“Is there anything he could do, or anything that could happen, that would make you not vote for him?” CNN anchor Alisyn Camerota asked.
“No,” the panelist, Crystal Arlington, responded.
Camerota then asked: “If he shot someone on Fifth Avenue [in New York City], would you vote for him?”
Panelist Marian Taylor was the first to reply, saying: “You’d have to know why he shot him.”
“Yeah, why did he shoot him?” Arlington interjected, echoing Taylor’s comment.
Panelists also argued that the Democratic-led impeachment inquiry against Trump will “hurt everyone.” One woman lamented that the government “won’t get anything done” because of the impeachment process.
“Most of us are mothers, and we want everyone to work together,” Taylor said after Camerota asked about Republican and Democratic lawmakers’ seeming unwillingness to compromise.
“You’re tired of the divisiveness?” Camerota asked. “We are, we are,” Arlington replied.
Trump infamously said during his presidential campaign in January 2016 that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would stick with him. “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters,” the president said at the time, drawing significant criticism.
Last month, William Consovoy, a lawyer for Trump, argued in court that the president enjoys absolute immunity from prosecution. A judge questioned whether the president would be immune from prosecution even if he shot someone, and the lawyer said that he would.
“What’s your view on the Fifth Avenue example? Local authorities couldn’t investigate? They couldn’t do anything about it?” Judge Denny Chin asked Consovoy during a hearing over whether Manhattan prosecutors can legally subpoena Trump’s tax returns for an ongoing investigation.
Consovoy asserted that while a president is in office, he cannot be prosecuted and nothing can be done.
Chin and the other three justices on the appeals panel of the federal circuit court in New York disagreed, ruling unanimously that Manhattan prosecutors could subpoena the president’s tax returns. “Any presidential immunity from state criminal process does not extend to investigative steps like the grand jury subpoena at issue here,” the panel wrote in their ruling.
Trump’s legal team will now appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.