb, top campaign adviser Boris Epshteyn and former campaign aide Mike Roman. They are accused of allegedly aiding an unsuccessful strategy to award the state’s electoral votes to Trump instead of Biden after the 2020 election. Also charged are the Republicans who signed paperwork on Dec. 14, 2020, that falsely purported Trump was the rightful winner, including former state party chair Kelli Ward, two state senators, and Tyler Bowyer, a GOP national committeeman and chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, the campaign arm of the pro-Trump conservative group Turning Point USA.

Trump was not charged, but he is described in the indictment as an unindicted co-conspirator.

- Washington Post

Yes, Trump was complicit on many fronts when it came to plots intended to keep him in office and nullify the 2020 election and the peaceful transfer of power for the first time in this country’s history.

AND HIS SUPPORTERS HAD NO REAL ISSUE WITH THIS. WTF IS WRONG WITH THEM?? No, we really DON’T have enough time to spend on that question.

Here we are, almost four years later, and Trump has yet to be held accountable for his role in ANY of the plots to nullify the results of the 2020 election.

Not only that, but Trump’s attorney argued before the Supreme Court that he deserves Absolute Immunity Forever and Ever, Amen © for any and all of his acts as President. The argument is that Trump needs Absolute Immunity Forever and Ever, Amen © because his attempt to become Supreme Omniscient Peerless All-Powerful Superlative Paramount Incomparable Pre-eminent Transcendent Most-Excellent Incomparable Maximum Dictator for Life © via a coup attempt is an “official act.”

For perspective, allow me to offer a different scenario for those demanding that Trump deserves Absolute Immunity Forever and Ever, Amen © for trying to become Supreme Omniscient Peerless All-Powerful Superlative Paramount Incomparable Pre-eminent Transcendent Most-Excellent Incomparable Maximum Dictator for Life ©.

Imagine that the tables had been reversed, and Joe Biden had done the same thing, chapter and verse, AND received a blowjob from an intern while doing it. Does anyone SERIOUSLY think for even a nanosecond that Trump supporters would be making the same argument?

Of course not. The eruption of righteous indignation, rending of garments, and venting of spleens would be EPIC, and it would happen from sea to shining sea. The torches and pitchforks brigades would’ve begun assembling in village squares across the country, and the ritual lynching of Liberals would’ve erupted as a way of sating the bloodlust of enraged Trump supporters.

THIS CRIMINALITY MUST NOT STAND; the cry would ring…loud, long, and enraged. HE MUST PAY FOR HIS CRIMES!! Besides, he got a blowjob, and that’s gotta be a crime, right??

Trumpkins have zero interest in electing a President. They want a King.

#FJB

The immunity hearing in the Supreme Court certainly sounded as if the male Supremes were ready to jump on the Trump Train and grant him Absolute Immunity Forever and Ever, Amen ©. After all, how can you commit a crime while President if you can’t declare such illegality “official acts” and know you’re free from accountability? How can you become Supreme Omniscient Peerless All-Powerful Superlative Paramount Incomparable Pre-eminent Transcendent Most-Excellent Incomparable Maximum Dictator for Life © if you can’t rely on having Absolute Immunity Forever and Ever, Amen ©?

Then again, what would Donald Trump have to worry about when he has the friendly faces of Right-wing arrogance, ineptitude, and corruption sitting on the Supreme Court, ready to kneel before him and do his bidding (knee pads and lipstick optional)?

(It’s good to be the benefactor and creator of Kings, no?)

One of the bedrock principles of American governance has been a simple, four-word phrase that has held up for a quarter-millennia.

Jeff Tiedrich

explains it for all of us like we’re two-year-olds, and though he shouldn’t have to, when more than 72 million shitferbrainz MAGA warriors voted for Agolf Shitler in 2020…well, one must occasionally revisit the basics, no?

presidents are not kings.

it’s a no-brainer, right? it’s like the very first thing anyone learns about America. we fought a whole Revolutionary War about it. US presidents are bound by the same laws that the rest of us abide by — and for two and a half centuries, hardly anyone has had a problem with this.

but along comes big fucking baby Donald Trump, so worked up over losing an election that he sent an armed mob to the Capitol to try to overthrow his own government — and he got indicted for it. but then Donny was all nah bro, laws are bullshit and I should get to crime all I want — because mommy says I’m special and I have presidential immunity.

For a quarter-millennia, America has had no need for a President to have Absolute Immunity Forever and Ever; amen ©. No President has ever been thoroughly corrupt and amoral enough to believe he should be Supreme Omniscient Peerless All-Powerful Superlative Paramount Incomparable Pre-eminent Transcendent Most-Excellent Incomparable Maximum Dictator for Life ©.

he pulled this shit on Judge Chutkan and she was having none of it. she literally said “presidents are not kings” in one of her rulings.

so he went crying to the DC Court of Appeals and was all Judge Chutkan is a meanie and she won’t let me have my precious immunity — and the Appeals Court was all look, fuckstick, you don’t have any immunity. get your smelly ass back in court.

did Donny then run blubbering to his hand-picked pals on the Supreme Court? you bet he did. guys, he whined, all those other courts, they just don’t get me like you do. please explain to them about presidential immunity and stuff.

any sane Supreme Court would have quickly slapped Trump with a writ of go fuck yourself, and we’d be having a DC trial right now. but we don’t have a sane Court. we have four bought-and-paid for Federalist Society hacks who sit snugly in the pocket of the plutocrats who tell them how to vote — and we have Neil Gorsuch, who just fucking hates government and is deliberately out to create as much chaos as possible.

so this Supreme Court said hmm, laws are bullshit and Donny should be allowed to crime all he wants? yeah, we should def look into this.

sigh.

how is Clarence Thomas not recusing himself from this case? his wife is an insurrectionist, for fuck’s sake. she attended Trump’s speech on January 6th. she was texting Mark Meadows a mile a minute all that day. oh wait, I forgot — Clarence Thomas is as corrupt as they come.

Is this how the American experiment whimpers to its inevitable denouement? Brought to its knees by a cabal of corrupt assholes who care for no one and nothing beyond their narrow self-interest, and who’d sell their country down the river for 20 pieces of silver?

Because this moral black hole is the sort of human flotsam that currently occupies lifetime sinecures on the Supreme Court:

How, precisely, was the last election “questionably decided?” This is especially true when almost everyone associated with conducting and monitoring it on a state and national level has repeatedly stated that the 2020 election was perhaps the cleanest and fairest ever conducted. Not only that, virtually every instance of election fraud uncovered was committed by —wait for it—REPUBLICANS.

Does Justice Samuel Alito show up at work in a MAGA cap? He could hardly be more transparent in his allegiance.

So much for justice being blind, yeah?

Now, if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?

- Justice Samuel Alito

Yes, those words were uttered by a sitting Supreme Court justice (and Trump shadow campaign committee chairperson, apparently) in what can only be described as a moment of unintentional honesty and clarity.

But what is this madness? Trump didn’t appoint Alito to his seat; it’s not like he owes Agolf Shitler anything. So why is Samuel Alito carrying water and chopping wood for the disgraced ex-President?

Thankfully, we have Dahlia Lithwick’s gifted legal mind (never mind her willingness to decipher Alito’s fucking mindless bullshit) for us:

Never mind that the president in question did not leave office peacefully and is not sitting quietly in retirement but is instead running for presidential office once again. No, if we want criminal presidents to leave office when they lose, we have to let them commit crimes scot-free. If ever a better articulation of the legal principle “Don’t make me hit you again” has been proffered at an oral argument, it’s hard to imagine it.

And this insane pablum was vomited forth by one of the nine minds of the highest court in the land? That’s the argument of someone who’s stopped taking his Thorazine, not “one of the most respected legal minds of our generation.”

Yes, I’m having one of my “I’m ashamed to be an American” moments again…and I’m not about to apologize for it. This madness is unbelievably fucking embarrassing. Samuel Alito and the rest of the chuckleheaded Conservative majority should be ashamed of themselves.

They won’t be, of course. But they should be. They’re an embarrassment to the American legal community.

No, scratch that; they’re an embarrassment to America.

I don’t know shit about law but I do know when Supreme Court Justices are pissing on my head.

- Jeff Tiedrich

And it was pouring at the Supreme Court during oral arguments on Donald Trump’s demand for Absolute Immunity Forever and Ever, Amen ©.

Of course, predicting Supreme Court decisions is a fool’s errand and not the sort of thing one would want to try to make a living betting on. Still, it doesn’t require a J.D. to recognize the ludicrous nature of the arguments made by Trump’s lawyer AND the Conservative males sitting on the Court.

One thing that hasn’t been factored into the evaluation of the oral arguments, though, is how the experiences of the Conservatives on the Court have impacted their views on political power and the rights of Republican kings Presidents. It’s an aspect, and probably a very important one at that, of the Court’s collective thought process that could deeply impact the decision concerning Absolute Immunity Forever and Ever, Amen ©.

With a ruling from the Court not expected before June at the earliest, the odds of Donald Trump’s election interference trial being completed (or even starting) before the November election are growing increasingly slim.

Accountability? Perhaps for thee, but nay for Donald Trump (for no one is above the law, unless your initials are DJT). Not when he seemingly has the highest court in the land doing his heavy lifting.

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