The New Yorker:

A political hit job? A military coup? Trump’s lawyer tests the boundaries of a truly imperial Presidency.

By Susan B. Glasser

Donald Trump is nothing if not a dreamer. In seeking to return to the Presidency, it’s as though he has reimagined America as a kingdom and himself the king, an absolute ruler whose actions, no matter how sordid, cannot be stopped or subject to prosecution in a court of law. And yet what remains most remarkable is how far down the road to fulfilling this fantasy he now is, and how many millions of Americans he has managed to carry along with him: the Republican primary voters who, overwhelmingly, chose him again as their party’s nominee; the Republican officials, such as former Attorney General Bill Barr, who, despite condemning Trump for calling forth violence and illegality in his effort to overturn the 2020 election, are nevertheless endorsing him this year; the advocates on and off his payroll who say that a federal criminal case against him must be thrown out because, as President, he had every right to seek to overturn the election. This is the Richard Nixon theory of the executive taken to its circular and oh-so-Trumpian extreme: if the President does it, by definition, it is not illegal. “I have the right to do whatever I want as President,” Trump said when he was in the White House.

On Thursday, Trump’s legal team asked the Supreme Court to take this both literally and seriously, advancing his fantastical claims about an unfettered Presidency in oral arguments at the Court, where, alarmingly, they received a respectful hearing. So here we are in the midst of this most consequential election year, debating things such as whether a President has the power to accept bribes for official appointments, to sell nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary, or even to call forth a military coup to remain in office. How is it possible in the United States of America that the answer to any of these questions could be yes? And, yet, strip out the hemming and hawing, the polite citations of Marbury v. Madison and the sayings of Benjamin Franklin, and the answer from Trump’s lawyer to all of the above was more or less: Yes.

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