According to Allen Dershowitz, who was clearly missing on the day the senate decided not to have any witnesses or documents at trump’s impeachment trial,

“Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest. And if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind of quid pro quo that results in impeachment.” 

The complication with this idea is the assumption that, unless otherwise proven, a sitting president’s motivation for running for reelection is pure, possibly misguided and wrong, but innocent regardless what is done.

Of the 44 previous presidents, only three did not run for reelection.

Chester Arthur, who became president upon the assassination of James Garfield, may have wanted to run, but his party saw his reforms a little too costly for the power brokers, especially the Pendleton Act, a civil service reform measure that awarded positions based on merit instead of patronage. The Republican Party ran someone else when his first term ended.

Regardless what he might have thought about his presidency being for the public good, others thought differently.

James Polk made the promise when he ran for president that he would only serve one term, and then went on to reduce tariffs, reestablished an independent treasury, acquire California from Mexico, and annex Oregon. He was a very effective one term president who had obviously worked for the public interest.

And finally in modern history, there is Lyndon Baines Johnson.

LBJ became president because of the assassination of John Kennedy, and completed less than half of John F. Kennedy’s term. Because of this, he was eligible to run for two terms on his own right. He was a very politically ambitious man who had wanted to be president since he was young.

When he ran in 1964 for his own first term, he won against Barry Goldwater in a landslide.

During his first full term, the Vietnam War had gone out of control, and the war to contain Communist expansion in South East Asia became an unwinnable war with half a million troops fighting it.

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He was being challenged by Democrat Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota running on an antiwar platform and Senator Robert F. Kennedy of New York.

Johnson could have run for reelection claiming what he was doing was in the public interest, but saw that the war was the proverbial albatross around his neck.

On March 31, 1968, at the end of a televised speech he announced, much to the surprise even of his own speech writers,

“I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your president.”

Without the need to face reelection he could devote his full time and energy to trying to wrap up the war and get the troops home.

He could have run again claiming what he was doing was for the public interest, but he recognized and acknowledged that the public decides what is the public interest, not the politicians.

Is it really possible that out of the remaining 41 presidents, 42 if you include Trump, the motivation to run for reelection was anything but what was best for the public interest with no other regardless whether or not there was also some selfish reasons?

George H.W. Bush, Jimmy Carter Gerald Ford, Herbert Hoover, William Howard Taft, Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, Martin Van Buren, John Quincy Adams, John Adams lost their bids for reelection. Surely, they believed their desire was in the public interest, but did not break laws or violate the Constitution in their attempt to get reelected.

And who justifies that what the president does to get reelected is for the public interest?

Who defines the public interest and who assesses if that definition is more than self serving?

Certainly Johnson could not have been the only honest politician and the only one whose reelection would not have been in the public interest.