“As leaders, we have to do a better job of explaining to our members that a vote for Trump is a vote against your pension, a vote for Trump is a vote against organizing workers, a vote for Trump is another vote against the working class.”

“He has a longstanding history of racism, of hate towards women, towards minorities, towards the LGTBQ community – he is not accepting of other people,” Lister said. “Our union president shouldn’t even entertain the idea of a meeting. That shouldn’t have even been on the table.”

The United Auto Workers (UAW), which last year elected a union leader who – like O’Brien – promised to bring democracy and militancy to the labor group, rejected offers to meet with Trump during their strike this fall and said a possible second Trump term would be a “disaster”. “I see no point in meeting with him because I don’t think the man has any bit of care about what our workers stand for, what the working class stands for.”

“The core idea of our Constitution, of American law, of the founding of our country, is that no person is above the law,” said Norm Eisen, a CNN legal analyst who served as counsel to House Democrats in Trump’s first impeachment trial. “Everyone is subject to the Constitution. No, you cannot cross the line,” Eisen said. Giving a president absolute immunity “would be a dictatorship.”

Former officials in Republican administrations filed an amicus brief in the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, arguing the immunity idea was “absurd,” “dangerous” and would remove the guardrails from one of the most powerful people on Earth. “The Constitution does not confer any kind of immunity upon former Presidents for conduct that violates the criminal laws of the United States and instead contemplates that a former President might be prosecuted for crimes committed in office,” they wrote.