Alan Dershowitz uncorked a defense of Donald Trump Wednesday afternoon that left listeners stunned and bewildered, asking, “Did he really just say that?”
The answer is yes. Specifically, Dershowitz claimed, “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
So … literally any quid pro quo Trump could dream up would be unimpeachable as long as he believed it would help him get elected and that his election was in the public interest?
Let’s give Dershowitz the benefit of the doubt. Maybe more context would help here. He started with the Israel-Palestine plan Trump unveiled on Tuesday, jumping from that to a hypothetical Israel-Palestine quid pro quo that a future Democratic president might impose, trading funding for some change in behavior on one side or the other.
“The only thing that would make a quid pro quo unlawful is if the quo were, in some way, illegal,” he said, ignoring that soliciting foreign election interference is in fact illegal. “Now, we talked about motive. There are three possible motives that a political figure could have. One, a motive in the public interest. The Israel argument would be in the public interest.”
“The second is in his own political interest, and the third, which hasn’t been mentioned, would be in his own financial interest,” Dershowitz continued. “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest. And mostly you’re right: Your election is in the public interest. And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
The generous read here is that Dershowitz merely mangled an argument that, as Josh Marshall characterizes it, “with many foreign policy decisions a President is both advancing the national interest and also looking to his personal political fortunes. That cannot be an impeachable offense, he argues.” It’s a stretch to hear Dershowitz actually saying that, though. If you took out “Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest. And mostly you’re right: your election is in the public interest” and changed the following sentence to “If a president does something that is in the public interest and that he also believes will help him get elected, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.”
But as it stands, what Dershowitz said is that a president can engage in any quid pro quo that he thinks will help him get re-elected as long as he thinks his re-election is in the public interest. “Accepting this argument would put us on a short path toward dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise. It’s incompatible with government of, by, and for the people. It’s government by egomania,” constitutional law scholar Laurence Tribe tweeted.