In order to have a smoothly running totalitarian state, absolute obedience to the will of the leader is essential. It is impossible for an army to efficiently carry out obscene orders if individual officers and soldiers are allowed to have their own subjective moral opinions about right and wrong. Authority flows top down and loyalty is rewarded, until a sacrifice is needed, in which case it will be undertaken willingly, in the name of protecting the infallible leader. If your leader is, God forbid, on trial for a specific set of illegal acts, shift the legal focus from the acts in question to a series of academic future hypotheticals. Why dwell on, or indeed allow discussion of, anything that will make the leader look as guilty as he appears to be? That would be self-sabotage of the worst kind.

There is a universe, offers Trump’s attorney, in an excellent impression of the insane Robert F. Kennedy Jr., where this would be an official presidential act entitled to absolute immunity from prosecution. I don’t recall Justice Sotomayor asking Mr. Sauer under what Bizzarro World situation this could be an official act. After all, if the guy is corrupt, there is a justice system in place, unless the corrupt political rival is somehow above the law…

As for the defense of murder of a political rival as an official presidential act, I guess Sauer’s argument would go like this: lets say, for example, that the defeated president truly and honestly believes the candidate who defeated him is an evil vampire who drinks the blood of innocent white Christian children while he diddles them.   After all, no less than the brilliant, respected Alan Dershowitz made the arguably not demented argument at one of Trump’s impeachment trials that if the president, or presidential candidate, truly, honestly believes something that nothing he does in connection with that truly held belief can ever be against the law.  After all, führerworte haben gesetzeskraft, as German legal experts used to say during the Thousand Year Reich.

The leader’s word, you understand, has the force of law. Every one of the leader’s farts, the force of prophecy. The leader’s temper tantrums — irrefutable directives from a higher power. Ask anyone who has been in the courtroom with Leader Trump, as he nonchalantly catches a few winks while his vicious enemies weakly flail away, trying to unfairly destroy him. Ask particularly about the prophetic farts…