“Imagine if our president had leveraged his role as commander in chief to convince a foreign power to open an investigation into his political opponent. Imagine if the president’s rival lost the primary because news broke that he was under investigation. When Republicans suggest that Trump did nothing wrong, what message does that impunity send to Trump and to future presidents? The third thought experiment is simple: What if Trump weren’t president, but was like almost any other person in America? We all recognize that no school official or other person in a government bureaucracy should use public power for private benefit.

Source: New York Times January 25, 2020 19:30 UTC