Kushner speaks at a news briefing at the White House in August 2020. Testing lagged for crucial weeks, resulting in more infections and dead Americans. Unable to draw on federal resources, states competed with one another for equipment. These decisions were objectively disastrous. The task force also seems to have nixed its own plan for nationwide testing. Yet Kushner’s outside-the-box thinking also brought a sudden shift in pandemic responsibilities from the national government to the various states. He did deliver a cache of N-95 masks to New York City. Kushner also pledged to “think outside the box.” On April 2, 2020, shortly after Trump’s conversations with Woodward, the president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, announced that he would be helping Vice-President Mike Pence’s coronavirus task force with supply issues. A civil action?īut the law offers another path to justice when it comes to the Trump administration’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. In legal terms, he should be more worried about the more than two dozen women who have accused him of sexual assault, not to mention further accusations of sexual misconduct, in ways he boasted about in 2005. In short, Trump’s actions here were morally repellent, but they would be very hard to prosecute as criminal. Imagine a precedent that could enable a Republican administration, through the Attorney General’s office, to pursue Barack Obama for the deaths of U.S.
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That principle isn’t as bad as it sounds.Īfter all, constitutional government depends on peaceful transitions of power, which in turn require that former office-holders live without fear of state sanction. (AP Photo/Evan Vucci)įinally, government officials in general, and the president in particular, are often immune from prosecution for their actions in office. Trump speaks during a news conference on COVID-19 at the White House in July 2020. He could also point to his early ban on travel from China as evidence that he acted on his information. Whether he listens is unclear, but he could plausibly claim that being president involves a unique range of responsibilities and decisions - that he’s less akin to a negligent parent leaving a pistol next to his kid’s tricycle than to a fireman who confronts many fires at once.
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In his capacity as chief executive, Trump also receives a daily briefing about a huge range of national security threats. It’s much harder to establish guilt for collective suffering, especially with all the variables of COVID-19 infections. Prosecutors would need to show that Trump himself caused the deaths of specific other persons. Source: CBC News, The National.Īnd yet the fact that he’s president also gives Trump some get-out-of-jail-free cards.Ĭriminal prosecutions generally require clear, one-to-one relationships between perpetrator and victim. Led by Matthew Staver, Dean of the Liberty University Law School, Liberty Counsel regularly represents Christian nationalists who challenge state-imposed restrictions on religious gatherings during the coronavirus pandemic.Trump plays down the threat of COVID-19 at a White House news conference.
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Fourth, we briefly examine several recent legal cases brought against the governors of California and Illinois by the Liberty Counsel, the leading Christian evangelical legal firm in the USA. Third, we look at one kind of Christian evangelicals-that is, Christian nationalists-to see how they regarded restrictions on their religious behaviour caused by COVID-19. Second, we assess the transactional importance that President Trump placed on Christian evangelicals’ religious freedom. The paper is organised as follows: first, we identify the importance of religious freedom for the more than 20 million Americans who self-classify as Christian evangelicals. It contends that the ability of state governors to close religious places of worship illustrates both the limits on the power of the president and that public health can take supremacy over religious freedom in today’s America. This paper examines the issue of religious freedom in the USA during the coronavirus pandemic of 2020–2021, during the presidency of Donald Trump (2017–2021).