MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Wednesday slammed the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to review Donald Trump’s claim that he is immune from prosecution for acts committed when president, which will delay his trial over the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection until at least the summer.
The “important question here,” said Maddow, is not if the Supreme Court will rule in favor of Trump because it “would be fully insane” to do so.
Instead, Maddow argued, “the conclusion that we can arrive at now based on what they have done, without having to wait for the ruling, is that they are ensuring that Trump will not face trial and when they inevitably rule that presidents aren’t immune from prosecution after they leave office, what that will tell Donald Trump if by then he is president, is that he can never leave the office of the presidency.”
She continued, “And if he is voted out in 2028, he cannot leave office, and he is welcome to commit any crimes he wants to as long as he is still president in order to ignore the result of that election and stay in power for life because otherwise, he’s going to go to prison when he gets out. That is the way this is going to go unless the country votes Trump out, votes for Biden and against Trump in November.”
Maddow’s MSNBC colleague Chris Hayes said the “level of cravenness” from the Supreme Court’s slow pace in tackling Trump’s claims was “deeply unnerving.”
Lawrence O’Donnell, however, suggested the court always moves slowly.
Maddow later questioned the idea that Trump’s immunity claim is actually an “open question,” saying the idea that the court has to take it up “is B.S.” and “disproven by a plain reading” of former President Gerald Ford’s pardoning of his disgraced predecessor, Richard Nixon.
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