Susan Glasser: King Donald's Day at the Supreme Court

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/king-donalds-day-at-the-supreme-court

No paywall link
https://archive.li/mZmXf

Donald Trump is nothing if not a dreamer. In seeking to return to the Presidency, it’s as though he has reimagined America as a kingdom and himself the king, an absolute ruler whose actions, no matter how sordid, cannot be stopped or subject to prosecution in a court of law. And yet what remains most remarkable is how far down the road to fulfilling this fantasy he now is, and how many millions of Americans he has managed to carry along with him: the Republican primary voters who, overwhelmingly, chose him again as their party’s nominee; the Republican officials, such as former Attorney General Bill Barr, who, despite condemning Trump for calling forth violence and illegality in his effort to overturn the 2020 election, are nevertheless endorsing him this year; the advocates on and off his payroll who say that a federal criminal case against him must be thrown out because, as President, he had every right to seek to overturn the election. This is the Richard Nixon theory of the executive taken to its circular and oh-so-Trumpian extreme: if the President does it, by definition, it is not illegal. “I have the right to do whatever I want as President,” Trump said when he was in the White House.

On Thursday, Trump’s legal team asked the Supreme Court to take this both literally and seriously, advancing his fantastical claims about an unfettered Presidency in oral arguments at the Court, where, alarmingly, they received a respectful hearing. So here we are in the midst of this most consequential election year, debating things such as whether a President has the power to accept bribes for official appointments, to sell nuclear secrets to a foreign adversary, or even to call forth a military coup to remain in office. How is it possible in the United States of America that the answer to any of these questions could be yes? And, yet, strip out the hemming and hawing, the polite citations of Marbury v. Madison and the sayings of Benjamin Franklin, and the answer from Trump’s lawyer to all of the above was more or less: Yes.

In a remarkable dialogue with that lawyer, D. John Sauer, Justice Sonia Sotomayor established that Trump believes he should even have the right to order the assassination of a political opponent without fear of prosecution. Yup, we’ve reached the point of the election year where Trump’s lawyer says it’d be O.K. if Trump were to order a hit job on a rival—and is not immediately laughed out of court. The claims advanced by Sauer on behalf of the most powerful man in the world were so sweeping that, eventually, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was left to wonder “what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into the seat of criminal activity in this country.”

It says everything about Trump that these are the questions debated and dissected on his behalf. It says everything about this Supreme Court—a radical right-wing bench that Trump reshaped with his appointments—that several conservative Justices hardly seemed bothered by this absolutist vision of the Presidency. And yet, notably, I did not hear any of them specifically defend Trump’s indefensible conduct or the tremendous overreach recommended by his lawyer; instead, they invoked fears of unwarranted prosecutions against other former Presidents—not this one, they insisted somewhat sanctimoniously, but unnamed others. “I’m not talking about the present case,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said. “I’m talking about the future.” Justice Neil Gorsuch agreed, stressing this was not so much about Trump as it was about debating “a ruling for the ages.”

*snip*