April 25, 2024, 12:44 p.m. ET

Alan Feuer

Reporting on the criminal cases against Donald J. Trump 

Looking back, one of the main points of discussion turned on the question of which situation would be worse: a world in which presidents, shorn of any legal protections against prosecution, were ceaselessly pursued in the courts by their rivals in a never-ending cycle of political retribution, or allowing presidents to be unbounded by criminal law and permitted to 

do whatever they wanted with impunity.

Yes. It was an exercise in other-world imagining.