Trump Now Has ‘Carte Blanche to Do Unspeakable Things’
The combination of recent Supreme Court rulings on presidential power with the Democratic Party’s nomination crisis in the wake of Joe Biden’s disastrous debate performance has significantly improved Donald Trump’s prospects — not only his odds of once again becoming president, but also of enacting a sweeping authoritarian agenda.
Trump’s debt to the six-member conservative majority on the Supreme Court is twofold.
First, their delay. By waiting until the last day of the court’s term to issue their decision on Trump’s immunity claims, the justices effectively prevented prosecution of federal criminal charges against him before the election.
“By shielding Donald Trump from standing trial before a jury in two of his felony cases,” Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO, writes in a post on his Substack, Tipping the Scales, “Trump’s three appointments to the Supreme Court, along with the even more MAGA Justices Alito and Thomas and Judge Aileen Cannon, have already irreparably interfered in the 2024 election.”
Second, the substance of the July 1 ruling in Trump v. United States has convinced Trump and his allies that they will face few legal obstacles if they pursue a radical reconstruction of government — a “second American Revolution,” in the words of one loyalist — if Trump regains the White House on Nov. 5.
“In a sweeping decision that constitutionalizes the modern reality of the imperial presidency, the U.S. Supreme Court has established near-total criminal immunity for Donald Trump’s official acts while he was president,” Noah Feldman, a law professor at Harvard writes in a July 2 Bloomberg column, “Emperor Trump?”
“The Supreme Court has gutted the historic effort to hold Donald Trump legally accountable for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” Feldman goes on to say, pointing out that
At the same time, Trump’s main political adversary, the Democratic Party, is enmeshed in a grim struggle over whether Biden has the cognitive ability to be president for another four years or whether he should withdraw from the race.
