The Daily Fuckup

On April 10, 2024, Donald Trump was still leaning on one of the broadest defenses available to him in the Jan. 6 election-subversion case: the claim that a former president should have sweeping criminal immunity for conduct tied to official acts. By that point, the Supreme Court had already agreed to hear the issue and had set oral argument for April 25, so this was not a fresh procedural breakthrough. It was the next stage of a fight that had already moved into the high court.

The appeal carries an obvious tactical upside for Trump. If the courts accept that some of the charged conduct fell within protected presidential authority, the defense could narrow the case, slow it down, or force prosecutors to redraw part of their theory. That is a meaningful prize for any defendant facing serious criminal exposure. But the same argument also draws a bright line around the question at the center of the case: how far presidential power reaches once a president leaves office, and whether that power can block criminal prosecution for conduct connected to the presidency.

That is why the immunity theory is as much a legal test as a political one. Trump has tried to cast the prosecutions against him as partisan persecution. At the same time, asking for a sweeping immunity shield necessarily tells the public that the underlying charges are serious enough to require extraordinary protection. Those two messages sit uneasily together. A defendant who says the case is baseless usually does not also need to argue for a constitutional fortress against it.

So on April 10, the story was not that immunity had won or lost that day. The story was that Trump was still pressing a broad doctrine that could reshape how the courts treat presidential conduct in criminal cases, even as the issue moved toward Supreme Court argument. Whatever practical benefit the defense might eventually produce, it also kept the legal stakes unmistakably visible: the case remained alive, unresolved, and tied to a question the justices were about to answer.