Maddow on Immunity Case: Trump Got 105 Percent of What They Were Asking for from Supreme Court

RUSH TRANSCRIPT:
Rachel, just your thoughts. I remember talking to you the day of oral arguments when we did a special. Everyone’s action to that, whoa, are they going to do this?
>> Yeah. I remember talking to you about this, Chris, the day they chose to take it up, the decision to take it up itself was so gob smacking and I’m generally a glass half empty kind of person, I always see the cloud before I see the silver lining. We talked about the radicalism of that decision in and of itself. When the district court, ruled on this issue basically the rule was, you know, of course a president isn’t immune, when the appeals court then looked at it and reviewed that decision, it was a bulletproof decision from that appeals court where the bottom line was essentially, of course, no, a president can’t be immuned. It was gobsmacking when the Supreme Court took it up. In my glass half-empty kind of way, I thought, well — under the worst case scenario they’re not going to decide he’s immune. It’s outrageous they’ve taken it up. Give him temporary immunity before the election. Once the election happens, if he wins he makes the prosecutions go away anyway. I didn’t expect they’d do this and they, you know, Donald Trump and his counsel asked for this 100% absolute immunity thing which was insane, I’d say they got 105% of what they were asking for, they got immunity from this court despite so much the language in justice roberts’ ruling, saying that there was some — some measure of humility here, or some measure of restraint. They give Trump immunity that even he and counsel did not ask for and given the hypotheticals over the course of these arguments as you rightly pointed out, can a president assassinate a rival? We have to look at the Supreme Court’s affirmative answer to that, yes, you can. With as much seriousness as it deserves. This is a death squad ruling. This is ruling that says as long as you can construe it as an official or quasi-official act you can do absolutely anything, absolutely anything, and never be held accountable, not only while you are president but forever. This president has activated pro-Trump paramilitary group, wear t-shirts and celebrate right-wing death squads. A president who has talked about using the Justice Department to go after his — to go after his rivals, this explicitly immunize immunizes anything the president wants to do through the Justice Department and full stop to anyone.
>> I’m 100% with you on that. I want to stay on Department of Justice thing, obviously there’s reason why in those, the hypothetical offered by a federal judge in the appeals court arguments about s.E.a.l. Team 6, why that’s had such significance, but that’s a hypothetical, it hasn’t happened in American history, what has happened in American history is a president Richard Nixon using the Justice Department, the IRS, all kinds — I mean, he had the IRS audit his political enemies. He attempted to use the Justice Department to go after his enemies. That’s American history. You’ve been a historian of this period for a lot of reasons, there was a conclusion that Watergate was wrong, and that what Nixon did was wrong. The reading from roberts today, Watergate wasn’t prosecutorable, what Nixon did as president he probably was immune for, too bad John Roberts wasn’t around in 1974.
>> I mean, the executive sort of the imperial executive idea pie neared by Republican Justice Department officials like ed meese, governing apex under Dick Cheney and worked in Republican politics to approve the sort of things that happened particularly after 9/11 under the George W. Bush White House, those have been brought by bringing a bunch of people who are part of that cultural, bringing them into a supermajority in the Supreme Court that has brought us to a place where a president has had his lawyers asked by a justice in open court, are you saying your guy can assassinate someone and he’ll have immunity for that? The answer was yes. The court wrote it down. And that answer is the logical, you know, apex of where those things arego over time. But to have that radicalism land, when you have a potential next term of Donald Trump on the horizon if he wins in November, where he’s saying exactly what he’ll do with this power, is quite a remarkable thing, you’ll notice that nobody in reacting to today’s ruling they’re saying, wow, how scary, what is Joe Biden going to do with this power, right, nobody’s saying that, nobody is worried a president like Joe Biden is going to, you know, abuse this in such a way that’s going to be bring about a de dictatorship dictatorship. Because a this’s what Donald Trump is promising that, they’re doing this in the full context, the full knowledge of the radicalism of what they’re bringing down upon the country and the only solution to this, the only way out of this is to have noncriminals and nonauthoritarian-mind ed nonauthoritarian-minded win presidential elections. This is the only way to fix it. If you have someone who’s criminal or authoritarian minded when they get in there armed with this ruling there’s nothing they can’t do.
>> On that final point, yeah, the prospective implications of today’s ruling are more profound in some ways and more unnerving than the retroactive ones, about the trial, we’ll talk about this, was did it mean for the case that Jack Smith has? It’s still alive. They can cabin enough of this to bring it. But the symbolic meaning to me as important as the legal meaning. For the reasons that you say. What it says to Trump and to Republicans, I mean, the joke I made today was like John Roberts pulled down the American flag turned it upside-down and hoisted it back up on the Supreme Court, it felt like to me the opinion we’re with you on this.
>> Yeah.
>> Over and above its findings, its holdings as a matter of constitutional law.
>> Yeah, I mean, if the president — when Donald Trump running for president in 2016 started leading crowds in that lock her up chant, as shocking as it was to most of the country, it was a transgressive thrill to Trump and his followers because they knew it sounded so wrong. But they enjoyed that transgressive thrill so much that it became policy, he tried to get the Justice Department to bring improper political motivations against opponents. We know that he’s very, very — this is what he wants to do. This is what he think ss power should be. Now the Supreme Court has said, without reservation, and without limit, yeah, you can do that, we promise you explicitly in the ruling and the language of the ruling, anything you say to your Justice Department subject to immunity for you. And that is — I mean, the rule of law means in this country that the law isn’t used as a instrument of the ruler, the rule of law is supposed to constrained the ruler. The Supreme Court just undid it. It’s binding. Now the way our country is structured. The only way out of this, the only fix to this shgs, is to put someone in the White House from here on out who will not abuse the absolutely tir ran call