Making MAGA heads spin

In the months after the 2020 election, Donald Trump leaned on his campaign to launch ad blitzes and legal challenges to the results, insisting to his supporters that the election was “ a long way from over.”

[...]

Even after the votes had been counted and certified, Trump filed lawsuits contesting the results — and he claimed he was doing so not as the outgoing president, but as a candidate.

It’s even what he told the Supreme Court in a Dec. 9, 2020 brief filed by his lawyer at the time, John Eastman. “He seeks to intervene in this matter in his personal capacity as a candidate for reelection,” Eastman wrote.

[...]

Now, in a bid to derail criminal charges, he’s saying the opposite. At least six times in the past two weeks, Trump has declared that the election was “ long over” by the time he began pushing state officials and then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn his defeat.

It’s a new piece of rhetoric that’s meant to bolster Trump’s assertion of “presidential immunity” from his criminal charges for interfering with the transfer of power. He wasn’t a candidate anymore, Trump’s new theory goes, so he must have been doing his job as president to ensure elections are fair.

  Politico

And if in another lawsuit tomorrow it would benefit him to claim the former, he'll do that, too.

In the weeks after the 2020 election, Trump made similar statements in other court filings asserting that he was operating as a political candidate. And he echoed that sentiment in a tweet on Nov. 25, 2020 — three weeks after Election Day — in which he told his followers that the election was “a long way from over.”

[...]

But Trump’s characterization of that chaotic period shifted late last month, as the urgent significance of his immunity fight began to crystallize. It has continued in the weeks since. In a video he posted on social media Tuesday about his post-election activities, he said: “The election was long over. I wasn’t campaigning. I was just doing my job. I am entitled to immunity. I am absolutely entitled to immunity.” He’s repeated the refrain often in recent days.

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Legal experts say it’s not uncommon for litigants to change their stories — or even their entire legal theories — to gain an edge in court. It will be up to judges to determine whether Trump was in fact operating as president or candidate during that fateful stretch of 2020, they say.

[But] Trump’s contention in 2020 that he was filing legal briefs as a political candidate has [...] drawn scrutiny from federal judges, who cited this characterization last month when they ruled he could be sued for allegedly inciting the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.

[...]

“President Trump — like every other president in recent history — wore two hats,” Eastman’s lawyer, Charles Burnham, told POLITICO. “One, as president of the United States, the nation’s chief executive responsible for ensuring that the laws are faithfully executed, and the other as a candidate for reelection."

So, he just changes hats, depending on what legal argument he needs to make.

Check it out.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.