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Though a career journalist, I sometimes do theatrical one-man shows where I often tell jokes. When I do, I would prefer to kill.

It depends on my jokes, but killing could be seen as a constitutionally-protected right under the First Amendment.

Donald Trump wants the Constitution to protect him too. But he doesn’t joke.

Well, the former president may have been joking when he said in 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?”

Good thing I prefer First Avenue.

But Trump is not joking now as he seeks total immunity from criminal liability from any official actions as president. It’s convenient too that immunity would skirt a number of the criminal prosecutions Trump currently faces.

His intent became clear only last Tuesday when Trump appeared before a three-judge panel in the D.C. Court of Appeals, the second highest court in the land.

If Donald Trump wasn’t joking around about immunity, neither were the judges, who showed their skepticism at his claim that a former president could not be prosecuted for anything he did as “an official duty.”

It took a probing question from federal circuit judge Florence Y. Pan to make it all crystal clear.

Pan, born in New York City, the child of immigrant parents from Taiwan, has something in common with Trump. She went to Penn’s Wharton School. But unlike Trump, Pan graduated double summa, then went to work for Goldman Sachs. Something must have happened there because she decided to switch gears and pursue law. She found a love for truth and justice? Pan went to Stanford Law School and has had a successful career that reached a zenith in 2021. That’s when President Joe Biden picked Pan to fill the old job of Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom Biden had nominated to the Supreme Court of the United States.

All this is to say, Pan knows her stuff.

It was Pan who asked Trump attorney D. John Sauer the question that suddenly snapped America back into the realm of common sense.

“Could a president order Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? That’s an official act. An order to Seal Team 6,” said Pan in a hypothetical I can’t believe has ever been asked in such a high-level hearing in U.S. history.

Trump lawyer Sauer responded: “He would have to be and would speedily be impeached and convicted before the criminal prosecution.”

Pan pressed on that: “But if he weren’t, there would be no criminal prosecution or criminal liability for that?”

Sauer hemmed and hawed about the chief justice, the Constitution, and the impeachment clause.

But Pan wanted to get to the truth and politely but firmly cut to the chase: “I asked you a yes or no question. Could a president who ordered Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, who was not impeached, could he be subject to criminal prosecution?”

Sauer responded: “If he were impeached and convicted first.”

“So your answer is a no?” Pan asked.

“My answer is a qualified yes,” said Sauer.

What is a “qualified yes”? A shameful way of saying no.

At that point, rational people, and hopefully all voters, understood what Trump was doing.

Can a president get rid of political opponents by killing legally? The question isn’t really all that hypothetical—for a dictator.

Some die-hard MAGA types would insist, “Well, the president is the commander-in-chief of the military, and we have to protect our democracy!”

But sane folks may begin to see that a second-term Trump imagines himself as an authoritarian ruler of a perverted democracy like our former colony, the Philippines. That’s where former Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte has admitted to extrajudicial killings in a government war on drugs as “his only sin.”

Human rights advocates say the number of those killings under Duterte’s reign exceeds 12,000. One of his arrested political opponents said it was nearly 30,000. Duterte is no longer in office but has yet to be held to account.

And what would Trump--the man who said, he’d only be a dictator on day one--say, if given absolute immunity?

That he’d only kill when absolutely necessary? And just a couple, or a few dozen. Not thousands.

On Thursday, another one of Trump’s lawyers, Alina Habba, went on right-wing talk shows defending Trump saying, “He didn’t kill anyone.”

Well, not yet.

But Judge Pan’s questioning should set off the alarms for all, Democrats and Republicans alike. If the court rules for Trump and gives U.S. presidents absolute criminal immunity, it would certainly change the phrase, “no man is above the law.”

Clearly, one would be.

Immunity for presidential actions? That would be a license to kill our democracy.

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NOTE: I will talk about this column and other matters on “Emil Amok’s Takeout,” my AAPI micro-talk show. Live @2p Pacific. Livestream on Facebook; my YouTube channel; and Twitter. Catch the recordings on www.amok.com.