WASHINGTON—“This conduct is not America First, it’s Donald Trump first,” Rep. Jerry Nadler said last Thursday during the prosecution’s presentation in the Senate trial of the U.S. president. Now, with the trial appearing set to conclude Friday, the president’s defence has proposed that there may be no difference between those two things.

“Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest and, mostly, you’re right — your election is in the public interest,” Trump lawyer Alan Dershowitz told senators on Wednesday. “If a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” Absent a direct financial interest or a clearly delineated violation of criminal law, the argument went, a president is entirely justified in using his office to help his campaign.

This is an attitude — l’état, c’est moi — that many of Trump’s opponents have long attributed to the president. But as a defence of his actions, it is potentially transformative of the long-held understanding that the United States was formed to throw off the rule of kings.

Trump’s harshest critics have argued that he’s a narcissist who cannot separate his personal interests from those of the nation he leads.

“Trump proposes a presidency that elevates the expressive and personal dimensions of the office over everything else,” Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes write in their recently published book, “Unmaking the Presidency.” “It is one in which the institutional office and the personality of its occupant are almost entirely merged — merged in their interests, in their impulses, in their finances, and in their public character.”

Hennessey and Wittes were condemning the president, but a similar argument is now being offered in his defence.

At one time — and at his own insistence — Trump’s defence boiled down to “no quid pro quo,” and his Republican defenders insisted that was the line in the sand. Then came leaks about former national security adviser John Bolton’s forthcoming book, in which he reportedly claims Trump told him there was a clear quid pro quo between the U.S. supplying Ukraine with military aid and Ukraine announcing investigations into Trump’s political opponents. At the very least, this would seem to justify calling Bolton as a witness — as House managers prosecuting the case continued to argue in the Senate at every opportunity on Thursday, and as 75 per cent of Americans told pollsters they should.

But it seemed increasingly likely that a majority of senators will vote Friday against hearing from witnesses.

They now say such testimony is besides the point.

Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, who once said such an exchange of favours would be wrong, is now saying the important thing is that Trump “did nothing wrong in his mind.”

Republican Sen. Ted Cruz told Fox News this week that “it’s a red herring. It doesn’t matter if there was a quid pro quo or not.”

To be sure, Trump’s lawyers Jay Sekulow and Patrick Philbin continued to argue Thursday that military aid and the request for investigations were not linked. But they argued this on the basis that no evidence pointed to a link, while depending on senators to vote against hearing evidence on the matter. They were presenting Dershowitz’s position as a supplement, a common legal tactic: My client didn’t do it, the argument goes, but even if he did, it wasn’t illegal.

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Dershowitz’s arguments — that abuse of power is not impeachable, and that the quid pro quo the president is accused of seeking might have been a fair use of his power — seemed to better reflect the underlying logic of the many vocal Republicans standing in judgment.

On Thursday afternoon, Dershowitz tweeted that he wasn’t saying a president can do anything he wants to serve his re-election, but rather that a mixed motive that includes his own electoral interests cannot make what would otherwise be a legal act (such as withholding foreign aid) into an impeachable one.

This trial began with many Republican senators openly saying they had already made up their minds to acquit Trump. As it continued, some have argued there is no point extending the trial to hear more evidence since the outcome is predetermined. From the outset, they appeared to see their own interests tied to Trump’s by partisanship. Now there’s an argument that those partisan interests are synonymous with the national interest.

Dershowitz might not claim the same position, but Trump once insisted that the U.S. Constitution gave him “the right to do whatever I want as president.” His colleagues in the Senate appear ready to signal they agree.

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