Did Trump’s lawyers misquote George Washington? Here’s What the First President Actually Said

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Seeking Evidence That Founding Fathers Supported ‘Absolute Immunity’ From Criminal Prosecution for Former President Donald Trumphis lawyers turned to George Washington.

Citing Washington’s “Farewell Address to the People of the United States,” a foundational historic message that Washington wrote for all Americans, Trump’s lawyers said the first president’s important and historic warning against factions – political parties – should help protect Trump from any prosecution for election interference. .

Here’s how they put it in a brief filed ahead of Thursday’s oral arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court, during which attorney John Sauer said similar things:

George Washington warned of “the alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of vengeance natural to party dissensions, which, at different times and in different countries, has perpetrated the most horrible enormities.” »

The problem, as former CNN anchor John Avlon, who wrote an entire book about Washington’s farewell speech, told me, is that Trump’s lawyers cut Washington off.

Washington’s thinking doesn’t stop where Trump’s lawyers set the point.

What did Washington actually say?

Here is the full paragraph of the farewell speech, taken from the US Senate website (Senators from both parties take turns reading the speech each year in the Senate):

The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of vengeance natural to party dissensions, which at different times and in different countries has perpetrated the most horrible enormities, is in itself a fearful despotism. But this ultimately leads to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result from them gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and rest in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the leader of some dominant faction, more capable or happier than his competitors, turns this disposition to the advantage of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.

Yes, Washington said that alternation between parties is a problem, “a terrible despotism”.

BUT! Washington says things will lead to something much worse: a “permanent despotism” in which an individual is raised “on the ruins of public liberty.”

In this paragraph, Avlon sees not a roundabout and tortured reference to the need for presidential immunity, as Trump’s lawyers argue, but a clear warning against those who put party before country and do things like try to cancel an election to stay in power. power.

“Washington was warning about someone precisely like Donald Trump,” Avlon said.

Predicting an “insurrection”

In the next paragraph of his speech, Washington almost cannot imagine “any such extremity.” It includes a commentary that spans the years from 1796 to January 6, 2021:

Without hoping for an extremity of this kind (which should not, however, be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage it and to contain it. .

This always serves to distract public councils and weaken public administration. He agitates the community with ill-founded jealousies and false alarms, stirs up animosity among some against others, sometimes foments riots and insurrections.

Avlon, who is now running for Congress as a Democrat in New York, said the misquotation was “an insult to Washington, a deliberate misreading of the text and an attempt to undermine the American people.”

This reading seems consistent with the question Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson asked Sauer, in which she asked whether, rather than inoculating a president against partisanship, immunity would encourage presidents to work outside the law.

Washington’s View on Law Enforcement

The farewell speech is also notable because, in this speech, Washington begins his message by announcing that he will relinquish power, without clinging to it like Trump. Washington does not present himself as being elevated above the country, but rather as a citizen, and he ends his speech by saying that he looks forward to leaving office so that he can begin to “participate, in the midst of my fellow citizens , to the benevolent influence of good.” laws under a free government.

These are not the words of a man who expects absolute immunity.

Another Washington historian, Alexis Coe, who wrote a recent biography, called Trump’s lawyers’ view of Washington’s farewell speech “crazy.” She believes that instead of seeking exemption from the laws, Washington would find ways to circumvent them.

“Washington believed that a president should be replaced when the people – land-owning white men – thought he should be replaced, and certainly did not think he would avoid accountability for his actions in office,” he said. she declared.

Coe recounted how Washington circumvented the Pennsylvania law that would have emancipated his enslaved servants after six months by periodically moving them out of the state – a tactic he spoke of openly in letters but hid from slave workers.

Modern politicians should take away an important message from Washington’s farewell, Coe told me, that parties “should hold themselves accountable, and the likelihood that they won’t makes them dangerous.”

Why Trump is unique among presidents

Trump’s lawyers say the fact that no other president in U.S. history has been prosecuted is proof that presidents should not be prosecuted.

Presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said on CNN after the Supreme Court oral arguments that Trump is unlike any previous U.S. president in one very important way. Her legal problems, she explained, “have to do with the fact that the former president has not accepted the loss of his presidency, which is something all other presidents have been willing to do.”

Will Trump get immunity?

Supreme Court observers were somewhat surprised by the deference the court’s conservative justices gave to the various arguments presented by Sauer.

The conventional wisdom, which often turns out to be wrong, is that the Court’s conservative majority is poised to create a new immunity test for presidential actions or send the case back to lower courts for further review. in-depth.

Refusing to talk too much about Trump’s alleged election interference, conservatives like Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch were more interested in what their ruling in the case would mean for the future.

“We are writing a rule for all ages,” Gorsuch said at one point.

Anything that delays the prosecution of Trump is a clear victory for the former president, who is playing to win the clock until the November election.

If judges create an immunity rule, they will also create something completely new. Although many of these conservative justices like to think of themselves as constitutional textualists, the issue of immunity is not mentioned in the Constitution and was not directly debated in the Constitutional Convention – and it is impossible to see in Washington’s Farewell Address.

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