THE NATIONAL INTEREST, C’EST MOI

“I WANT TO be elected. I think I am a great president. I think I am the greatest president there ever was, and if I am not elected, the national interest will suffer greatly.” These are the words of a hypothetical president, as imagined by Alan Dershowitz in his role as one of Donald Trump’s lawyers during the final days of the Senate impeachment trial.

That hypothetical president, said Dershowitz, would not have committed an impeachable offense if he offered an otherwise-legal quid pro quo partially motivated by a desire to improve his own electoral chances. After all, “every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest.”

Despite Dershowitz’s Harvard credentials and long standing as a liberal stalwart, this thought experiment was greeted with a storm of disdain on the Hill and within the legal community.

“His argument was. “He is wrong, and I think he’s made a laughable argument that undermines the president’s case.”