Donald's immunity

There, instead of making a law to declare legal what was illegal, they have limited themselves to the Supreme Court deciding that a president can do whatever he wants without being accountable to anyone as long as he acts officially and not privately, just as we do here with the prevarication that it does not matter if politicians misspend your and my money as long as they do not put it in their own pockets... although it may go to unpresentable causes or into the pockets of cronies. 

In other words, in the United States the law is the same for everyone except presidents, who are above the law, something like the Pope himself. To make matters worse, the decision has been taken by the high court by six conservative votes against three progressive ones, taking advantage of the fact that Trump himself appointed three of the judges who now exonerate him and who have life tenure. As Sonia Sotomayor, the judge who voted against him, said: "You order Navy Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? You orchestrate a military coup d'état to keep himself in power? Immune; Accept a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune, Immune, Immune, Immune, Immune". It seems too much. 

This has a direct bearing on Donald's responsibility for the riots that led to the disgraceful storming of Congress on 6 January 2020, after he refused to accept the result that Joe Biden had won the election. Now the trial court judge will have to start by deciding when Trump acted as president (Biden had already been proclaimed the winner, but had not yet been sworn in) and when he acted as a private citizen, with the immediate consequence of prolonging the process because the judge's decision will be subject to appeal, making it virtually impossible for him to be tried before the elections on 5 November. 

Delaying his pending trials has been his lawyers' first line of defence because if he is elected president he will simply be able to pardon himself if he is convicted or, better still, order the pending trials to be halted. In his case, to delay is to win. For a start, the publication of the verdict in the Stormy Daniels case has already been delayed for two months, even though Trump was not yet president when the events took place. 

The argument of the six conservative judges who voted for such a large immunity is that a president should be able to make important decisions without having to worry about the possibility of one day being punished for them. Then he can think altruistically about the general good without fear of consequences. 

Trump's lawyers are already arguing this Supreme Court verdict in the former president's other open trials. Will his immunity include taking home drawers full of secret documents that were then stacked unattended in a bathroom? And ordering local authorities to "look up" a few thousand votes to flip the election result in Georgia? And falsifying accounts to disguise the payment to buy the silence of a porn actress with whom he had sex while her child was being born? Not to mention his New York real estate shenanigans, which seem harder to pin on the president. In any case, one has to recognise that Mr Trump's criminality has touched all the registers, showing a very great imagination. 

Now, between the Supreme Court and last week's debate in which Trump could afford to do nothing more than watch Joe Biden fail to fulfil the only objective he had, which was none other than to convince viewers that his age was no obstacle to a second term in the presidency of the most powerful country in the world, his possible return to the White House seems closer than ever. And that, I fear, is bad news for the world and especially for Europe because Trump is quite capable of abandoning Ukraine, making nice with Putin, and hollowing out NATO, leaving us without protection from Moscow. But it is even worse for the United States because he will not have "adults in the room" as he had during his first term in office to curb the vengeful instincts he has already announced against political rivals, judges, journalists, civil servants... that make Robert Kaplan think that with him at the helm the United States could be heading towards a dictatorship. 

As can be seen, there is trouble everywhere. 

Jorge Dezcallar, Ambassador of Spain