Some say Donald Trump is seeking the status of a “king” as he fights for complete and total criminal immunity, but it’s actually much worse than that, according to a history professor at Yale Sunday.
Renowned Yale Prof. Timothy Snyder, who previously said Putin wants Trump to win because the former president shows our “system is rotten,” has recently spoken out about the right-wing Supreme Court justices seeming to go off the rails when it comes to immunity.
Now, he says “right-wing justices postulate Trump’s ‘immunity,'” and that, “The objection is that this makes him a king.”
“Not so. It’s much worse,” he said Sunday.
“A king can be subject to law. Even George III was subject to law. The American Revolution was justified by the notion that he had overstepped the law,” he added. “This discussion of immunity is something else. The justices are not discussing any constitutional system at all, including a constitutional monarchy.”
Further, according to the professor, the justices “are instead flirting with the idea that a single person can be outside any constitutional system, outside the rule of law as such.”
“What justices seem to find charismatic is dictatorship, specifically fascist dictatorship. It is making an exception for a person that attracts them,” he said. “That is the basis of Nazi legal theory (Carl Schmitt). The law and the constitution are just there so we can find the person, the Leader, the Führer, who breaks them, who makes an exception.”
Finally, Snyder noted that he was not making specific claims about the intentions of the SCOTUS justices.
“I am not claiming that right-wing justices read Schmitt, or anything else. Simply that their emotive affinity for fascist law is troubling,” he said on social media.
