Trump says presidents don’t have to obey any laws. Kansas and Missouri AGs sign on | Opinion

Donald Trump doesn’t want to be president. He wants to be king.

Andrew Bailey and Kris Kobach are determined to help him.

How else to interpret a brief the Missouri and Kansas attorneys general helped file this week at the United States Supreme Court? The filing came in support of Trump’s request for immunity from prosecution in the federal government’s charges that he conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Spoiler alert: Trump really conspired to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

We all saw it. The only real question is whether he’ll finally be held accountable.

Trump’s argument to the Supreme Court, essentially, is that whatever a president does is legal. Even if it’s plainly illegal.

“The president cannot function, and the presidency itself cannot retain its vital independence, if the president faces criminal prosecution for official acts once he leaves office,” his lawyers argue in their own brief to the court. “A denial of criminal immunity would incapacitate every future President with de facto blackmail and extortion while in office, and condemn him to years of post-office trauma at the hands of political opponents.”

Sounds like a problem. But one way to solve it — hear me out — would be not to commit illegal acts while in office.

That’s too much to ask of Trump, though. No surprise there.

It’s amusing, though entirely unsurprising, that Bailey and Kobach are backing Trump’s play. These law-and-order Republican attorneys general don’t typically ask courts to spare criminal defendants from prosecution. That’s not really their job.

Then again, most criminal defendants don’t have the power to make or break Bailey and Kobach’s political careers. Trump does.

Lucky for him.

“The weaponization of government against President Trump is unlike anything this country has ever seen before,” Bailey posted Wednesday on the social media service X. “We’re doing everything we can to halt it.”

That “everything” includes signing on to this week’s brief, the two men part of a larger group of 17 Republican AGs asking the Supreme Court to please, please let Donald Trump be above the law. (Separately, America First Legal — the outfit run by former Trump adviser Stephen Miller — filed a similar brief on behalf of Republicans including Sen. Roger Marshall of Kansas and Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri.)

To be fair, their brief rests less on the idea that presidents should be kings — that’s Trump’s argument — and more on the idea that federal prosecutors serving under a Democratic president are being wildly unfair to his Republican predecessor.

“Prosecutors purport to represent the People, but their approach toward President Trump suggests ulterior motives,” the brief says. “The court should take seriously the risk that exposing former presidents to criminal liability will enable partisan abuse.”

That’s wild coming in the service of Trump, the man who campaigned to chants of “Lock her up!” back in 2016 — and who now runs for president in 2024 on a promise to supporters of “retribution” for all his grievances.

Weaponizing government in the service of partisan abuses is pretty much Trump’s entire governing agenda.

Which is why, paradoxically, we should take Bailey and Kobach’s brief a little bit seriously. If Trump’s immunity bid fails and he somehow is still elected president — God help us — you can bet that he’ll go after Joe Biden with the full force of federal law enforcement.

He’s told us so. “If I don’t get Immunity, then Crooked Joe Biden doesn’t get Immunity,” the former president wrote on Truth Social in January.

One wonders: Would Bailey and Kobach be back in court arguing for Biden’s immunity when that happens?

Call me skeptical.

It’s here we should note that Republicans in Congress — led by Missouri’s own Rep. Jason Smith — have spent more than a year desperately casting about for evidence of a high crime or misdemeanor to pin on Biden so they can impeach him. They have utterly failed — so badly that Fox News made fun of them this week.

Trump, meanwhile, committed his crimes against the Constitution right out in the open for everybody to see. Andrew Bailey and Kris Kobach? They want to help him get away with it. Law and order is for little people.

Joel Mathis is a regular Kansas City Star and Wichita Eagle opinion correspondent. He lives in Lawrence with his wife and son. Formerly a writer and editor at Kansas newspapers, he served nine years as a syndicated columnist.