Trump believes he has the 'divine right of kings': Former prosecutor
President Donald Trump is already governing as if the law doesn't apply to him, former federal prosecutor John Flannery told MSNBC's Ari Melber on Wednesday evening.
"Your thoughts on what we just saw there and these, these pardons of people convicted of sedition against the United States?" asked Melber, himself an attorney.
"Well, going backwards from the pardons, here you have a president who claims that he's going to enforce the Constitution, and he has this amazing conflict himself by basically rewarding all those who made possible the insurrectionists to try to overturn the election, that he turned into a four-year campaign issue, and now he rewards them for what they did, notwithstanding the fact that they hurt the police," said Flannery.
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"And the second part of it is, not only are there those who were intimately involved with suffering that violence, they have to think he asked us to defend him and to keep him whole, and when the shoe is on the other foot and we need that, he doesn't punish them," Flannery continued. "So what is that to say for the respect for police nationwide? What is that to say for those who supported him in this election?"
Beyond that, said Flannery, Trump believes he has the power to rewrite the Constitution with his order purporting to end birthright citizenship — and that has to be tackled head-on.
"We're not going to delay. We're not going to make the mistake that [former Attorney General Merrick] Garland made and sit on our hands. We're going to fight from the beginning for the rights that are ours," he said.
"Not only does a person become a citizen as a result of [Amendment] 14, section one, but if you think about the nature of the attack, they're attacking the 10th Amendment, which, when our Constitution was made, the states pushed back and said, we want, we want and need, to have reserved to us anything that is not specifically specified for the federal government," he said. "And Trump, of course, doesn't care anything about that because he is, in his mind apparently, within the status of the divine right of kings. Putting his hand on a Bible is beneath him."
"And this is something that our country, from George III to now, has decried as not who we are," Flannery added. "So this man is alien to us. This is an absurd administration. And we have to fight it from the beginning."
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