WASHINGTON—In a New York court on Wednesday, a judge asked Donald Trump’s lawyers what would happen if the U.S. president shot someone on Fifth Ave. Could he be prosecuted for a crime?“No,” Trump’s lawyer William Consovoy answered, not while he was still the sitting president.“Local authorities couldn’t investigate? They couldn’t do anything about it?” Judge Denny Chin asked. “Nothing could be done? That is your position?”“That is correct,” Consovoy said. Before the president’s defenders accuse a cabal of Democratic Party operatives in the judiciary of conjuring this murderous example from some partisan fever dream, it seems worthwhile to point out where the hypothetical comes from. It comes from the mouth of Trump, who while campaigning in 2016 claimed that his electoral base was so strong that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Ave. and shoot somebody, OK, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”It was a laugh line then. When Trump was running for president, supporters like tech entrepreneur Peter Thiel said he should be taken “seriously but not literally,” given his penchant for brash hyperbole.But in the years since then, it turns out he meant a lot of it literally. The wall. The treatment of refugees. The “America First” indifference to the foreign policy interests of America’s allies.Or his own feeling of immunity from accountability. What was at the time a statement of the loyalty of his supporters is now an argument presented on his behalf in court: as long as he is president, the laws do not apply to him.Anyone who was following Toronto politics in the Rob Ford years will hear plenty of echoes in the Trump administration. Among them: when he was running for mayor, Ford’s brother and campaign manager said of his supporters, “Rob could commit murder on the steps of city hall and they would still vote for him.” ...
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