Donald Trump is too special to prosecute

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A Supreme Court Expert Invents an Extraordinary Legal Standard

DONALD TRUMP IS a convicted criminal. It's important to be careful about the way language can be used to set apart people convicted of crimes, below the rest of humanity; "felon," especially, has historically been a pejorative in search of a legal framework. But the problem with Donald Trump, convicted criminal, is the opposite of that. The problem with Trump is that he has successfully refused to accept normal criminal law at all. And most major American institutions have helped him do it. 

"A central pillar of American democracy is that no man is above the law," the Supreme Court blogger and retired Supreme Court litigator Thomas Goldstein wrote in the New York Times opinion section. "But Mr. Trump isn’t an ordinary man."

Here were two sentences, each entirely inimical to the other, presented as if they formed an argument. Where had Thomas Goldstein, retired Supreme Court litigator, conjured the word "ordinary" from, after starting from "no man is above the law"? Where in the constitution, exactly, did the Founders draw the line between the ordinary citizens and the extraordinary ones? Did Trump, like the wily Odysseus, change his name to "No Man," to outwit the lumbering Cyclops of republican self-government?  

It was broken reasoning for a broken country. Goldstein was stringing these contradictory propositions together to argue that "[a]lthough this idea will pain my fellow Democrats," the multiple criminal prosecutions against Trump "should be abandoned."