Donald Trump calls for ‘total immunity’ for presidents, defending Obama over civilian causalities in Afghanistan.
By World Israel News Staff
Former President Donald Trump on Thursday defended his proposal to grant American presidents “total immunity” from prosecution, rebuffing criticism in a social media post.
Writing on his Truth Social social media outlet Thursday, Trump argued that “A President of the United States must have full immunity,” while in office, “without which it would be impossible for him/her to properly function.”
“Any mistake, even if well-intended, would be met with almost certain indictment by the opposing party at term end. Even events that ‘cross the line’ must fall under total immunity, or it will be years of trauma trying to determine good from bad.”
“There must be certainty. Example: you can’t stop police from doing the job of strong & effective crime prevention because you want to guard against the occasional ‘rogue cop’ or ‘bad apple.’ Sometimes you just have to live with ‘great but slightly imperfect.'”
“All Presidents must have complete & total presidential immunity, or the authority & decisiveness of a President of the United States will be stripped & gone forever. Hopefully, this will be an easy decision. God bless the Supreme Court!”
Trump, who is currently facing four indictments – two federal, one in New York, and a fourth in Georgia – has argued in court for a broad degree of immunity as a former president, including a claim submitted to a Washington D.C. appeals court that short of being convicted as part of an impeachment proceeding, a president should be immune from criminal prosecution.
The former president also spoke with Fox News regarding his proposal for total presidential immunity, citing Barack Obama’s presidency in defense of his plan.
“I’m not talking about myself,” Trump told Sean Hannity.
“I’m talking about [how] any president has to have immunity, because if you take immunity away from the president, it’s so important, you will have you have a president that’s not going to be able to do anything.”
“[W]hen he leaves office… the opposing party will indict the president for doing something that should have been good.”
“Obama dropped missiles and they ended up hitting a kindergarten or a school or an apartment house. A lot of people were killed. Well, if that’s the case, he’s going to end up being indicted when he leaves office,” Trump said, referencing collateral damage and civilian areas accidentally struck during the Obama administration’s drone campaign against Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Critics lambasted Trump’s plan, calling it a thinly-veiled attempt to shield himself from prosecution.
Trump is trying to “reverse-engineer a not-guilty [verdict] from the trials that he’s facing, but also potentially try to give himself license to break whatever law he wants in a possible second term, to the point where it could even go to assassination,” MSNBC‘s Jonathan Lemire claimed.
CNN‘s Zachary B. Wolf warned that Trump’s plan, if enacted, would give him “literally unchecked power” which “is certainly at odds with what every American schoolkid is supposed to learn about a federal system of government that relies on separation of powers.
CNN‘s legal analyst, Norm Eisen, said granting such far-reaching immunity “would be a dictatorship.”