I have badly underestimated Donald Trump. Thursday was the day that his justices it turns out that they are indeed his justices on the Supreme Court, just as he claimed got it through my thick head: Trump is not just competent but masterful. He is not just capable, he is supreme.
~snip~
Crime is a largely private endeavor. Corruption is public. It seeps into the muscle and sinew of democratic society and institutions; it devours from within. The Supreme Court, drunk on arrogated power, cut loose from rudimentary ethics, has been eaten alive by it. But the court is just one plot of a vast terrain that Trump has conquered not with crime, but corruption.
~snip~
Trump has already succeeded at corrupting much of whats corruptible. Government. Elections. Foreign policy. Democracy. Religion. Above all, people, and mostly men. Truckloads, boatloads, tiki-torch-parade-loads, courtloads of weak men all standing in the shadow that Trump casts.
~snip~
But it was the Republican Supreme Court mostly men again that put the shiv a little deeper in democracys back this week. Originalists or textualists, all sounded more or less Trumpist as they seriously entertained Trumps argument that his assaults on the constitutional order are protected by the Constitution itself. There is no way to make honest sense of such a liars mash. But Larry, Moe and Curly arent just chairing committees in Congress. They wear robes and furrowed brows now, too. And they seem eager to pretend that crimes are just constitutional exercises of power, and that one ex-president is a king.