Would he? (Of course he would.)
Trump’s allies are trying to reassure the Supreme Court that if you give Trump total immunity he would never order an enemy to be killed as was posited in the appeals court hearing. And anyway, even if he did, nobody would carry it out. So it’s all good.
As the Supreme Court gets ready to hear oral arguments in Donald Trump’s presidential immunity case, the former president’s allies are working to tamp down any concerns the justices might have about one of the more absurd and disconcerting arguments offered by any Trump lawyer ever: that a president would have to be impeached and convicted before he could be prosecuted if he were to, hypothetically, order the assassination of a political rival.
The America First Policy Institute, a think tank led by former top Trump advisers and allies, filed an amicus brief with the Supreme Court last month arguing that the justices should not consider this hypothetical in their decision, because the military would never follow such a command. “A president cannot order an elite military unit to kill a political rival,” says the brief, adding: “The military would not carry out a patently unlawful order from the president to kill non-military targets.”
The organization’s brief was filed on behalf of former Veterans Affairs Secretary Robert Wilkie, retired Lt. General Keith Kellogg, and retired Lt. General Jerry Boykin. Kellogg added in a press release that “my time with [former] President Trump allows me to state without equivocation, he would never issue or consider such an action.”
Unfortunately, according to Trump’s former Defense Secretary Mark Esper, he as president did suggest to senior administration officials that they should order U.S. troops to open fire on some of his political enemies — namely, street protesters.
“Can’t you just shoot them?” Trump asked, regarding Black Lives Matter demonstrators and others who were protesting around the White House in June 2020, according to Esper. “Just shoot them in the legs or something?” (Trump has denied this account.)
This wasn’t just some idle thought: Esper wrote in his memoir that he had to legitimately talk Trump down from the idea. “The good news — this wasn’t a difficult decision,” Esper wrote. “The bad news — I had to figure out a way to walk Trump back without creating the mess I was trying to avoid.”
Two sources, including a former senior Trump White House aide, who’ve spoken to the former president regarding his ideas about troops shooting civilians tell Rolling Stone that when Trump talks about this, he’s eager to wound — not kill — potential targets. Sometimes, he’s been reminded, including by government officials, that shooting someone in the leg can easily kill them, a point he usually dismissed outright.
Last year, Trump publicly stated that another political foe — former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who has denounced Trump as a “wannabe dictator” — deserves to be put to “DEATH.”
AFPI, for its part, has repeatedly argued that the president should designate Mexican drug cartels as terrorists and use military force to eliminate them.
Trump has no limits. And he and his followers are now delirious with revolutionary zeal. Of course he would do it. And there is no guarantee that the military wouldn’t follow his orders. He’s going to make sure that the top brass are loyalists and there’s every reason to believe that the rank and file is full of Trumpers.
Also, he is a pathological liar and no one should ever ever take his word for anything.