Nina Totebagberg: “Trump Derangement Syndrome” leads both liberals and conservatives to argue that you can prosecute a president for criming

There’s a derangement syndrome at work here for sure:

Perhaps it’s Trump Derangement Syndrome that led lots of legal eagles, from liberal to conservative, to believe that former President Donald Trump’s claim of immunity from criminal prosecution was preposterous. But it’s more likely that court observers didn’t properly account for the personal experiences of the conservative justices.

I want to pose this in the most polite and civil way I can think of, so I would like to ask the Official Voice of Even the Liberal NPR WTF is she even trying to say here?

She goes on to argue that the exactly zero historical cases of a current or former president being criminally prosecuted prior to Donald Trump need to be understood through the perspectives of Federalist Society hacks who hated seeing the Republican administrations they worked for subjected to politics, or, in the case of Neil Gorsuch, seeing his mother suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

The lowlight of Totenberg’s trip down memory lane is this:

Then too there is Justice Samuel Alito, who held increasingly senior Justice Department positions for the entirety of the Reagan administration in the 1980s.

“Presidents have to make a lot of tough decisions,” Alito told Dreeben. He asked incredulously, “Did I understand you to say, ‘Well, you know if he makes a mistake, he makes a mistake. He’s subject to the criminal laws just like anybody else.’ You don’t think he’s in a special, a peculiarly precarious position?”

“Making a mistake is not what lands you in a criminal prosecution,” Dreeben replied.

Alito went on to suggest that barring criminal prosecutions of a former president would be a good thing for democracy.

“If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows” there is “a real possibility after leaving office” that rather than being able to “go off into peaceful retirement,” he may be criminally prosecuted “by a bitter political opponent,” won’t that “lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?” Alito asked.

Thanks Nina, for treating Sam Alito’s position, which is that presidents should be able to coup without fear of prosecution because otherwise they would be tempted to attempt a coup, as something worthy of our careful consideration, as opposed to the most incoherent garbage ever spewed by a Supreme Court justice, which is kind of like picking Leo Messi’s best goal.