presidents are not kings: an explainer for anyone as dumb as Donald Trump

the presidency is not get-out-of-criming-free card

hey, did you know that when he was president, Donald Trump could have picked up the phone and called Seal Team Six and had any of his political rivals assassinated all to fuck?

ha ha, you’re dead! now I call you Even Sleepier Joe! it was a beautiful assassination, an assassination the likes of which no one’s ever seen — maybe the greatest assassination of all time.

I shit you not — this was the argument raised yesterday by one of Trump’s ace team of traffic court lawyers.

oh wait, maybe Trump’s lawyer meant Meal Team Six. those brave patriots will do anything for Dear Leader.

John Sauer, the latest in a long line of failed lawyers for Little Donny Fuckface, stood before three judges from the DC Court of Appeals and gamely tried to explain why his dipshit client deserves to use his presidency as a get-out-of-criming-free card.

by all accounts, things did not go well for Donny.

“The headlines went instead to the sharp questioning by the three judges. They did not overtly acknowledge Mr. Trump’s presence in the courtroom but expressed great skepticism about his legal team’s argument that even a president who ordered the killing of a political rival could not be prosecuted unless he or she was first convicted in an impeachment proceeding.”

because presidents-are-kings is a dumb-ass argument. it’s what you say when you’ve exhausted every rational line of reasoning — or never had one to begin with — and have nothing left in the tank — it’s a hail-Mary effort to throw anything at the judges in hopes that you get lucky and some goddanmed thing sticks to the wall.

as I wrote yesterday,

“this argument is too stupid for words. no serious person believes that the framers of the Constitution intended for presidents to be as unaccountable as kings. we fought a whole fucking war about it, remember?”

but don’t just take the word of some loudmouth rando on the internet. here’s what our good friend Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in 2021.

“Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President,” Chutkan wrote of Trump.

let’s go even higher up the judicial food chain and listen to what Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson had to say about presidential kingliness in 2019.

“Stated simply, the primary takeaway from the past 250 years of recorded American history is that Presidents are not kings.”

wait, did I say that by all accounts, things didn’t go well for Trump? untrue! turns out that Fox News has been telling their gullible viewers that Donny Diaperstain smoked the Appeals Court’s ass.

“I have to tell you, I thought that three-judge panel was somewhat skeptical of Department of Justice’s arguments. you could tell they were concerned about precedent, if they said a president is not immune from prosecution.”

in other news, up is down and in is out.

now let’s go to Joe Biden for his reaction to yesterday’s hearing.

speaking of Joe Biden, I have a question for you MAGAs out there.

if presidents have immunity, then Joe Biden can do whatever the fuck he wants and no one can touch him, right? or does immunity only exist when Donald Trump is the president?

you stupid dipshits really didn't think this one through, did you.

as for Trump himself, upon leaving the courtroom, the world’s sorest loser vowed that “there will be bedlam in the country” if he isn’t given a pony, and then stormed away.

reporter: “you just used the word ‘bedlam.’ will you tell your supporters now, no matter what, no violence?”
Trump: [ignores and walks away]

he then spent the entire day melting all the way down on his crappy app, whining about how unfair it all is, and promising to wreak revenge on Joe Biden.

but in the end, how are these threats of future revenge any different from what’s going on right now?

we have James Comer and Jim Jordan persecuting the current president and his family — not because there are actual crimes, but simply out of revenge.

we have Ken Paxton threating to throw Joe Biden off Texas’s ballot — not because there are actual crimes, but simply out of revenge.

once again, ladies and gentlemen, this is your modern-day Republican party.

no ideas, no policies, no principles, nothing to make the lives of We the People better.

just grudges, grievances and score-settling.

folks, a word on a different subject before I let you go: we’re doing some quarterly fundraising at my other venture, The Smirking Chimp. I’m leery of even mentioning it because if you’re one of the people paying to support my own writing here, you’re already doing god’s work and you’re already doing more than enough to help out. but if you’ve got five dollars that you absolutely wouldn’t miss and you do feel like supporting the Chimp, well, that just makes you twice the hero. the donation link is here, or you can go straight to paypal if you need no further convincing. and if you don’t care to donate, that’s totally cool, too, and we will not speak of this again. in fact, we never had this conversation. thanks for listening and that’s it from me for now.