July 2024 – The Tarbabys Blog

There Is Apparently No Accountability — Ever — for Donald Trump

The New York Times – Opinion

There Is Apparently No Accountability — Ever — for Donald Trump

By Frank Bruni – July 4, 2024

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

An illustration depicting the silhouettes of Donald Trump surfing on a crowd in a blue dumpster against an orange background. — Credit…Ben Wiseman

We tell children — or at least we used to — that actions have consequences. What goes around comes around. Watch your behavior. You’ll answer for it someday.

Donald Trump is the living, lying contradiction of that.

He answers for nothing. He’s accountable to no one.

You thought that changed with a Manhattan jury’s verdict five weeks ago? With “guilty” on all 34 counts? How adorable. That only bound most of his supporters even closer to him. Only amplified the theatrical ardor with which Republican politicians pledged their devotion. Only increased donations to his presidential campaign.

Oh, and his sentencing has now been delayed and the conviction itself thrown into doubt, thanks to a supremely reckless Supreme Court.

Immunity, thy name is Trump.

The House of Representatives impeached him twice, but a cabal of collaborators in the Senate chose tribalism over justice and made it all go away. They said that it was up to others to decide if he’d committed crimes, up to others to punish him for those. It was up to them to get re-elected.

The voters repudiated Trump, but he simply pretended it hadn’t happened. He invented dark conspiracies and embroidered wild fantasies to turn defeat — by seven million votes, no less — into supposed victory. Into full-blown martyrdom. He cried “rigged,” he cried “stolen,” he stood by as a mob stormed the Capitol and stood mute as it chanted for his vice president to be hanged. For that ethical savagery the members of his political party lined up dutifully behind him once again. David Koresh never knew loyalty like this.

Trump schemed to steal the election himself. Prosecutors rightly charged him for that. But he has lawyers upon lawyers. He has gall atop gall. He has Fox News, Newsmax, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon. He has that rogue Supreme Court stacked in his favor, thanks to his and Mitch McConnell’s brazen stacking of it. Its justices have kicked the can so far down the road that it has tumbled into a different galaxy, a different cosmos, one where there’s no moral gravity, where transgressions vanish and worries disappear with the abracadabra of executive privilege.

Trump’s unpopularity with most voters should be a much bigger obstacle for him and a much bigger opportunity for Democrats than it is. Time worked in his favor, as it has so often in the past. It stiffened his political rival’s gait. Weakened his political rival’s voice. President Biden can’t answer Trump’s outrages with optimal passion, ideal precision, laser-guided disdain. He’s Trump’s better in decency, many times over. He’s Trump’s lesser in lung power, and in an age of invective, that matters.

Creditors left in the lurch. Accomplices left holding the bag. (Here’s looking at you, Rudy Giuliani.) Spurned associates. Appeals and delays and delays and appeals. Attorney General Letitia James of New York won her fraud case against Trump, but it doesn’t seem to have hobbled him at all. It’s seldom even mentioned anymore. E. Jean Carroll won her sexual abuse and defamation case. He swaggered (and slandered) on.

Trump has made a career of evasion. No, he has made a legend of it. And while there’s a kind of smarts and a sort of skill in that, it owes more to luck than to brilliance. It owes the most to the perverse freedom that comes with a total lack of conscience — with the readiness to stoke people’s darkest fears and cruelest impulses, to shrug at the damage done, to bilk charities, to run a sham university, to tell little lies, to tell big ones, to place self-promotion and self-preservation so far above everything else that they’re not so much his guiding values as his only ones.

All of that has gone around. When exactly is it coming around?

Perhaps we owe children a new adage, as oversimplified as the ones with which I began but no less true: The shameless shall inherit the earth, while the blameless grapple with the mess they make of it.

The Long Trump Tease

The wait for Donald Trump’s announcement of a running mate will apparently continue into next week.

Let’s not pretend for a second that this is a normal process.

I don’t mean Trump’s hyping of the suspense, as if he’s engaged in some reality-show reveal. I mean this: Whoever is willing to be considered has made that decision despite Trump’s attempt after the 2020 election to get Mike Pence, his vice president the first time around, to ignore the will of American voters and violate the Constitution. Despite Trump’s reported equanimity with calls for Pence’s execution. That bespeaks not only a perilously high tolerance for risk but also a rapacity for power at odds with responsibly wielding it. Which is to say that the reputed finalists for the Republican vice presidential nomination complement Trump beautifully.

But the argument for many of them ends there. J.D. Vance? His singular mix of contemptuousness and smarm should be patented — and then promptly outlawed. Doug Burgum? Proof that plutocrats can be as dull as the rest of us. Tim Scott? An unctuous blur. Tom Cotton? He scares small children and many forest animals.

Keep an eye on Marco Rubio. Sure, he’d have to resign his Senate seat and establish a primary residence somewhere other than Florida to join the ticket, but that’s nothing compared to stepping into Pence’s old cement shoes. And while it took Rubio a while, he has now traveled — now completed — the modern Republican arc from being appalled by Trump to being in thrall to him.

For the Love of Sentences

In The New Yorker, Susan B. Glasser reflected on a micro-tussle toward the end of last Thursday night’s presidential debate: “Is this how democracy dies, in a shouting match between two seniors about their golf game?” (Thanks to Mike Greenwald of Melville, N.Y., for nominating this.)

In The Connecticut Post, Colin McEnroe pondered the president’s proper course: “I’m guardedly a ‘replace him’ guy. Some of you may recall that in 2019, I compared Biden to a Subaru with 310,000 miles on the odometer. ‘America has gotten a lot of use out of Joe Biden, and now it’s time to leave him by the side of the road, unscrew the plates, and walk away,’ I wrote. I was wrong … ish. He turned out to have deeper treads and more left in his tank than I had supposed. But Thursday night was 90 minutes of the ‘check engine’ light flashing desperately in the darkness.” (Holly Franquet, Fairfield, Conn.)

In The Times, Maureen Dowd acknowledged Biden’s gracious response to her tough coverage of him over the years: “He was so un-vengeful, I doubted he was Irish.” (Nancy Jackson, Taos, N.M., and Peter J. Geisser, Cranston, R.I., among others)

In The Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan evaluated Americans’ attitudes toward NATO over time (and worked in a reference to a recent movie directed by and starring Jerry Seinfeld): “From age to age, a new generation of supporters must be rallied, and that is becoming the 13th labor of Hercules. If the thudding disappointment of ‘Unfrosted’ taught us anything, it’s that young people hate boomer nostalgia. And NATO is the rotary phone of geopolitical alliances.” (Richard Reams, San Antonio)

To return to The Times, Rory Smith explained the hubbub in Britain over the soccer commentator Gary Lineker’s uncharacteristically negative appraisal of England’s performance in the Euro2024 tournament: “To the public, Lineker is supposed to be the embodiment of neutrality. Hearing him be so scathing is akin to seeing David Attenborough pummel a dolphin.” (Ian Wallace, Wilmington, Del.)

Margaret Lyons appraised a beloved television show. “‘The Bear’ has an arms-length relationship to sex and romance, and that was one of its zestiest calling cards in Season 1: plenty of knifing, but no forking or spooning,” she wrote. (Jonathan Gerard, Durham, N.C., and Lee Burdette Williams, Mystic, Conn., among others)

And Margaret Renkl connected her concerns about fireworks to her concerns about America: “The conflation of selfishness with patriotism is the thing I have the hardest time accepting about our political era. Maybe we have the right to eat a hamburger or drive the biggest truck on the market or fire off bottle rockets deep into the night on the Fourth of July, but it doesn’t make us good Americans to do such things. How can it possibly be ‘American’ to look at the damage that fireworks can cause — to the atmosphere, to forests, to wildlife, to our own beloved pets, to ourselves — and shrug?” (George Fero Jr., Chicago)

On a Personal Note

A reader wrote to me a few weeks ago to describe her recent vision loss and to ask for my advice — based on my own, somewhat similar situation — about how best to cope. She’d both read and listened to my memoir on the topic, “The Beauty of Dusk,” but she wondered if I had more to say.

I guess I do, if only because three years have passed since I finished that book. I’ve had additional experiences and reflections.

By her account, her eyesight is much more gravely diminished than mine, raising questions about the work she can and cannot continue to do. I’m hugely blessed — while I need to pace myself carefully and devote extra time and effort to tasks that I once accomplished with relative ease, my professional life remains much the same. So I offer the following observations humbly, knowing that some of them may have wide application and some not.

I cut myself more slack than I used to. I forgive myself for small mistakes (typos related to the sporadic blurring of my vision), medium-size hiccups (the occasional need to request a deadline extension) and what can feel like discourtesy (emails unanswered and invitations declined because of the limits of my focus and energy).

And I resolve, as best as possible, to see that permission as its own kind of gift. Throwing off the yoke of perfectionism or its lesser kinfolk can be liberating. It doesn’t compensate for loss, but it helps enormously with the adjustment to it. There are people who slow down voluntarily; I’ve slowed down involuntarily. That still leaves me in a place not wholly unlike theirs.

Also? I let myself get mad — at judiciously staggered intervals, in rigidly contained increments. I pounded my desk just the other day because the words on my screen began to shimmy and the words on the printouts that I’d made in case that happened were doing their own ugly dance. That necessitated a half-hour break that I didn’t think I could afford. Not fair!

So I seethed, not for a few seconds but for several long minutes, rationalizing that I couldn’t make more productive use of the time and then realizing that this was productive use of the time. It was a warranted exhalation of frustration, a worthwhile release of pressure. I was a laptop shutting down and rebooting. I was a drain being unclogged.

And then I was OK, or at least OK enough for a new keystroke, and then a keystroke after that. One foot in front of the other. It’s the strategy for any journey, slow or fast, long or short.

More in Opinion

Opinion: Why I Won’t Vote

Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book “The Age of Grievance” and a contributing Opinion writer.

Loving America Means Expecting More From It

The New York Times – Guest Opinion

Loving America Means Expecting More From It

By Esau McCaulley – July 4, 2024

An illustration of a man opening a door onto a barbecue, with stars in the sky. — Credit…María Jesús Contreras

Patriotism did not bring my grandfather to the Army recruiter’s office in 1956. Poverty did. A youth spent picking cotton and working odd jobs to help feed his family meant that he was a good way from graduating from high school as his 18th birthday approached. He wanted a better life for himself and saw the Army as a way to make it happen.

He ended up staying three years beyond his initial three-year commitment. A sepia-toned photograph of him in his uniform still hangs proudly in his bedroom in Huntsville, Ala.

For my grandfather, military life was not without challenges. He recalls that he and other Black soldiers were consistently addressed as “boys” until he stood up to his commanding officer and told him that there were nothing but men in their unit. After this tense and even dangerous exchange, the officer addressed them respectfully — a small triumph that my grandfather never forgot.

I asked him why he continued on and he replied, “I guess I loved America more than I thought. I definitely liked it more than Russia.”

The military was the first integrated space he encountered. “We served together, marched together, slept in the same barracks and learned to respect each other,” he said. During his six years of service, he finished high school and took extra classes. He returned to civilian life equipped with certifications to be a fireman, a merchant seaman and a bookkeeper. But in Alabama in the 1960s no one would hire him to do any of those things. His first job was as a janitor.

My grandfather’s feelings about America are by turns fond and critical. He loved his unit and the moments when the white men he served with treated him as an equal. He also laments those times when he wasn’t, especially in the civilian years that followed. Now, at age 86, he gets animated talking about how he never got to be a fireman.

His story embodies America’s great contradiction of being both a land of opportunity and one that hinders it at too many turns.

To my children, he is almost a mythic figure who climbed out of American history books. Despite all that he became — he opened his own music store in the 1990s — he cannot help but think he could have been even more.

He is my kids’ connection to a past they do not quite understand.

My children are not the only ones who do not know what to do with my grandfather’s story or his complex form of patriotism that holds tight to affection despite a deep sense of betrayal.

In this country we have come to see patriotism as a positive account of our history that treads lightly upon the nation’s sins. The Fourth of July in particular is a time to wrap ourselves in the flag, grill some meat and run through a playlist of songs with lyrics lauding Americana. Talking about slavery, Jim Crow, economic exploitation and what happened to Black soldiers after they finished their service ruins the vibes.

It costs nothing to sing along to “God Bless America.” It requires much more to believe in a place that has failed you.

As an African American who speaks on anti-Black racism, I often hear the refrain, “If you hate America so much, you should leave.” But I don’t recount my grandfather’s story because I hate America. I tell it because to omit stories like his would only hinder us from becoming a better country. On the other side of honesty is the possibility of change. For me, telling the truth is the most hopeful form of patriotism.

Too often we worry that if we tell our children about our complex and sometimes dark history, their response will be debilitating shame. But instead of lying to our youth, we can give them a task that demands the best of them. We can call upon them to close the often-gaping chasm between our ideals and practices. This is the gift the past offers us, a chance to flee old evils and pursue new goods.

It is not enough to imagine ourselves riding down the road with Paul Revere shouting warnings about redcoats or nestled on the boats preparing to storm the beaches of Normandy. We must note that the liberty Revere helped win was for some Americans, not all. We must recognize that the African Americans who risked their lives on that beach in France returned to a racially segregated country in which they were the targets of lynching.

This year, my mother’s side of the family will host a reunion on July 4 weekend. We will grill and set off fireworks like everyone else. We might even listen to Marvin Gaye’s or Whitney Houston’s rendition of the national anthem while we wait for the meat to finish cooking.

There will also be criticism of this country, especially since it’s an election season. That will not be all we have to say. We’ll talk about the long journey of my family from the plantation to the present freedoms we enjoy. That story contains its own mix of tragedy and triumph. We’ll speak of my grandfather’s service along with that of his father and two of his uncles, all three of which fought in World War II. In my generation, a cousin also served.

These emotions of love, pride and regret can reside in the same heart. It is the truest form of patriotism, a love that isn’t complacent, one that demands more than crumbs from justice’s table.

More on patriotism:

‘The Argument’, The Complex Truth About American Patriotism – Feb. 23, 2022

David Brooks: How to Love America – March 4, 2021

Esau McCaulley: Frederick Douglass Knew What False Patriotism Was – July 3, 2023

Esau McCaulley is a contributing Opinion writer and the author of “How Far to the Promised Land: One Black Family’s Story of Hope and Survival in the American South” and the children’s book “Andy Johnson and the March for Justice.” He is an associate professor of New Testament and public theology at Wheaton College.

Your Religious Values Are Not American Values

The New York Times – Opinion

Your Religious Values Are Not American Values

By Pamala Paul, Opinion Columnist – July 4, 2024

A photo illustration of a religious icon wearing a U.S. flag as a shirt. — Credit…Illustration by Carl Godfrey

Whenever a politician cites “Judeo-Christian values,” I find it’s generally followed by something unsettling.

Last month brought two flagrant instances. In both cases, Republican officials introduced state laws that formalize precepts of the Christian nationalist movement — in the words of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers (A.D. 2019), “doing everything we can to restore the Judeo-Christian foundation of our nation.”

On June 19, Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana signed legislation requiring public classrooms to display the Ten Commandments, a practice struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 1980. A rich endorsement came via Donald Trump, who crowed, “I LOVE THE TEN COMMANDMENTS IN PUBLIC SCHOOLS, PRIVATE SCHOOLS, AND MANY OTHER PLACES, FOR THAT MATTER. READ IT — HOW CAN WE, AS A NATION, GO WRONG???”

One week later, Landry’s fellow Christian soldier Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s superintendent of public instruction, announced plans to mandate teaching the Bible in public schools. Walters said learning the Bible is necessary to having “an understanding of the basis of our legal system.”

Forgive me for wondering: Is he referring to “an eye for an eye” or the stoning of disobedient children?

Either way, for both Trump and true believers, it hardly matters that the First Amendment was intended to protect religion from the state, not to have the state impose a religion. (So much for originalism.) Their goal is to impose one form of religion, Christianity, and the underlying message is that those who do not share it will have to submit.

Not only have such moves been declared unconstitutional (“I can’t wait to be sued,” Landry said), but they are also exclusionary and offensive to many.

Despite what the Christian nationalist movement would have you believe, America was not founded as a Christian nation. Nor is it one today. In a pluralistic country, neither the Bible nor Judeo-Christian values are universal, including in the two heavily Christian Southern states in which these laws were passed.

In Louisiana, for example, 2 percent of residents are adherents of other faiths — including Islam, Buddhism, Judaism and Hinduism. Thirteen percent are religious nones, including 4 percent who are atheist or agnostic. In Oklahoma, a similar percentage follow non-Christian religions, and an even larger portion — 18 percent — adhere to no religion.

In a suit challenging the Louisiana law, Americans United for Separation of Church and State noted that among the state’s approximately 680,000 students, many do not practice any religion at all. In response, Landry called on his followers to “stand up for Judeo-Christian values.”

While most of the Ten Commandments involve universal principles, and moral precepts can be found in the Bible, not everyone draws ethical guidelines from religion. And when the Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” the implication is that there is one true god. That is decidedly not true for all Americans. Some atheists and secular humanists embrace the ideal put forth by Felix Adler, the founder of the Society for Ethical Culture, of deed before creed — that how we act is far more important than what we profess to believe.

Politicians, many of whom regularly flout Adler’s ideal, rarely bother to include nonbelievers — those of us who are not what politicians refer to as people of faith — in their supposedly inclusive rhetoric. This is where leaders of both parties, with their public prayers and displays of religiosity, typically alienate people like me whose principles do not stem from belief in a god. Barack Obama was an exception in including people “with no faith at all,” though I would have preferred a more elegant phrasing. Many of us rationalists do have faith, but it’s in science or humanity, as disappointing as humanity can be.

When it comes to the Ten Commandments, four of the 10 (three if you’re Catholic) concern a specific form of worship with a specific god. I’m on board with a rule against killing, for instance, but somehow this god has given a lot of killing a pass in his name.

And there’s a lot to explain in the Bible itself if you believe it’s a holy book — like its acceptance of slavery.

For me, the Bible’s primary interest is in its historical and literary influence, a work whose stories and metaphors have permeated literature. But it’s also one that, throughout history, has inspired and abetted many of the world’s most violent and deadly wars.

In their drive to foist their religious beliefs on others or to prove their conservative Christian bona fides, Republicans are leaning harder into exclusionary territory. Prominent and mainstream Republicans increasingly support the tenets of the Christian nationalist movement, which often embeds antisemitism and anti-Muslim views into its creed. And it is probably no coincidence that this is occurring as many Christians are fleeing their religion — many, no doubt, because of the hypocrisy and intolerance they’ve witnessed.

In ordinary times, all this would be quickly swatted away by the courts. Unfortunately, the conservative majority of the Supreme Court has demonstrated that, like many Republican politicians, when it comes to freedom of religion — and yes, that must include freedom from religion — those justices are willing to put their own faith above all else.

This Fourth of July, let’s bear in mind that what many Americans value in this country is its inclusion and protection of all, regardless of their beliefs.

Forcing Biden Out Would Have Only One Beneficiary: Trump

The New York Times – Opinion

Forcing Biden Out Would Have Only One Beneficiary: Trump

By Charles M. Blow, Opinion Columnist – July 3, 2024

Donald Trump, wearing a red MAGA hat, stands at a podium in front of rally attendees, holding out his hand. — Credit…Tom Brenner for The New York Times

Joe Biden refuses to drop out of the presidential race even as some liberals, rattled by the incumbent’s frightening debate performance last week, keep pressuring him to do so.

Who’s surprised by that?

The inertia of a presidential campaign is one of the most powerful forces in politics. Ending one after a party’s nomination has been secured is almost unfathomable. The candidate is already strapped to the rocket.

Furthermore, all serious presidential contenders, particularly those who hold or have already held the office — this year, we have both — have a God complex. They must. And doubt doesn’t exist in the presence of God. There are throngs of advisers, boosters and confidants around Biden to keep that doubt at bay; to introduce it is blasphemy.

Biden can’t be forced out of the race; he would have to be persuaded to leave it. And that eventuality, while not impossible, lives next door to “Never!”

And Biden staying the course may be the best course.

The American University historian Allan Lichtman, a prescient predictor of presidential election results, told me on Sunday that pushing Biden out of the race would be a “tragic mistake for the Democrats,” because he believes that the president remains his party’s best chance at winning the election.

As for the alternatives, Lichtman adds, “It’s not as if there’s some, you know, J.F.K. out there just waiting to jump on the white horse and save the Democratic Party.”

I agree with him: There are no potential replacements that would stand a better chance of defeating Donald Trump than Biden.

Yes, a CNN-SSRS poll conducted in the days after the debate found that Vice President Kamala Harris performed slightly better than Biden against Trump, within the margin of error but still trailing. (But note that a brand-new Reuters-Ipsos poll found that only one-third of Democrats think Biden should exit.)

If Biden were replaced, yes, Harris would be Democrats’ safest option. But approval ratings and standings in one poll before she becomes the actual candidate could be a bit of a mirage.

During stretches of Hillary Clinton’s time in the Senate and her tenure as secretary of State she enjoyed solid approval ratings, but when she ran for president against Trump, her approval numbers gradually diminished.

There were lots of reasons for this, and one of them, I am convinced, is the patriarchal nature of our society. That would likely be revisited for Harris, only this time amplified by patriarchy’s twin evil: racism.

Harris is competent and capable, regardless of what her needling detractors suggest, but unfortunately, I do not believe that she is more electable than Biden in the current climate.

Yet if Biden did stand aside and Harris was passed over in favor of another candidate, there would very likely be strong protest from her legions of Democratic supporters, many of them Black women, a voting bloc that is essential to a Democratic victory.

On top of that, a free-for-all selection process would be sheer chaos. Factions would fiercely compete, egos would be bruised and convention delegates would select a candidate, effectively bypassing direct participation by Democratic voters.

This would all play out just a few months before Election Day, and opposition researchers would have a field day vetting the list of probable Democratic alternatives, several of whom are governors with only regional name recognition, increasing the possibility of a devastating October surprise.

To be clear: I’m not saying that Biden should continue to run because an eventual victory is assured. It isn’t. He was struggling before the debate kerfuffle and will continue to struggle if he survives it.

Trump’s support has gelled while Biden’s has frayed. Many Americans haven’t felt the benefits of what is a structurally sound Biden economy, and the young, activist portion of the Democratic base is angry about Biden’s handling of the war in Gaza.

I, like many others, wish Biden hadn’t sought a second term. I wish that the Democratic nominee was a young visionary with verve.

But retrospective wishing is worthless.

Biden is the Democratic candidate. He’s the only person standing between us and Trump’s destructive, retributive impulses and the ever-increasing latitude that the Supreme Court has granted him.

The fact that an 81-year-old is increasingly showing signs of being an 81-year-old doesn’t panic me; what Trump has signaled he’ll do with another term does.

There’s another way that calls for Biden’s withdrawal could backfire on liberals. One of my favorite TV lines comes from Omar on “The Wire,” paraphrasing Emerson: “You come at the king, you best not miss.” A failed attempt to usurp a man in power risks his vengeance.

But I’ve been thinking of that line in another way as it relates to Biden. By building a case for Biden’s incapacity and his need for capitulation — without convincing him of the same — liberals risk further wounding their standard-bearer and increasing the probability of the thing they most desperately seek to avoid: Trump’s re-election.

And if Biden should decide to leave the race, as The Times reported on Wednesday that he is considering, his withdrawal would only add credence to the idea that some Democrats had, in effect, conspired to conceal a disqualifying impairment and only changed course when forced. The taint of this would linger over the party and any replacement candidate.

Instead of clearing the way for victory, liberals may well be paving the way for defeat.

Opinion | The Supreme Court has signed off on a Trump takeover of the DOJ

MSNBC – Opinion

The Supreme Court has signed off on a Trump takeover of the DOJ

Hayes Brown – July 3, 2024

In the process of granting former President Donald Trump immunity for at least some of his actions between Election Day 2020 and Jan. 6, 2021, the Supreme Court’s sweeping decision also provided a stamp of approval for one of the most dangerous parts of Trump’s second-term agenda: payback. In doing so, the justices rolled back one of the key post-Watergate reforms preventing presidents from abusing their vast power, freeing Trump, if he’s re-elected, to use the Department of Justice as his personal weapon.

The scheme Trump and his allies cooked up in 2020 involved enlisting the Justice Department to give their lies about widespread election fraud an official patina. Then-Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark drafted a letter to send to several states, including Georgia, that would falsely claim that “various irregularities” existed that cast those states’ election results into doubt. Had it been sent, the letter would have encouraged those state legislatures to convene special sessions to “investigate” and potentially send to Congress slates flipping the states’ Electoral College votes to Trump.

When the acting attorney general refused to send the letter, Trump threatened to fire him and replace him with Clark. He yielded only when a slew of top Justice Department officials promised to resign in protest. Apparently, though, according to the Supreme Court, there was nothing about that chain of events that falls outside the scope of the president’s “official acts.” As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 6-3 opinion, “The President may discuss potential investigations and prosecutions with his Attorney General and other Justice Department officials to carry out his constitutional duty to ‘take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’”

The line seems innocuous compared to some of the other more dumbfounding statements within the decision, but the problem is that it’s written as though there was nothing wrong about the content of those discussions. A few paragraphs later, Roberts clarifies that sentence’s importance in explaining why the pressure campaign against Justice Department officials can’t be used to as part of the federal case against Trump:

Putting those two ideas together effectively signs off on ending the last 50 years of Justice Department independence. The way then-President Richard Nixon and his attorney general, John Mitchell, used and abused the DOJ and other law enforcement bodies to shield Nixon’s allies and harass his enemies was one of the most damaging revelations of Watergate. Following Nixon’s resignation and Mitchell’s eventual prosecution and conviction, subsequent attorneys general have all strived to keep the White House at arm’s length from the day-to-day decisions regarding investigations.

But there were few legislative reforms that safeguarded the Justice Department from being used as a political tool — it has almost entirely been the work of norms and precedents that have cut across administrations. Even Trump’s White House counsel Don McGahn issued a memo at the beginning of his term laying out the firewall between the White House staff and the Justice Department. It’s a standard that Trump’s allies, including Clark, have railed against, making no bones about the fact that, if given the chance, they intend to tear it down entirely.

If that happens, there will be little to prevent Trump from launching his promised revenge campaign against his enemies. Given the leeway Roberts has granted for the president to order even “sham” investigations, anyone could be subject to arbitrary probes, prompting unnecessary (and expensive) legal defenses and social stigma. It’s not absurd to imagine this resulting in the arrest and detention on made-up charges for anyone on the long list of people who’ve earned Trump’s ire.

Conversely, this ruling also seems on its face to allow a president to order an investigation to end for any reason. Under Roberts’ test, there would be no means for a court to assess, for example, whether Trump’s corruptly ordering that a GOP megadonor be beyond Justice Department scrutiny was a criminal violation of the law. Instead, the court’s conservatives have chosen to write this opinion from a worldview that assumes every “official act” taken by the president within his authority is legal and constitutional.

Roberts attempted to give the illusion that opinion was written with anyone but Trump in mind, and in doing so, he obscured how far removed from the average president Trump is. What Roberts frames as a simple declaration of the president’s authorities under the Constitution is now poised to become Trump’s go-ahead to target the political opposition with impunity. Likewise, in granting presidents the broadest benefit of the doubt possible to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed,” the court has all but guaranteed that, if Trump is returned to power, he will do the exact opposite.

How a Patriotic Painting Became the Internet’s Soap Box

The New York Times

How a Patriotic Painting Became the Internet’s Soap Box

“Freedom of Speech,” the World War II-era painting by Norman Rockwell, has taken on a new life online.

By Charles W. McFarlane – July 3, 2024

A painting of a man in a blue plaid shirt and brown jacket standing up mid-speech while men around him, seated and wearing suits, look up toward him. — “Freedom of Speech,” completed in 1943, is among a series of works by the American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell that depicted the “four freedoms” promoted in a Franklin D. Roosevelt speech.Credit…Norman Rockwell Museum Collections; SEPS: Curtis Publishing, Indianapolis

So you have an opinion you want to share online — something you need to get off your chest. Maybe it’s about the current political climate. Maybe you want to have the final word on whether or not people should wear their shoes in the house.

If you know you have a spicy take on your hands, you might look to the American painter and illustrator Norman Rockwell to help you share it. Across social media, his work “Freedom of Speech” appears alongside all manner of strong opinions, from the highly serious to the absurd to the esoteric, enshrining itself into the lingua franca of the internet decades after its creator’s death.

The oil painting, which shows a man dressed in work wear standing and poised to speak amid a crowd of men in suits, is part of a series by Rockwell inspired by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1941 State of the Union address arguing for U.S. involvement in World War II. In his remarks, the president outlined four universal freedoms that Americans should fight to guarantee for all: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want and freedom from fear.

According to the internet encyclopedia Know Your Meme, the painting began showing up in posts on X, then Twitter, in 2020. It wasn’t until two years later, though, that it started spreading widely, first with a post by a user who shared the image with an opinion on shrimp-fried rice (“a shrimp did not fry that rice!”).

Since then, the image has been used to take a stance on divisive personal essays, weigh in on Taylor Swift albums, proselytize the merits of hard-shell tacos and decry the state of professional football.

On the day former President Donald J. Trump was found guilty of 34 felony counts in a New York court, Mary Katharine Ham, a Fox News contributor, posted a picture of the painting with the comment, “jailing your political opponents is bad, actually” — to which the frequent anti-Trump poster Armand Domalewski replied with the same image and the comment, “nobody being above the law is good, actually.”

That the painting has become a hit online isn’t as unlikely as it may seem. Joshua Citarella, an artist in New York who researches online political subcultures, said the artwork had a natural affinity with the social media platform where it has spread.

A stated goal of X is to “give anyone the ability to speak to the crowd and to give a platform to any opinion,” Mr. Citarella said. (Elon Musk and previous chief executives of the platform have called it the “town square” of the internet.) “If one had to illustrate Twitter in an image, it would be very well encapsulated in this very painting,” he added.

But the viral life of “Freedom of Speech” long predates X debates. Stephanie Haboush Plunkett, the deputy director and chief curator of the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Mass., home to the “Four Freedom” paintings, said Rockwell’s oeuvre was intended to distill and quickly spread a mass message.

“Many Americans did not register what the meaning of those freedoms truly were” and found Roosevelt’s speech abstract, Ms. Plunkett said. What Rockwell wanted to do, she continued, “was to try to envision them in a way that a large populace could understand.”

“The Four Freedoms” and Rockwell’s interpretations of them were everywhere in American life in the 1940s. They appeared on covers of The Saturday Evening Post, where Rockwell regularly published his work. The government put them on postage stamps, displayed them in an exhibition as part of its nationwide war-bond drive and printed them on posters that helped raise $133 million for the war effort.

More recently, the paintings were used as inspiration for “Imagining Freedom,” a virtual exhibition at the Rockwell museum that includes many contemporary interpretations of his work, including a piece by the artist Maurice (Pops) Peterson, who in 2015 reimagined “Freedom From Fear” for the Black Lives Matter era.

“We’ve done a fair amount of work in terms of how his imagery has been appropriated, parodied or memed,” said Rich Bradway, the digital innovation officer at the museum.

Mr. Citarella said he had noticed that the “Freedom of Speech” painting was a little bit more popular online “with people who are on the left,” as part of a small but growing trend of memes related to Roosevelt and the New Deal.

The longing for a return to an imagined golden age of liberalism comes as there is a push from some on the right to return to the racial and gender hierarchies of midcentury America. On the left, there seems to be a small effort to “reclaim some of that imagery,” Mr. Citarella said.

“There’s a real push and pull with the semiotic use of this particular image,” he said of “Freedom of Speech.”

But the painting’s effort at universality still seems to resonate with those who share it online.

“Even if you are not a middle-aged white man speaking, people use him to represent themselves,” said Kathryn Winn, the author and editor of the Substack newsletter Memeforum. “There is a neutrality to him in that he’s not making an expression or saying anything beyond ‘This is my opinion.’”

For much of his career, and long after his death, Rockwell was considered “an enemy of modern art,” a “lowly calendar artist” and “a cornball and a square,” according to Deborah Solomon, who published a biography of Rockwell in 2013. But in recent years, Rockwell’s work has fetched tens of millions at auction houses — far exceeding expectations for American paintings — and has been looked on more kindly by some critics.

That Rockwell has been entered into the internet’s canon, too, is “a great way to maintain his presence in the public consciousness,” Ms. Plunkett said. Even if “Freedom of Speech” is largely wielded with irony online, something of its original meaning seems to shine through.

People from “all sides of the political spectrum” may use the painting to express, say, their views on pineapple as a pizza topping, Ms. Winn said. “The meme shows that we value freedom of speech, even at its most stupid, and that’s what Twitter is for.”

The Trump Decision Reveals Deep Rot in the System

The New York Times – Guest Opinion

The Trump Decision Reveals Deep Rot in the System

By Laurence H. Tribe – July 1, 2024

Laurence H. Tribe is a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. Mr. Tribe taught constitutional law at Harvard for 50 years.

In front of the Supreme Court Building, a person holding up a sign reading, “Delay, delay, delay.” — Credit…Damon Winter/The New York Times

On Monday the Supreme Court dispensed with the rule of law by effectively depriving the American people of crucial information we should have had before the November election.

The question before the justices in Trump v. United States: Was Donald Trump immune from prosecution for the crimes the special counsel Jack Smith accused him of committing while president? The answer should have been obvious: No, presidents cannot commit crimes aimed at obstructing the peaceful transfer of power without facing consequences. Indeed, to my knowledge, no court has ever held that a president could be criminally immune under any circumstances.

Instead of delivering that judgment many months ago and allowing the trial to proceed, the justices have given Mr. Trump the gift of delay piled upon delay. By taking nearly 10 weeks to deliberate before returning the case to the district court — and by sending it back not even for immediate trial but for preliminary determinations that could trigger yet another round of appeals — they have extinguished any realistic hope of getting a verdict in the Jan. 6 case before November. American voters will enter ballot booths to choose between Donald Trump and President Biden without knowing whether Mr. Trump is guilty of the crimes with which a grand jury of his fellow citizens charged him.

This decision may seem like a reflection of a rogue conservative majority that can, in time, be changed. But it is a sign of a much deeper problem — one that, when the time is ripe, will require constitutional reforms to solve and perhaps even a new branch of government.

Although the opinion features a high-minded disclaimer that the court is not granting Mr. Trump or any future president complete immunity, the practical effect of this decision is presumptive immunity for all future presidents and complete immunity by delay for Mr. Trump.

This prospect was not lost on Mr. Trump. He repeatedly obtained delays to avoid trial, turning the legal machinery of the court system against itself to buy what he needed most: time — time to distract, delay and spin his own version of the story as he sought to find a way to make these devastating charges disappear. If he becomes president again, he could have his new attorney general fire Mr. Smith and deep-six the entire prosecution.

Regardless of whether you think Mr. Trump would have been acquitted or convicted in a trial, immunity by running out the clock is justice delayed and thus justice denied.

So how did our legal system get tripped up by his persistent delay strategy? And why does it have such perilous ramifications for the rule of law?

The Constitution’s framers erected a structure they hoped would ensure, as far as humanly possible, that no person, including a president, would be above the law. But they also designed the prosecutorial arm of government — which now includes the attorney general and the special counsels — to be dependent on the president. As centuries passed, this has created serious problems.

Special counsels now lack even the autonomy of independent prosecutors past because the dissent of Justice Antonin Scalia in a 1988 case called Morrison v. Olson announced what is now the accepted judicial view: that the executive branch should have sole appointment and discretionary retention power. As a result, Mr. Smith is less equipped to cope with extreme corruption at the top than his predecessors.

The attorney general, for his part, serves at the president’s pleasure. That probably explains why Merrick Garland waited about 20 months to appoint a special counsel in this case. The New York Times and other outlets have reported that in the early days of his presidency, Mr. Biden adamantly opposed bringing charges against his predecessor, most likely worried that they would backfire politically. An attorney general unconstrained by the political pressures of presidential politics might well have brought charges earlier, ensuring that we had answers before Election Day.

All this is generally accepted. But this case has exposed an even more insidious problem caused by the structural relationship between any president and the Justice Department. During the oral arguments, Michael Dreeben, the able Justice Department advocate, had to acknowledge that, because the attorney general serves at the president’s pleasure, any president can effectively secure the equivalent of immunity for whatever crimes he might choose to commit. All a chief executive must do is pick an attorney general who would give him a formal opinion stating that whatever he planned to do would be legal — up to and including a coup reversing his own election loss. That advice of counsel would, under settled principles of due process, give the president an ironclad defense every bit as good as judicially conferred immunity.

Should Mr. Trump return to the Oval Office, he could act with even greater impunity than he did in his first term, either by immunizing himself with an attorney general’s opinion (which would give him license to commit whatever crimes he chose to commit) or by using the Justice Department to engage in politically motivated prosecutions.

The American people can still vote this November to reject what would be a devastating blow to the survival of government by and for the people. But whatever one believes about the likely outcome, we can and should also begin talk of amending the Constitution to repair these structural flaws. Whether Trumpism implodes later rather than sooner, we must remember that over the course of our history, we have made progress toward a “more perfect Union” only by imagining a better future and struggling to embody it in our fundamental law. Sometimes we’ve amended the Constitution after a national upheaval as convulsive as the Civil War. At other times, however, less traumatic events affecting the presidency, in particular, have prompted constitutional reform.

To repair the profound and growing problem of presidential unaccountability, we must dare to design a separate branch of government, outside the existing three, charged with investigating and prosecuting violations of federal criminal laws.

The process of amending the Constitution is long and cumbersome and could take years. Although it requires no involvement by the president, it can happen only after our constitutional republic puts Trumpism behind it. But a decisive victory over the MAGA movement, either now or in the years ahead, could provide the political energy needed to make structural change possible, persuading a future supermajority in Congress to advance an amendment to repair the dangers embedded in our constitutional structure before it is too late.

Precedent exists for a prosecutorial arm separate from the presidency. In other nations and more than 40 states, the chief executive has no power to remove the head of the government’s prosecutorial authority. In a majority of those states, voters elect attorneys general who are independent of the governor. That would be one route for selecting an independent federal prosecutor to head the fourth branch. Another would retain appointment of the chief federal prosecutor by the president but ensure that official’s independence by preventing removal without good cause.

To be sure, there are risks. There’s no perfect system of government that individuals with insatiable thirst for dominance cannot corrupt or subvert. In the one I envision, an individual motivated less by justice than by greed for power could come to wield the immense authority of the federal prosecutor. What would prevent that person from going rogue? Courts? Congress? The people? The answer is all of the above.

By creating a fourth branch less powerful than the presidency and subject to checks and balances — both from the judiciary, with its power of judicial review, and from the legislature, with its power of the purse — we can fortify our system from the kinds of abuse we have sadly witnessed in our times and are likely to see repeated and amplified because of Monday’s anti-democratic decision.

More on Donald Trump’s plans for a second term:

Michelle Goldberg: ‘Lock Her Up’ Was Not Just a Slogan – June 3, 2024

Jacob Heilbrunn: The Real Danger if Trump Is Re-elected – May 21, 2024

Caroline Fredrickson: What Worries Me Most About a Trump Presidency – April 10, 2024

Washington Post: Justice Department to pursue Trump prosecutions past the election, even if he wins

CNN

Washington Post: Justice Department to pursue Trump prosecutions past the election, even if he wins

Piper Hudspeth Blackburn and Hannah Rabinowitz – July 2, 2024

Justice Department officials will continue to pursue the federal criminal cases against Donald Trump past Election Day, even if he wins, The Washington Post reported Tuesday.

The plan is due to a view that DOJ rules against charging or prosecuting a sitting president would not kick in until Inauguration Day in January, people familiar with the discussions told The Post.

The Washington Post’s reporting comes a day after the Supreme Court ruled that Trump may claim immunity from criminal prosecution for some of the actions he took at the end of his presidency.

The court’s decision is likely to further delay a trial on the federal election subversion charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith, leaving Trump poised to avoid pre-election trials in the most significant criminal prosecutions he faces after being found guilty in his hush money trial in May. (His sentencing in that trial has been postponed until September in the wake of the court’s ruling.)

Officials who were not part of the special counsel’s deliberations told CNN they believed the long-standing DOJ policy against criminally charging a sitting president does not extend to a president-elect.

The department policy applies to a “sitting president,” the officials told CNN – so even if Trump were to win reelection in November, he could still stand trial before he was inaugurated in January 2025.

A spokesperson for Smith’s office declined to comment to The Post.

Trump also faces dozens of federal charges related to the alleged mishandling of classified documents. The judge who oversees that case, also brought by Smith, indefinitely postponed the trial in May, citing significant issues around classified evidence that would need to be worked out before the case goes to a jury.

The Supreme Court Made a ‘Monumentally Awful’ Decision

The New York Times – Opinion

The Supreme Court Made a ‘Monumentally Awful’ Decision

Presidential immunity never existed in America. Until now.

By Jesse Wegman – Produced by Derek Arthur

On Monday morning the Supreme Court ruled that Donald Trump and future presidents of the United States have immunity for official acts. “The entire idea of the American system of government and the Constitution was that the rule of law was king, the rule of law applies to everyone equally, including the president of the United States,” Jesse Wegman, a member of the editorial board, says. “The court blew all of that up.”

In this audio essay, Jesse explains what the ruling means for Trump and for the presidency in decades to come.

(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)

A photo illustration of the Supreme Court Building, shaded blue. — Credit…Illustration by The New York Times; photograph by Walter Bibikow

This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Derek Arthur. It was edited by Alison Bruzek and Kaari Pitkin. Mixing by Pat McCusker. Original music by Carole Sabouraud and Pat McCusker. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris and Kate Sinclair. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski. Our executive producer is Annie-Rose Strasser.

Jesse Wegman is a member of The Times editorial board, where he writes about the Supreme Court, law and politics.

Transcript:

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.Jesse Wegman

I’m Jesse Wegman. I’m a member of “The Times” editorial board, where I write about law and politics.

So on the last day of its term, the Court ruled — I think shocking many of us — that presidents are basically above the law, much to the shock of those of us who thought they weren’t. They have, essentially, absolute immunity for most of their official acts, regardless of how egregiously they violate the law in carrying them out. And they may even have immunity for some acts that are on the edge of officialness. So it’s a decision that flies in the face of more than 200 years of American history, the text of the Constitution, and, I think, everybody’s settled understanding of presidents’ liability for criminal activity.

In the immediate term, what this means is that Donald Trump will almost certainly not face prosecution for inciting a violent insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 to try to overturn an election that he had lost fair and square. I think the concern that the dissenters brought up was that this is not just Donald Trump but presidents going forward who will now feel, essentially, free to do whatever they want, knowing that it is going to be extraordinarily hard to hold them to account after their presidencies.

When this case first got to the court system, I think a lot of people laughed it off. It was Donald Trump bringing up yet another one of his off-the-wall, absurd legal arguments. In this case, he was saying everything that happened on January 6 and around January 6 I’m immune from prosecution for because I was the president, and I was doing my job as the president.

Just to be clear, there has never been any criminal immunity for any president in American history. This was, I thought, broadly understood. Everyone understood this. Richard Nixon understood it back in the Watergate era.

That’s why he accepted a pardon because he knew that, without the pardon, he could be criminally prosecuted. It’s why Donald Trump’s lawyers, during the second impeachment of Trump in early 2021, said, even if you vote to acquit him, don’t worry. You can still go after him in a court of law. That was the general understanding.

The court blew all of that up with its decision on Monday. And I don’t think we can overstate what a monumental, and monumentally awful, decision this was.

Look, the justices in the majority, which was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, who styles himself as an institutionalist — and I would say this opinion is about as anti-institutional as you can get — they argued that to expose presidents to criminal prosecution would interfere with their ability to do their job with the kind of energy and boldness that we require of presidents.

This is just laughable. First of all, no president in history before Donald Trump was brought up on criminal charges. The reason for that isn’t that presidents were tiptoeing around, terrified about being brought up on criminal charges. The reason is that presidents understood their role, and they didn’t break the law the way that Donald Trump did.

For a court that loves to talk about the importance of the text of the Constitution and the history and the tradition of this country, this is about as untethered from any of those things as you could imagine. If you could characterize this court in any way, it is a court that is entirely outcome-driven.

It has no principles. It does not rule on the grounds of any principle other than what it wants to do in a given case. And what it wants to do in a given case is, suspiciously, often correlated quite closely with the interests of the conservative movement and the Republican Party.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who wrote one of the two dissents from Monday’s ruling, she called it “atextual, ahistorical, and utterly indefensible.” And Sotomayor says in her dissent, “The court effectively creates a law-free zone around the president, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the founding.”

That’s what’s so shocking about this decision, right? The American Revolution was fought specifically to get out from under the power of a king who was unaccountable, a king who literally existed above the law.

The other way to think about the stakes of this ruling and of the impact it’s going to have is on Donald Trump himself. Look at what he did in his first term. Look at how much he disregarded the courts, Congress, all of the institutions of American government, when they didn’t go his way. He delegitimized them all.

So now think about Trump basically being unleashed by a Supreme Court that has said, it is going to be almost impossible to hold you criminally to account for anything that you’ve done. This is a man who does not see the law or the rule of law as something he respects or will follow. So now consider what it will be like if and when he retakes office and knows that nothing he does is going to come back to haunt him.

He will basically be immune in every sense for his actions. It is going to be very hard to say that almost anything a president does is not done in his official capacity. And I think, because of that, you’re going to see presidents feeling emboldened to take all kinds of steps that we didn’t think that they could ever take before.

Opinion | The Supreme Court wrote an immunity test Trump can’t help but pass

MSNBC – Opinion

The Supreme Court wrote an immunity test Trump can’t help but pass

Hayes Brown – July 2, 2024

It’s hard to see how the Supreme Court’s ruling on whether former President Donald Trump enjoys immunity from prosecution could be much worse. It’s true that the opinion in Trump v. United States doesn’t grant him the absolute immunity that he’d claimed. Instead, Chief Justice John Roberts authored a majority opinion as close as possible to finding that absolute immunity without making a complete mockery of the findings of the lower courts. In the end, the chief justice and his GOP-appointed colleagues determined that presidents are immune for “official acts” but may still be prosecuted for “unofficial acts” once they’ve left office.

With this decision, the six conservative justices left up in the air exactly what parts of the federal indictment against Trump are still constitutional. The opinion accordingly pats itself on the back for not making the determination straight away, leaving that to the lower courts to determine based on a test of the Supreme Court’s devising. But the caveats and examples that the court provides in its opinion makes it obvious that anything determined to be outside the shield it has erected around Trump will be at best a temporary setback for the former president.

In this brave new world, a president’s actions can be divided into three categories. The first are those official acts that are “conclusive and preclusive” — authorized through a power granted solely to the president under the Constitution. Such acts are now totally protected from prosecution. All other official acts, including presidential communications, are granted “presumptive immunity.” In those cases, prosecutors can still argue that executive privilege doesn’t apply but it’s up to a judge to make that call. Finally, “unofficial acts,” or those taken beyond the scope of office, don’t fall under the aegis of this newfound immunity — but exactly what counts is left undefined.

In setting this new precedent, Roberts draws heavily on the 1982 decision in Nixon v. Fitzgerald, which determined that the president enjoys immunity from civil cases even for acts that extend to the “outer perimeter” of their role. The same presumed immunity for those acts now applies to criminal cases, “so long as they are ‘not manifestly or palpably beyond [his] authority.’” With that very unhelpful guidance, Roberts has ordered the lower courts to do the work now of figuring out what exactly that entails, including whether the Trump-led pressure campaign against former Vice President Mike Pence fits the bill.

Accordingly, this ruling has wiped away entirely the assertion in special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment that Trump leaned on the Justice Department to pursue false election fraud cases to bolster his efforts to overturn the election. More damaging, Smith is now blocked from even using those supposedly “official acts” as evidence to prove criminality for unofficial acts, whichever those wind up being. The overall effect is to tie prosecutors’ hands, cutting them off from one of the key factors in determining whether to bring charges against a person.

Importantly, Roberts also writes that “in dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” This new dictum applies even in instances of clear motive to act in their own personal interest, rather the national interest, putting such motivations beyond the reach of prosecutors. This determination also all but bars lower court judges from applying common sense to charges involving a president, as Monday’s ruling also blocks judges from deeming a president’s action unofficial “merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law.”

To top it all off, Roberts sanctimoniously forgoes driving the dagger into the heart of this case. After determining that criminal immunity exists for official presidential actions, he then writes that “the current stage of the proceedings in this case does not require us to decide whether this immunity is presumptive or absolute” for each of those given actions. No, those issues must be left for the future because, he writes, a single case “in more than ‘two centuries does not afford enough experience’ to definitively and comprehensively determine the President’s scope of immunity from criminal prosecution.”

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the federal case in question, is now tasked with adjudicating which of Trump’s actions are still subject to prosecution. What is left only implicit in the opinion, though, is that those decisions are subject to appeal by Trump or the prosecutors (though much more likely the former). So, too, are the decisions that the appeals court eventually makes, putting the final call right back where it started: in the hands of Roberts and his fellow conservatives.

In sum, this decision is a Roberts special, projecting neutral impartiality while thoroughly skewed toward a predetermined outcome. The supposed tests that are meant to give the veneer of wide applicability beyond Trump should instead be seen in the same light as the decision to allow him onto the ballot despite the 14th Amendment’s language preventing it: a fig leaf over a standard that applies to only one man.