Trump's latest about-face: He now says 2020 election was 'long over'

Contributing sentiments towards policy:

46% : As he seeks to derail special counsel Jack Smith's criminal charges, Trump's strategy suggests he believes his immunity argument can only succeed if courts agree that his efforts -- which included leaning on government officials and spreading false claims of fraud -- were official presidential responsibilities rather than political self-interest.
45% : "President Trump himself recognized that he engaged in his campaign to win re-election -- including his post-election efforts to alter the declared results in his favor -- in his personal capacity as presidential candidate, not in his official capacity as sitting President," Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan wrote in the unanimous ruling.
43% : In the weeks after the 2020 election, Trump made similar statements in other court filings asserting that he was operating as a political candidate.
43% : It wasn't a legitimate use of governmental authority.
40% : 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.
32% : But there's a problem: It flies in the face of the legal arguments Trump made three years ago, during his frenetic push to subvert the election results.
32% : 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.
32% : That's why Trump now claims he was merely investigating election integrity as president in December 2020, not trying to seize a second term.
32% : And when he was ordered by a court in 2021 to reveal more details about his work for Trump, Eastman produced an unsigned "engagement letter" from the campaign, dated Dec. 5, 2020, which characterized his work for Trump as candidate, not president.
31% : Professor Eastman represented President Trump in that latter capacity.
30% : The contradiction could cause headaches for Trump and his current lawyers as they now press appellate courts to accept an aggressive immunity theory -- a gambit that could hinge on whether Trump's attempts to overturn Joe Biden's victory can somehow count as official presidential acts or whether they were nakedly political.
26% : "The idea that 'just doing his job' as president entails inciting a violent riot at the Capitol, interfering with the certification of the election, and attempting to throw out legitimate votes is and has always been absurd," Litman said, "and the flip flopping between whether the same words and actions were said or done by candidate private citizen Trump and President Trump is just the latest example of it."

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