Topic: United States/Presidents of the United States
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π Presidential Immunity in the United States
Presidential immunity is the concept that sitting presidents of the United States have civil or criminal immunity for their official acts. Neither civil nor criminal immunity is explicitly granted in the Constitution or any federal statute. However, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in Trump v. United States (2024) that all presidents have absolute criminal immunity for official acts under core constitutional powers, presumptive immunity for other official acts. The court held that there is no immunity for unofficial acts. The court made this decision after former President Trump claimed immunity from prosecution for actions performed within the perimeter of his responsibilities as president.
Previously, the Supreme Court had found in Nixon v. Fitzgerald (1982) that the president has absolute immunity from civil damages actions regarding conduct within the "outer perimeter" of their duties. However, in Clinton v. Jones (1997), the court ruled against temporary immunity for sitting presidents from suits arising from pre-presidency conduct. Some scholars suggested an immunity from arrest and criminal prosecution as well, a view which became the practice of the Department of Justice under a pair of memoranda (1973 and 2000) from the Office of Legal Counsel. Presidents Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton, and Donald Trump were criminally investigated while in office, but none were prosecuted while still in office.
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- "Presidential Immunity in the United States" | 2026-01-12 | 79 Upvotes 66 Comments
π Trump Fake Electors Plot
The Trump fake electors plot was an attempt by U.S. president Donald Trump and associates to have him remain in power after losing the 2020 United States presidential election. After the results of the election determined Trump had lost, he, his associates, and Republican Party officials in seven battleground states β Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin β devised a scheme to submit fraudulent certificates of ascertainment to falsely claim Trump had won the Electoral College vote in crucial states. The plot was one of Trump and his associates' attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election.
The intent of the scheme was to pass the illegitimate certificates to then-Vice President Mike Pence in the hope he would count the fake electoral college ballots, rather than the authentic certificates, and thus overturn Joe Biden's victory. This scheme was defended by a fringe legal theory developed by Trump attorneys Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, detailed in the Eastman memos, which claimed a vice president has the constitutional discretion to swap official electors with an alternate slate during the certification process, thus changing the outcome of the electoral college vote and the overall winner of the presidential race. The scheme came to be known as the Pence Card.
By June 2024, dozens of Republican state officials and Trump associates had been indicted in four states for their alleged involvement. The federal Smith special counsel investigation investigated Trump's role in the events. According to testimony, Trump was aware of the fake electors scheme, and knew that Eastman's plan for Pence to obstruct the certification of electoral votes was a violation of the Electoral Count Act.
Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, a "central figure" in the plot, coordinated the scheme across the seven states. In a conference call on January 2, 2021, Trump, Eastman, and Giuliani spoke to some 300 Republican state legislators in an effort to persuade them to convene special legislative sessions to replace legitimate Biden electors with fake Trump electors based on unfounded allegations of election fraud. Trump pressured the Justice Department to falsely announce it had found election fraud, and he attempted to install a new acting attorney general who had drafted a letter falsely asserting such election fraud had been found, in an attempt to persuade the Georgia legislature to convene and reconsider its Biden electoral votes.
Trump and Eastman asked Republican National Committee chair Ronna McDaniel to enlist the committee's assistance in gathering fake "contingent" electors. A senator's chief of staff tried to pass a list of fraudulent electors to Pence minutes before the vice president was to certify the election. The scheme was investigated by the January 6 committee and the Justice Department. The January 6 committee's final report identified lawyer Kenneth Chesebro as the plot's original architect. On October 20, 2023, Chesebro pleaded guilty in the state of Georgia to conspiring to file a false document and was sentenced to five years of probation.
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- "Trump Fake Electors Plot" | 2026-02-24 | 62 Upvotes 24 Comments
π God Emperor Trump
The Master Drone or Il Pa-Drone, popularly referred to as God Emperor Trump, was a 65-foot (20-metre) papier-mΓ’chΓ© sculpture and float depicting Donald Trump, the president of the United States, dressed as the fictional God Emperor of Mankind from the Warhammer 40,000 miniature war game franchise. It was created by the Italian artist Fabrizio Galli for the Carnival of Viareggio in 2019.
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- "God Emperor Trump" | 2026-01-24 | 11 Upvotes 2 Comments