'Absolute immunity’ under fire as new plan hatches to hold Trump accountable

On Tuesday,,President Donald Trump's desire for "absolute immunity" came under fire from a man very familiar with the disgraced fellow Republican president whose image Trump wishes to rehabilitate, Richard Nixon.

After reviewing a number of expert scholarly opinions Thomas B. Edsall, who contributes a weekly essay to The New York Times, quoted Philip Allen Lacovara, "a former deputy U.S. solicitor general and counsel to the Watergate special prosecutor. Lacovara thinks the Supreme Court handed Trump "a virtual get-out-of-jail card"" with their ruling in 2024 that the president has a very high bar before being guilty of a crime.

Lacovara told Edsall, "Although the wholly unjustified and constitutionally unsound decision in the Trump immunity case in 2024 purported to leave open the possibility of prosecuting a president (1) for some official acts and (2) for any unofficial acts, these exceptions are largely illusory — at least so long as the current majority remains on the Supreme Court."

He continued, "The opinion in the case creates a virtually impenetrable barrier protecting Trump from being prosecuted for such things as corruption; complicity in unlawful, extrajudicial killing; selling pardons; soliciting contributions from prospective office seekers; awarding federal contracts to big donors; interfering with elections; and any of the other abuses in his rap sheet."

Edsall proceeded to mention that Lacovara has backed up his work and emphasized Lacovara's observation that the Supreme Court has made it potentially impossible to prosecute this president even when there appears to be significant evidence of quid pro quo financial transactions (bribery) using the president’s office to grant favors in return for personal financial benefits for himself and his family.”

Trump has developed a particular interest in rehabilitating Nixon's image because Trump supporters believe the prosecution of Nixon was a Democratic example of "law fare," or prosecution of a president for exercising his supposedly legitimate prerogatives.

"Trump is passing policies by fiat or by executive order, so he’s sort of acting like the legislative branch, because Congress isn’t doing these things," Luke Nichter, professor of history at Chapman University, who edited two volumes of Nixon's White House tapes, told AlterNet in terms of what Trump learned from Nixon's attempts to gain power through the executive branch. "Then the judicial branch is acting more like the executive. It’s acting as a referee: You can do this, but you can’t do that. And Congress is reduced to holding a lot of hearings and talking, but not necessarily taking leadership."

He added, "So they’ve become kind of the judicial branch. We’ve had a sort of corruption of the three branches of government, where none of them is really functioning the way our founders intended."