For those who suffer from the well-known cognitive malady known as Trump Derangement Syndrome, even the very question is enough to trigger immediate cardiac arrest.
However, the question occurred to me as I watched Mr. Trump take the presidential oath of office for the second time and then listened to him deliver the least politically correct inaugural address since the invention of political correctness or, for that matter, the inaugural address.
“The voters who wanted President Trump to have a second term voted for him because he’s a fighter,” I said in January 2021, and the scoffers howled.
Imagine their reaction to whether Mr. Trump can do no wrong. It would involve the head-exploding emoji, or maybe not the emoji but their actual heads.
I don’t mean that our 45th and 47th president cannot make mistakes. Everybody makes mistakes.
I don’t mean Mr. Trump is impeccable or incapable of moral transgression. Even the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility governs only ex cathedra teachings on matters of faith and morals, not personal conduct. If there’s a sense in which Mr. Trump can do no wrong, that’s not it. And no president could be confused for the Holy Father.
I don’t mean that Mr. Trump cannot be charged with criminal violations based on his official acts as president.
However, that is, in fact, true: “The President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority,” the United States Supreme Court confirmed last summer.
At the time, the liberal dissenters claimed that the court’s decision meant Mr. Trump could do no wrong.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by two other liberal justices, lamented:
“When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he will now be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy’s Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune.”
I don’t mean Mr. Trump “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody” without losing voters. And, by the way, he didn’t mean it either when he did say it. That’s called hyperbole, of the New York City variety.
Even Snopes, a notorious peddler of the fact-check genre that is actually “opinion journalism or criticism, masquerading as straight news,” knew better than to take Mr. Trump literally, explaining that his January 2016 wisecrack “generally appeared absent of its broader context, which pertained to the loyalty of his followers, and not an actual desire, intent, or interest in shooting any individuals.”
You can always count on the fact-checkers for that sort of incisive analysis.
Mr. Trump is no more immune from hyperbole than any other politician. The difference is that the legacy media likes to parse Mr. Trump’s every syllable to conclude he is lying.
The Washington Post, for example, tallied “30,573 lies over 4 years” in its collected trove of unobjectionable claims, such as his statement that Melania Trump is “a woman of great grace and beauty and dignity” who is “so popular with the people” or that “political violence is an attack on everything we cherish as Americans.”
Aside from the irony in The Washington Post’s publication of a misleading tally of fake “lies,” you might wonder why their urge to falsify petered out at 30,573. Did they get tired and give up?
These benign, reasonable statements from Mr. Trump pale in comparison with the verity of choice whoppers like Barack Obama’s “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it.”
Then there is former President Joe Biden’s lies about his family’s business dealings, all now covered by preemptive pardons.
The arbiters of truth in the mainstream media judged all these complete lies to be true.
They also told us, in multichannel stereo, how Mr. Biden was “sharp as a tack” despite his obvious signs of dementia.
Faced with incontrovertible evidence of Mr. Biden’s cognitive decline, his administration and the regime media adopted Chicolini’s line in the old Marx Brothers movie: “Who ya gonna believe: me or your own eyes?”
After cumulative decades of free passes for Democrats who preceded Mr. Trump in office, you can begin to understand why his supporters might say he can do no wrong.
He rescued us from the disastrous prospect of Madam President Clinton. With that alone, he delivered us from the precipice.
Now, Mr. Trump has done it again. He has delivered us from the disastrous prospect of Madam President Harris.
He made the result too big to rig, with a decisive victory in the popular vote to neutralize the astroturfed antifa protesters and other members of the so-called resistance keen on saving democracy. They now seem less keen on democracy.
At this point, we are playing with house money, as they say in Las Vegas.
Having twice defeated Ms. Harris and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, we have already won.
Everything else Mr. Trump offers is pure upside.
And, with an unabashed “America First” agenda and massive action on Day 1, it’s a lot of upside.
In that sense, Mr. Trump can do no wrong.
• Gayle Trotter is a lawyer and political commentator in Washington, D.C. You can follow her on X @gayletrotter.
First published in the Washington Times
