• Trump’s lawyers would argue that Biden can order Trump’s execution without any punishment, but that it would not cause him to win the next election because the military and other federal officials are not immune and are “obligated” not to follow illegal orders. So basically the argument is that illegal orders are unlikely to be followed.
• Problem with this argument is that the president has the pardon power, which means he could promise to pardon people for following his illegal orders.
• But the problem with that argument is that some believe the president could pardon himself, so maybe that situation is already a reality even if the president is not immune
• What would actually happen? It seems like in both Watergate and Jan 6, some people did refuse to follow corrupt orders. But in the case of Watergate where there was more time and a more intelligent corrupt president, that wasn’t itself a major problem. In Nixon’s Saturday Night Massacre, he forced his AGs to resign until he landed on future Supreme Court nominee Robert Bork, who carried out Nixon’s illegal order to fire a special prosecutor. The bad news for Nixon is that the move was so unpopular it eventually led to his resignation as he probably would’ve been impeached otherwise.

All you need to know about this subject is that Putin passed full immunity for himself. It was one of the nails on the coffin for modern russia.

Most of SCOTUS is not in favor of “broad immunity”, for exactly this scenario. They want to make sure that Trump is never held responsible for his actions while in office, and that every President after Trump(if he doesn’t declare himself President for life) is criminally liable for everything. Trump has even said that he’ll have Biden prosecuted if he wins.

Wait, I’ve been out of the loop for a bit; is Trump actually saying that he should be immune to charges because he was the president??? How in the world could he think that would work?