How to outrun Trump’s efforts to outrun the law: Supreme Court accountability.
Brian Beutler had a very smart column last week pointing out something that should be obvious to everyone: Donald Trump is not so much running a presidential campaign as he is spearheading a criminal immunity racket. This “campaign” bears none of the hallmarks of a typical presidential run, no softening Melania, no silky Ivanka, no “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” messaging, and almost no discussion of policy or politics. It’s just stadium rallies and Witch Hunt postings and “Please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages.” None of this, notes Beutler, is about making an argument for the presidency, and all of it is about evading legal accountability:
Trump is scarcely running a presidential campaign. He might become president in spite of this, but his efforts are overwhelmingly fixed on evading justice or mooting judgments he’s already lost by any means necessary. He’d ideally like to prevail in these efforts before the election, but the task will become much easier if he’s able to win or steal the presidency despite the legal peril.
Beutler further faults Democrats for failing to draw negative attention to Trump’s unlawful schemes in any systematic fashion. However, as many political observers have noted, most recently David French this past weekend, it almost doesn’t matter what the media and political classes draw attention to. Huge swaths of the public have simply tuned out political outrage on both ends of the political spectrum. Those blinders are why so many prospective voters know so very little about Christian nationalism, as French notes, or about Trump’s legal woes, or even about Trump’s overt promises about what he plans to do if he’s reelected. It’s all just noise at this point, goes the complaint. The challenge for those of us who write about such things is how to punch a hole in it.
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementIssues can and do break through. There is good reason to believe that threats to women’s reproductive rights, IVF bans, and denial of basic health care are salient issues for voters, even voters who have tuned out of political discourse. Sen. Chris Murphy has made a strong case that fear breaks through political static, as do discussions about voter happiness. But when it comes to the stickiness of Trump’s legal liability, it remains the case that most voters don’t seem to care all that much about Donald Trump’s specific legal issues. As Ankush Khardori argued recently, data from polling conducted by Ipsos and Politico seems to suggest that, despite voters’ confusion over the multiple Trump trials, a conviction in the Manhattan election interference trial, which on Monday got the go-ahead to begin April 15, would significantly harm the former president in the upcoming election. Put another way, despite the ongoing and escalating efforts by Trump to foment sweeping public doubt about the fairness of the criminal justice system, the polling Khardori cites confirms what we already suspected: A criminal conviction before the November election could seriously affect Trump’s chances in the presidential contest, but also that Trump’s criminal legal woes do not seem to be moving the electoral needle all that much in the meantime.
Advertisement AdvertisementWhich brings us back to Beutler’s question: Given that delay, delay, delay still seems to largely be working for Trump, at least thus far, how do journalists seeking to engage the public on the ways in which Trump poses a direct and existential threat not just to democracy, but also to the rule of law, make this argument in ways that feel salient and urgent and not, well, political?
One possibility lies in Khardori’s surprising findings around the Supreme Court. His recent polling shows that although voters aren’t quite certain what to make of Trump’s legal troubles, they are very sure on the question of whether they trust SCOTUS to fairly and neutrally adjudicate this matter. As his numbers suggest: “About half of the country does not trust the Supreme Court to issue a fair and nonpartisan ruling on the question of whether Trump is immune from prosecution.” That view is held by 46 percent of respondents, compared with 24 percent who do trust the Supreme Court on this question, and 29 percent who are unsure. If those numbers are even close to being correct, one answer to Beutler’s dilemma is that the argument needs to also be about the Supreme Court and its role in allowing Trump to escape legal consequences. Given the tremendous harm the court has done to its own public standing, by way of the Dobbs leak, the Dobbsdecision itself, rampant, uncorrected ethics violations by several justices, and a continuing public certainty that the court is a partisan political institution, linking Trump’s stench of corruption to that of the current majority of the Supreme Court makes sense.
Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement AdvertisementFor reasons we’ve been writing about for years, the political press tends to cover the Supreme Court within its own ecosystem and on its own terms, which makes it a salient political story for only really the last two weeks of June, when the big cases come down. But as the court has been drawn into Trump’s legal woes, it has become front-page news in recent weeks, both for the strikingly political and deeply consequentialist “per curiam” decision to rewrite the text of the 14thAmendment to keep Donald Trump on the ballot last month, and its even more harmful decision to allow his D.C. criminal trial to be delayed pending Supreme Court review, even though everyone and his cat knows that Trump’s immunity theory is risible and untenable.
AdvertisementConnect Trump’s evasion strategy to the Supreme Court’s declining public trust, and a rule-of-law story begins to take shape.
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Read MorePolitical strategist Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO and a founder of the Analyst Institute, has been thinking about the Roberts court’s conservative supermajority in political terms for some time now. Podhorzer made this point in his newsletter last week, when he wrote that we continue to make a category error when we posit that there is a centrist wing of the court evenhandedly meting out wins and losses to Trump because it cares deeply about American democracy:
AdvertisementAdvertisementIt’s time to recognize that when we observe the Court is pursuing “a very unpopular agenda,” that what is unpopular with most Americans is actually very popular with the constituencies that put the Federalist Society justices on the court in the first place.
The reality is that the six conservative justices who did their minor parts to stop Trump from overturning the previous election may not actuallybe currently engaged in an elaborate constitutional balancing act that would both preserve their public credibility and prop up the rule of law come November. (Although that counter-story offers great solace.) The effect of declining to hear the Trump immunity claim in December, and of scheduling it for oral argument in April, is not a neutral judicial act. It is part and parcel of Beutler’s story: High court helps Trump delay criminal prosecution.
AdvertisementIf Podhorzer is right about all this, then the conservative justices on the high court are doing precisely what Leonard Leo (who evidently was not cast out from the Trump Tent after 2020 as we were advised) wants him to do, which includes helping install Donald J. Trump as once and future emperor, imposing a national abortion ban, and ending government regulation once and for all. This isn’t a Trump story at all, then. It’s a SCOTUS story, again.
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Perhaps a better way to cover Trump’s current campaign to end any and all legal accountability for himself, while bending the criminal justice system to harm political enemies and rivals, is by starting not deep in the weeds with a mass of civil and criminal trials that are tough to differentiate and that seem to suffer from endless delays. Maybe the story should be one that the American public already well understands: Donald Trump and his cronies bought at least three justices using Leonard Leo’s secret piggy bank of judges, and those justices are shielding him from legal accountability, which is the Trump way in law and justice and always has been.
Maybe “Trump is using his entire presidential campaign to evade legal accountability” is indeed one too many turns in a media narrative that seems to get no specific traction in part because it never lifts off in time to soar. But “Trump Justices doing what MAGA paid for” may not be, since the public already knows it. That isn’t a tricky story to tell. It’s the American dream, turned on its head: Two systems of justice, one for the haves and the other for the have-nots, and two types of justices, Trump’s for the taking.
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