Trump's Lawyers Argue Appallingly for an Unaccountable Tyrannical POTUS at SCOTUS

When Donald Trump ran for president and claimed he’d release his tax returns as soon as the IRS was done auditing them, it was an obvious lie. Since then, he has taken extraordinary steps to conceal what every president and party nominee in almost half a century has gladly offered to the public. 

But his desperate attempts to keep the public from understanding his finances may finally be reaching their end — though how long it will take to actually see the documents, or if we will at all, is far from clear. On Tuesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in three separate lawsuits Trump has filed to stop officials from seeing those returns. The first two concern congressional subpoenas given to Mazars (his accounting firm) and Deutsche Bank (his bank). The third concerns an investigation by the district attorney of Manhattan. AD It was hard to tell how the justices might rule. 

But what the arguments did reveal is the almost limitless scope of immunity he seeks. Trump believes he should be excused not just from congressional oversight, not just from criminal investigation, not just from questioning by the press, but even from politics itself. 

It’s almost impossible to overstate how appalling the arguments by Trump’s lawyers have been. They have claimed kingly powers for the president — that while he is in office he can’t be prosecuted or even investigated. That, they say, applies to both Congress and prosecutors. 

In the lower court rulings as these cases (and others in which Trump has made similar sweeping claims of immunity) make their way up to the Supreme Court, Trump hasn’t just lost. Again and again, judges expressed shock and even outrage at the audacity of his claims before rejecting them out of hand.