There are no such things as rights. No one is born with rights. A baby doesn’t have a right to be born and an elder person doesn’t have a right to compassionate care. You don’t have the right to read, eat or pee or own a weapon, whether it be knife or a gun. Rights are invented and I think it was very important that our declaration of independence speaks of rights as being inalienable rather than God given. Most people tend to say, “It’s my God given right to… whatever.” No it’s not. “God,” if you will, aborts more babies than any medical abortion, through miscarriages. Those babies did not have a right to be born and even if somehow, the universe stated that they did have the right to be born, the biggest serial killer of all, defied that right through miscarriages.
Inalienable actually means that the right established as inalienable can’t be transferred to someone else, like a king, or taken away or removed by law. Luckily, or maybe not, the declaration only mentions three inalienable rights and they pertain to living humans: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It does not mention property, no matter how hard George Bush tries to insist that it does. These are purposely vague terms, but paired with the term inalienable they are powerful. It would take the bill of rights to get into the specifics.
Anyway, the point of this is that Trump, instead of suing for blanket immunity during his time as president — Richard Nixon was the last president to assert this but sort of acknowledged that it wasn’t going to play. Anyway, he should be thanking his lucky stars that there is no immunity for him because it is the rule of law that has allowed him to continue to thrive.
When you think about leaders who reach that stage of hubris where they can’t be touched — in other words — immune, the world reaches out and proves that you are exactly wrong. Nicolae Ceaucescu and his wife were marched into a courtyard and right up to the moment that were shot in the head, kept stating that “you can’t do this.” Mussolini, not to mention his boy toy Hitler, thought they were immune and eventually discovered they were not immune at all — Hitler taking the coward’s way of suicide in his bunker and Mussolini ending up hung upside down from a telephone line.
Other examples — unfortunately too numerous to go into much detail: Pol Pot, Pinochet, Stalin, Lenin, Franco, hundreds of African despots, the Guptas of South Africa and Jacob Zuma, King Msweti of eswatini (formerly Swaziland), and Robert Mugabe, Khaddafi and the current ruler of Turkey, Erdogan (who has not met his end yet) and Belarus’s Lukashenko and of course, Putin, who apparently plans to take his place among his former leaders. Some of these people just end up in ill health and die of disease. All of them, think or thought that they were immune.
In the United States, it is the peaceful transfer of power which prevents people rising up and killing their leaders (although Trump tried to create a coup against himself, technically, and felt his troops would kill the other people.) As so many people, frustrated by the naturally slow tendencies of the court system to get things right, have said, “Why isn’t he in jail?” Well it’s for the very reason that he is now trying to destroy. The law. Without the law he and his wife could be taken out and shot, all the while insisting that “they” can’t do that.