Citizen Trump can't pretend to be president. And therefore he's wide open for prosecution.
That's the thinking by former Solicitor General Neal Katyal who appeared on MSNBC's "Alex Wagner Tonight" on Tuesday night.
He talked about the implications involved in regard to Special Counsel Jack Smith hopscotching former President Donald Trump's stall tactics and the appeals process with a direct petition to the Supreme Court to rule on his "presidential immunity" claims in the 2020 election subversion case.
Katyal doesn't buy Trump's attempt to claim that he's not only immune, but infallible.
He paraphrased the legal position as flat out dim, noting that the "extraordinary thing that Trump is trying to argue, which is that he can murder someone and get away with it."
He can't, according to Katyal. And becoming leader of the free world doesn't come with infinite exoneration.
"That being president gets him a get-out-of-jail free card," he sarcastically noted.
But Katyal believes that in this case, Trump "didn't quite... get away with it."
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He found it incredibly odd that the former president, who's running again to win the GOP nomination, continues beating the drum that he is essentially untouchable as a "sitting president" and therefore "he can't be investigated." And yet his own attorney, according to Katyal, is also saying that they aren't fighting for "permanent immunity" — only to keep the hands off Trump (assuming he wins the presidency in 2024) until his second term elapses.
"Jack Smith is prosecuting him as a former president," Katyal contends. "I know Trump still thinks he's president, but he's not in the reality-based world."
And he then offered his prediction: and it would be that the Supreme Court will likely rule against the 45th president.
"The Supreme Court is gonna say, 'How can it be that a former president has absolute immunity? That's just not American.'"
