Convicted criminal Donald Trump wanted to jail his predecessor
It’s important that people understand just what crock this new line about Trump never calling for the prosecution of his political enemies is. He’s a liar, of course. But there’s more to this than just Trump’s usual mendacity, which Aaron Rupar ably covers in this free article from his newsletter, which you can subscribe to here.
It’s tough to remember now as Donald Trump regularly wails about the need for total presidential immunity, but four years ago, the then-president was a huge proponent of prosecuting presidents.
In the spring and summer of 2020, Trump desperately tried to make a big scandal out of “Obamagate” — the idea that President Obama had done, uh, something or other worthy of serious investigation and possible prosecution. (Trump at one point called the non-scandal the “biggest political crime in American history, by far!”)
We won’t get too into the details, because Trump certainly didn’t. The below exchange from a news conference on May 11, 2020, underscores that he had no real understanding of what “Obamagate” was even supposed to be.
“Some terrible things happened and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again,” claimed Trump.
“What is the crime exactly that you’re accusing him of?” reporter Philip Rucker followed up.
“You know what the crime is. The crime is very obvious to everybody,” Trump replied.
Trump’s calls for Republicans and DOJ officials to act on his made-up scandal didn’t amount to anything, and the whole thing receded from view along with the 2020 campaign.
The episode is worth revisiting now, however, not only as a reminder that Trump’s immunity claims are a bunch of BS, but also as a preview of how he hopes to abuse power if he returns to the White House and can avail himself of an administration stuffed with sycophants who will unquestioningly carry out his whims.
“FULL IMMUNITY” (some exceptions apply)
As a newly convicted felon, Trump has obvious reasons for his newly developed view that presidents should have total immunity.
Trump still faces even more serious charges for his illegal attempts to overturn the 2020 election and his theft of classified documents. He succeeded in delaying his cases in Georgia, Florida, and DC, but if he doesn’t win the presidency, his final reckoning is coming.
During his post-conviction press conference, Trump stated that his ongoing battle to place himself above the law is actually about ”our Constitution. It’s very important beyond me and this can’t be allowed to happen to other presidents.”
So Trump has laughably claimed that “presidential immunity” is not just about him. He worries that future presidents will be unable to function if they’re afraid their actions might break the law. But “Obamagate” gives the lies to the idea that there’s anything beyond naked self-interest at play here.
Back in May 2020, as the covid death total escalated and the prospect that Trump would become a one-term president became more real, he lashed out at a familiar foe. He spent Mother’s Day tweeting accusations that Obama masterminded a plot to topple his presidency, including retweeting a post from Twitter user “Rexxurection” that bore his image with the caption, “Hope you had fun investigating me. Now it’s my turn!”
Trump didn’t believe the first Black president was entitled to “absolute immunity” for his actions while in office. The inconsistency is hardly shocking.
The real scandal came from inside the house
As Americans got sick and died, Trump tweeted frantically about Obama’s supposed crimes, which he claimed “makes Watergate look small time!” But when pressed by Rucker on May 11 to explain exactly those crimes were, he responded with gibberish.
“Uh, Obamagate. It’s been going on for a long time,” he began. “It’s been going on from before I even got elected, and it’s a disgrace that it happened, and if you look at what’s gone on, and if you look at now, all this information that’s being released — and from what I understand, that’s only the beginning — some terrible things happened, and it should never be allowed to happen in our country again.”
“Obamagate” was an obvious distraction tactic from Trump’s botched covid response, which Obama had publicly criticized, and as the walls closed in on his presidency, Trump only grew more obsessed with the idea that a Barack-led cabal had conspired against him. During Obama’s 2020 DNC speech, a furious Trump tweeted, “HE SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN AND GOT CAUGHT!”
“It’s treason,” a frantic Trump told CBN News in June 2020. “Look, when I came out a long time ago, I said they’ve been spying on my campaign. I said they’ve been taping, and that was in quotes, meaning a modern day version of taping, it’s all the same thing. But a modern day version. But they’ve been spying on my campaign.”
The amorphous “they” included Trump’s direct political opponent, Joe Biden, who Trump claimed “led the charge” along with Obama. This was baseless slander unsupported by any actual facts. In reality, Trump had been impeached in 2019 for his attempts to coerce Ukraine into producing damaging (and false) narratives about Biden. “Treason” is itself narrowly defined as “levying War against [the United States], or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort.” Trump is egocentric enough to consider his personal interests indistinguishable from America’s.
This was all classic Trump projection: Trump’s 2016 campaign welcomed and actively solicited Russia’s assistance. Most infamously, during a July 2016 news conference, Trump said, “Russia, if you’re listening — I hope you are able to find the 30,000 [Hillary Clinton] emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press. Let’s see if that happens.”
Trump would later lie that he was joking in front of “25,000 people in a stadium,” but Vladimir Putin didn’t think he was kidding: Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation determined that “on or around the same day” as Trump’s remarks, Russian officials targeted email addresses associated with Hillary Clinton’s personal and campaign offices. It was a cyber version of the Watergate break-in.
That wasn’t the first time and Trump and Russia had worked together. Donald Trump Jr. was told in June 2016 that a Russian lawyer was willing to share damaging information about Hillary Clinton as “part of Russia and its government’s support for Mr. Trump.” Trump Jr. didn’t immediately report this conversation to the FBI — as Al Gore’s campaign did when it received documents stolen from George W. Bush. Instead, Trump Jr. replied he’d “love it.”
The next month, the FBI learned about Trump campaign foreign policy George Papadopoulos drunkenly blabbing to an Australian diplomat about having inside knowledge of Russian dirt on Hillary Clinton, and the FBI opened an investigation. Code-named “Crossfire Hurricane,” it would determine “whether individuals associated with [Trump’s] presidential campaign were coordinating, wittingly or unwittingly, with the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the 2016 US presidential election.” Four Trump campaign operatives were specifically targeted, including campaign manager (and future convicted felon) Paul Manafort and national security adviser Michael Flynn.
It’s against federal law for a political campaign to accept or solicit contributions or donations — directly or indirectly — from foreign nationals. The FBI’s investigation into the Trump campaign was clearly warranted, but more to the point, Obama had nothing to do with it. The Department of Justice and the House of Representatives found no evidence that Obama initiated or influenced the FBI’s investigation. And as Trump’s DOJ acknowledged, Obama didn’t have Trump Tower wiretapped, either — a repeated Trump lie.
Further, the Republican-controlled Senate Intelligence Committee released a report in August 2020 stating the obvious: “Moscow’s intent was to harm the Clinton Campaign, tarnish an expected Clinton presidential administration, help the Trump Campaign after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee, and undermine the US democratic process.”
Obama, of course, didn’t spend the 2016 election promoting baseless conspiracies about the Trump campaign. The sad irony is that rather than actively sabotaging his campaign, the Obama administration was if anything too protective of Trump, to the nation’s detriment. Biden revealed in 2020 that after Mitch McConnell refused in September 2016 to join a bipartisan statement condemning Russia’s election interference, he and Obama agreed not to speak out themselves and risk undermining the legitimacy of an American election. Trump’s GOP no longer has such scruples.
Immunity for me, not for thee
In January, Trump posted an unhinged, all-caps screed on Truth Social stating that even presidential actions that “‘CROSS THE LINE’ MUST FALL UNDER TOTAL IMMUNITY, OR IT WILL BE YEARS OF TRAUMA TRYING TO DETERMINE GOOD FROM BAD.”
In making his case, Trump compared himself to a “ROGUE COP,” adding, “SOMETIMES YOU JUST HAVE TO LIVE WITH ‘GREAT BUT SLIGHTLY IMPERFECT.’”
Trump’s desperate, blatant plea for the Supreme Court to let presidents, specifically those named Donald J. Trump, slide on criminal acts nonetheless resonated with Justice Samuel Alito, who echoed his nonsense a few months later during oral arguments.
“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?” he asked.
Alito’s logic is backward. Trump is the destabilizing force in our democracy, not the legal efforts to hold him accountable.
It’s especially twisted that Trump might benefit from a ruling Alito argues is intended to protect a former president from a “bitter political opponent.” Trump is that hypothetical opponent. He already shredded previous norms about presidents not attacking their predecessors, and when his reelection prospects started to tank, he escalated his smears against Obama — later complaining that the Justice Department, under sycophant Attorney General Bill Barr, had quietly ended its investigation without any charges against his nemesis.
Trump is also the first modern president to actively campaign on prosecuting his foes. Despite his recent gaslighting statement to the contrary, Trump frequently joined chants of “lock her up” during his hate rallies. He once told his lynch mob crowd that they should “speak to Jeff Sessions,” who was his future short-lived pick for attorney general.
If Trump was just “joking” again, his stand-up material contains a disturbing amount of treason and authoritarian-based “humor.”
During Trump’s second debate with Clinton, when he was fighting for his political life after the Access Hollywood tape, he threatened to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate her email server — even after the FBI had determined she hadn’t done anything illegal.
“If I win, I am going to instruct my attorney general to get a special prosecutor to look into your situation,” he said, “because there has never been so many lies, so much deception.”
This is an actual example of weaponizing the Justice Department. It was clear Trump wasn’t interested in where the facts led, either. When Clinton said it was a good thing he wasn’t president, he snapped back, “Because you’d be in jail.”
As president-elect, Trump still dangled the prospect of pursuing charges against Clinton. “I’m going to think about it,” he told CBS News’s Lesley Stahl, when asked if he still planned on appointing a special prosecutor.
Now in a spiral after his conviction in the Stormy Daniels case, Trump has openly vowed retribution. During a Newsmax interview Tuesday night, Trump described his conviction as “a terrible precedent for our country. Does that mean the next president does it to them? That’s really the question.” He later repeated the threat: “So, you know, it’s a terrible, terrible path that they’re leading us to. And it’s very possible that it’s going to have to happen to them.”
In short, the convicted felon who thinks presidents should be immune from prosecution is simultaneously threatening to weaponize the justice system to prosecute the current president. It sounds incoherent, but really that’s just Trumpism — for me, everything, for my enemies, the law.
For Trump, total immunity, but for his enemies, “Obamagate” — and the planned sequel, “Bidengate.”
Aaron Rupar has made this article free to the public so I’m sharing it here. But you can subscibe to his excellent newsletter by following this link. And his twitter and threads feeds are essential so if you do either one of those platforms, be sure to follow him there.