Joy Reid was one of the many MSNBC pundits to speak out against the Supreme Court’s Monday ruling of partial immunity for convicted former President Donald Trump. But she interestingly put a Hollywood spin on her interpretation in an attempt to make the consequences of the 6-3 decision a little more palatable for those catching up.
She compared SCOTUS siding with Trump and thereby stalling his election interference trial till after November’s election to the dragons, bloody battles for power and political gameplay of HBO’s “Game of Thrones.”
“It was something to read today, both the decision and the dissent. And I guess the sort of best way for me to sum it up is — I don’t know if everyone here watches ‘Game of Thrones,’ but if you’re a ‘Game of Thrones’ fan, you will note that in Westeros, there was a king, and then there was the hand of the king. And when the king is very young or very old or very mad, the hand of the king is effectively the king. And what I think you saw in this ruling today was the Supreme Court declare their preferred president, of course, because they know no Democrat would exercise these powers in the way they would very much like their next president to. They’ve declared the presidents and former presidents to be kings. But they’ve also declared themselves the hand of the king,” Reid said, laying out her theory.
Speaking with her colleague Chris Hayes, the “ReidOut” host then read from Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent to the partial immunity ruling, specifically from page 110.
“‘With its adoption of a paradigm that sometimes exempts the president from the dictates of the law when the court says so, this court has effectively snatched from the legislature the authority to bind the president — or not — to Congress’ mandates. And it has also thereby substantially augmented the power of both the office of the presidency and itself,’” Reid read from Jackson’s response.
“What John Roberts said today is that he and his five fellow Leonard Leo appointees will decide when the president has erred,” Reid continued. “They will decide when he has stepped beyond the bounds of official acts and only they can make that decision. They are the hand of the king.”
She then questioned Roberts’ proposed argument that the president needs the option of “boldness and decisive action” as a leader and that “only absolute immunity and presumed immunity can give a president such boldness.”
“One wonders, then, how previous presidents have figured out how to implement the Trail of Tears and force Indigenous people to march along with enslaved people across this country, mainly to their deaths; how President Lincoln essentially deleted $10 billion worth of human property from every state in rebellion by fiat; how — let’s talk about the presidents in the 20th century — Harry Truman unleashed a nuclear holocaust on two parts of Japan. He did that boldly and decisively without fear of prosecution. How, then, does a new president, a future president, need such boldness to come from the fiat of the Supreme Court?”
Hayes agreed. “There has been no lack of boldness and decisiveness from American presidents and executives through the years,” he said, “particularly when operating in the conduct of war.”
Watch the full MSNBC segment, which also featured Nicolle Wallace, Rachel Maddow and others, in the video above.
