Shooting part of traveling Trump shock-o-mania shitshow

In an informal, unscientific survey after former President Trump apparently got part of his ear shot off in Butler, Pennsylvania, roughly half of my friends and neighbors acknowledged believing – at least initially – that the shooting had been a staged campaign event. Given made-to-order photographs of the event taken by mainstream news media of Trump – face bloodied, fist raised defiantly as Secret Service agents rushed him offstage to a waiting vehicle, a U.S. flag soaring overhead heavenlike – who in our doubting world wouldn’t wonder as much?

Lest Trump supporters erupt in indignant outrage that anyone believe this was anything but an outright assassination attempt, remember: For more than three years, Americans have been pressed almost daily by Trump and his sycophants to believe the storming of the U.S. Capitol, complete with attacks on police officers, was a plot provoked by disguised antifa activists and choreographed by the FBI to embarrass and undermine President Trump. A few days after the July 13 assassination attempt, Trump again touted January 6 as a “hoax” in a social-media post.

I was making Saturday night dinner when my wife said Trump, 78, had been shot at one of his campaign rallies. As a lifelong newsman, I ordinarily would have rushed to my iPad or TV to confirm this; as a retired newsman living in the propagandistic, conspiracy-ridden, “truth-isn’t-truth” Age of Trump, I instead wearily suggested my wife consult reliable Washington Post or CBS News websites to ensure such an event had taken place – and that, in any case, dinner was ready. Only a few hours later had I sufficiently galvanized myself to return to the murky depths of Trump’s America.

One reason for skepticism: To experience a Trump rally as I have is to witness several hours of delusion, anger, even torment. Wonder why most people in the risers behind Trump didn’t flee when shots rang out? By then, many had spent hours outside baking in the July sun, often without easy access to water. Some had passed out from heat exhaustion. When cognizant, they listened to a stream of incendiary, overripe warmup speakers whipping them into a dizzying frenzy of victimhood and resentment. By the time gunfire erupted, they were too weak and too transfixed to run for their lives.

In short, the shooting seemed part of the traveling Trump shock-o-mania shitshow where Americans are invited to view themselves in a funhouse mirror of whacky distortions and the carnival barker-in-chief will say anything and everything – often to the point of babbling, and just as incoherently as our sitting president but without the latter’s bowing to certain standards of conduct. If you study the faces of the crowd behind Trump whenever he says something utterly absurd, trips over a spoken gaffe or collapses into garble at rallies, there’s no flash of realization anything is amiss. The lights at home are out.

When a friend who voted twice for Trump raised the assassination attempt the other day, he focused our conversation on ballistics, logistics and security contingency planning. Not once did he express surprise or horror that someone had tried to blow Trump’s head off. Nor did my friend once hint that this must have been some leftist or government plot to assassinate Trump. Our conversation reminded me of my own conclusion the evening of the shooting: If you regularly blow things up and you’re indiscriminate in how you blow things up, don’t be surprised if one day it all blows up in your face.

Trump’s champions in Congress and right-wing media accuse mainstream media and Democrats of inciting violence against Trump by alleging that Trump, the Make America Great Again movement and Project 2025 reek of unadulterated fascism. Yet Trump and his followers show no hesitation in recklessly vilifying others as “socialists” and “communists.” When I walked onto the grounds of the Trump rally at Waco Regional Airport the morning of March 25, 2023, one of the first oversized banners I saw declared: “DEMOCRATS ARE COMMUNISTS,” complete with hammer and sickle.

So why is turnabout not fair play? Republicans have been calling Democrats “communists” for decades. Are Democrats not entitled to claim Republicans are fascists, particularly if they (and a great number of moderates and conservatives) believe it so? Project 2025 reimagines America under a super-presidency largely unchecked by courts or Congress; replacement of millions of non-partisan civil service employees with Trump toadies who could bungle everything from Medicare to federal disaster relief to Social Security payments; and a military leadership more loyal to the president than the U.S. Constitution.

And talk of incendiary: Even now, Trump stokes violence by continually insisting, without evidence, that the 2020 election was “stolen.” Yet some 60 lawsuits alleging this failed in the courts. And despite claims to the contrary, about half of the hearings were evidentiary. To quote several elder Republican statesmen who refuted Trump’s charges in 2022: "Claims that an election was stolen or that the outcome resulted from fraud are deadly serious and should be made only on the basis of real and powerful evidence. If the American people lose trust that our elections are free and fair, we will lose our democracy."

In fact, these hardline Republicans of yesteryear who investigated Trump’s allegations (including former federal judge Michael Luttig and Bush v. Gore election attorney Benjamin Ginsberg) declare in their “Lost, Not Stolen” report: “There is absolutely no evidence of fraud in the 2020 presidential election on the magnitude necessary to shift the result in any state, let alone the nation as a whole. In fact, there was no fraud that changed the outcome in even a single precinct. It is wrong, and bad for our country, for people to propagate baseless claims that President Biden’s election was not legitimate.”

Consider, too, the numerous pleas for leniency from many January 6 rioters, insurrectionists and camp followers in federal district court who now blame Trump for inciting the violence.

Recent example: East Texan Alex Harkrider, 36, a Marine veteran convicted of running rampant with a tomahawk at the Capitol. "False claims by President Trump that the election was rigged were made on media sources as well as by the president himself that the election system had been corrupted and that the integrity of the election should be questioned," Harkrider’s attorney argued. "Trump refused to concede. He showed himself willing to undermine confidence in the democratic process and in time managed to convince nearly three-quarters of his supporters that the loser was actually the winner."

Not that this is the only outcome for January 6 dupes. When Tyler Dykes, 26, was sentenced to almost five years in prison this month for assaulting law enforcement as an active-duty Marine on the Sixth, he demonstrated the extremes of defiance deemed acceptable in the Trump ranks. He talked about the unrivaled adrenaline rush he experienced at the Capitol, eclipsing even (he claimed) bungee jumping, and offered in court his unqualified endorsement of Trump for president in 2024. Dykes has already served time for participating in the racist “Unite the Right” violence in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Trump apologists now demand we at least show decency and deference to Trump after the shooting. But for a tilt of the head, he might have been killed. Yet the former president mocked the hammer attack on then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband (and the MAGA crowd laughed); dismissed a very real plot to kidnap a Democratic governor as “fake”; hinted that Second Amendment advocates might want to do something about 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton; and has vowed to pardon January 6 rioters, many of whom roamed Capitol corridors screaming for the blood of Speaker Pelosi and Vice President Pence.

A Pew Research Center survey this year found nearly three times as many Republicans as Democrats believe politicians should be able to express themselves with aggressive or heated language without worrying about the consequences. A day before the Waco rally kicked off his 2024 reelection bid, the former president vented over the prosecution case against him involving hush payments to a porn star. Trump warned of “death and destruction” if the case was allowed to proceed. Rallygoers with whom I spoke the very next day were divided over whether such threatening language was appropriate.

General consensus: “Oh, that’s just Trump being Trump.”

During the 2024 Republican National Convention, Trump declared: “The election result [of 2020], we're never going to let that happen again. They used COVID to cheat.” Does Trump mean he’ll engage in more behind-the-scenes skullduggery to siphon votes his way (which he clearly attempted in 2020) or does he threaten more post-election violence? When Ted Koppel visited a Trump rally in Schnecksville, Penn., in April, some aging rallygoers signaled the latter. “Be ready, just be ready for war,” a burly white man with a “Second Amendment: God, Guns and Guts” cap told the 84-year-old veteran journalist.

Not even two weeks after the shooting, during a rally in Ohio, Republican state Sen. (and Boy Scout!) George Lang proved the Trump movement has learned nothing: “I believe wholeheartedly Donald Trump and Butler County’s JD Vance are the last chance to save our country politically. I’m afraid if we lose this one, it’s going to take a civil war to save the country, and it will be saved. It’s the greatest experiment in the history of mankind. And if we come down to a civil war, I’m glad we got people like Smitty [Mark Smith] and the Bikers for Trump on our side.”

The crowd cheered.

A more recent University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats survey suggests that 7 percent of Americans – roughly 18 million adults – view violence as justifiable in restoring Trump to power. They also deem January 6 insurrectionists as “patriots.” Another 10 percent – some 26 million people – view violence as justifiable in preventing Trump from regaining the presidency. The Chicago Project’s work gauging political violence accelerated only after Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol to halt the constitutionally mandated certification of the 2020 presidential election.

What’s now really driving the MAGA crowd crazy is they can’t categorize the dead 20-year-old shooter as a card-carrying member of the left. He was reportedly a registered Republican and a gun enthusiast who left few indications of what spurred him to elude security, somehow scale a building on the rally’s outer perimeter and maintain his perch long enough to squeeze off several shots with an assault-styled rifle. British reporter Siobhan Kennedy reports the Trump 2024 campaign considered the shooter’s household in Bethel Park as one of the most sympathetic to Trump’s reelection in the neighborhood.

Investigation continues as conspiracy theories multiply, representing a frantic game of whack-a-mole for the legitimate press charged with timely fact-checking. It’s quite possible the shooter reflects the utter incoherence of a political movement driven less by ideology and integrity, more by idolatry and impulse. The fact the shooter’s cellphone revealed obsessions with both Trump and Biden and their schedules may well hint at how a bewildered, repulsed, up-and-coming generation in the Age of Trump perceives all of us “adults” who, whatever else, have been in charge of America for generations now.

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors. This piece appeared in the Tribune-Herald on July 27.

Riding the storm, directing the whirlwind

 

Two hundred and forty-eight years ago, a group of American patriots gathered to ratify a document written by revolutionary firebrand and intellectual Thomas Jefferson that, more than anything, made abundantly clear their disgust with unaccountable kings deriving their power from the Almighty. And three days before those patriots’ descendants celebrated the Declaration of Independence this month, the Supreme Court of the United States in a burst of judicial activism restored the very monarchial malignancy our forefathers fought against in the American Revolution. It recast the American presidency in a way that 18th century Tories and turncoats might have celebrated.

In a ruling that will forever define the legacy of the Roberts court, Chief Justice John Roberts wrote a long, tortuous opinion in Trump v. United States that violates the fundamental, all-American principle that presidents be as accountable under the law as the rest of us. It instead allows immunity loopholes for all sorts of corruption and criminality by a president if he or she can pass off such malfeasance as "official acts." One can actually feel Roberts’ discomfort in the blunderbuss of words he employs to hide the fact he’s defending a deceitful, narcissistic scoundrel who sought to overturn the will of the American people and upend the peaceful transfer of power that had been an American hallmark for 220 years.

In doing so, Roberts at long last ensures himself of the same ignominy that posterity bestows on hoary Chief Justice Roger Taney in the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision.

Roberts' reading of The Federalist Papers is clearly selective. He gallops right past Federalist No. 69 by Alexander Hamilton who in 1788 sought to outline for Americans the benefits of a president over a king: "The president of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried and, upon conviction of treason, bribery or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law. The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable: There is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution."

Obviously, the 69-year-old chief justice has had a change of heart since his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2005 when he declared: “I believe no one is above the law under our system and that includes the president. The president is fully bound by the law, the Constitution and statutes.” Two decades later, overseeing a bitterly divided court hobbled by corruption, incompetence and incoherence, Roberts now signals in a ruling brimming with contradictions that, well, yes, the president has significant immunity from prosecution for official acts, whatever those acts might be. And that’s the problem with presidents claiming all sorts of powers beyond those set out by Article II of the Constitution.

Yes, one appreciates arguments for a strong, decisive chief executive, especially given that Congress is increasingly dysfunctional – more prone to showmanship and grandstanding than consensus-building and legislating policy. But the very act of emboldening the American presidency demands that those chief executives who exceed their “core constitutional powers” for self-gain be held accountable. That includes Donald Trump who, as sitting president, clearly conspired to subvert the will of the majority in a national election. Yet Roberts writes not only as if this conspiracy never happened, he seeks to hinder and confound and obstruct a federal trial weighing all the evidence and testimony, pro and con.

For graying Americans, the Roberts ruling showcases how effectively Make America Great Again rhetoric and its fanciful reweaving of foundational history has remolded the hearts and minds of some of us to be willing subjects, not discerning citizens. To quote journalist and historian Garrett M. Graff: “I wrote a history of Watergate that was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize last year. And let me tell you: When Nixon said, ‘If the president does it, it’s not illegal,’ no one believed that was true. All of American history argues the opposite. And yet that’s exactly what the Supreme Court agreed today. The entire test of Watergate was no one is above the law. Today, the Supreme Court made one man above the law.”

In her powerful dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor makes this point: "After the Watergate tapes revealed President Nixon’s misuse of official power to obstruct the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s investigation of the Watergate burglary, President Ford pardoned Nixon. Both Ford’s pardon and Nixon’s acceptance of the pardon necessarily 'rested on the understanding that the former president faced potential criminal liability.'" Sotomayor adds: “Trump’s own lawyers during his second impeachment trial [for incitement of an insurrection in 2021] assured senators that declining to impeach Trump for his conduct related to January 6 would not leave him ‘in any way above the law.’” So much for that supposed point of law.

The lack of outrage by everyday Americans – and during the Fourth of July weekend – offers disturbing evidence of how tenuous our collective grasp of foundational American principles is. After a windstorm toppled a large red oak in a neighbor’s yard this spring, he voiced astonishment the tree’s roots didn’t run deeper, given the many years the tree dominated the front yard. The failure of so many Americans – perhaps defeated by the court’s serpentine legal reasoning, perhaps allergic to daunting news reports on complicated topics, perhaps just eager to go out and revel in carefree displays of patriotism – reminds me of that oak’s fate as the nation lazily contemplates another tradition-trashing Trump presidency.

The ruling also reinforces that bright line between what I call “classic conservatives” – those embracing classical principles of limited government and rule of law – and Trump supporters who call themselves conservative but unashamedly shed their principles whenever convenient, particularly in deference to charismatic, divinely dispatched strongmen who cater to their fears and feed their anger and into whose arms they unwittingly surrender much. And it highlights the fact that, in so many infamous authoritarian eruptions, the judiciary is often quick to falter in upholding the law. The collective capitulation shown by so-called “conservative” Supreme Court members suggests we’re witnessing that here and now.      

Many of us who listened to oral arguments before the court by the Department of Justice and Trump’s attorney in April marveled at how right-wing justices shifted and squirmed to avoid discussing the actual case at hand, retreating instead into hypotheticals. Yet those justices who ultimately dissented elicited the most frightening possibilities in this legal game. Justice Sotomayor asked Trump’s attorney: "If the president decides that his rival is a corrupt person and he orders the military or orders someone to assassinate him, is that within his official acts for which he can get immunity?" Trump’s lawyer: "It would depend on the hypothetical but that could well be an official act."

Really? And that’s constitutionally protected now? In America?

On the very eve of this 6-3 ruling, Trump paused his many posts claiming victimhood by a “weaponized” Department of Justice to instead repost to his online followers a post accusing former Congresswoman Liz Cheney of treason and calling for “televised military tribunals.” He boosted another calling for the imprisonment of President Biden, Vice President Harris, former Vice President Pence and others. Would the high court regard such vengeful acts, were they to occur in a second Trump presidency, protected from prosecution because they qualify as official presidential acts? Or is only a two-month coup to hijack our government masterminded by a losing reality-TV president protected from legal consequence?

Trump celebrated the ruling on Truth Social: "Without Presidential Immunity, a President of the United States literally could not function! It should be a STRONG IMMUNITY, where proper decisions can be made, where our Country can be POWERFUL and THRIVE and where Opponents cannot hold up and extort a Future President for Political Gain. It is a BIG decision, an important decision, a decision which can affect the Success or Failure of our Country for decades to come. We want a GREAT Country, not a weak, withering and ineffective one." His campaign marketed T-shirts: "Trump 2024: Don't Tread on MAGA,” complete with timber rattler – ironically playing off the Revolutionary-era flag defying kings.

Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts, former guiding light of the off-the-rails Texas Public Policy Foundation, praised the court decision on presidential immunity as “vital” – hardly a surprise as he likely views it as more easily facilitating his goal of “institutionalizing Trumpism,” including radical measures in Project 2025 such as replacing much of the federal workforce with Trump loyalists, however competent. In an interview, he quite naturally cited Federalist No. 70, published March 15, 1788, in which Hamilton argued for a vigorous chief executive – also predictably quoted by the chief justice. Yet this essay surely didn’t negate Hamilton’s thoughts on presidents and the law in Federalist No. 69, published a day earlier.

For the record, Hamilton proved shrewdly perceptive. When Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied in the hard-fought presidential election of 1800, Hamilton surprised some by helping tilt the election outcome to Jefferson, even though Jefferson and Hamilton were fierce political rivals. So far as Hamilton was concerned, Jefferson at least had principles; Burr had none: “Mr. Jefferson, though too revolutionary in his notions, is yet a lover of liberty and will be desirous of something like orderly government. Mr. Burr loves nothing but himself – thinks of nothing but his own aggrandizement – and will be content with nothing short of permanent power in his own hands.”

Burr’s post-election intrigue allegedly involving shadowy efforts to prompt the secession of western lands and invade Mexico left him on trial for treason in 1807. He was acquitted but his reputation never recovered. By then Burr had also killed Hamilton in America’s most famous duel. Chief Justice Roberts actually cites United States v. Burr in his own Trump v. United States ruling, but in his bid to crown Trump with presidential immunity he contorts the broader views of Chief Justice John Marshall, who presided over the Burr trial. Whatever else on finer points in this complicated case, Marshall famously reasoned that “the law does not discriminate between the president and a private citizen.”

This much is clear: Alexander Hamilton anticipated Donald Trump 223 years before, judging from this 1792 epistle: “When a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper . . . despotic in his ordinary demeanor – known to have scoffed in private at the principles of liberty – when such a man is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity – to join in the cry of danger to liberty – to take every opportunity of embarrassing the general government and bringing it under suspicion – to flatter and fall in with all the nonsense of the zealots of the day – it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion that he may 'ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.’”

In his smug interview on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast, Heritage executive Kevin Roberts skates past such historical distinctions. He delights in the “radical left” going apoplectic “because our side is winning.” He claims the nation is undergoing “the process of the Second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.” This raises a question given this historian and election denier’s suggestion that whoever resists this “revolution” – including presumably we moderates and anti-Trump conservatives – will be dealt with. Are we permitted to at least resist with, say, the ferocity and dedication displayed by self-righteous, delusional, far-right “heroes” of the Sixth of January?  

Equally disturbing is the court majority’s dictate – and without any constitutional originalism to back it up – that lower courts “may not inquire into the president’s motives … nor may courts deem an action unofficial merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law.” And, amazingly, the court ruled Trump’s exchanges with Department of Justice officials to overthrow the 2020 election in his favor are protected by presidential immunity because such exchanges qualify as “officials acts.” Constitutional scholar and Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin correctly argues this "radical break from history and the rule of law shows how far Trump’s lawlessness has contaminated the Supreme Court." Indeed.

Even Trump-nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett balked at John Roberts' sweeping view of presidential immunity for acts hardly within a president’s constitutional realm. "Take the president’s alleged attempt to organize alternative slates of electors," Barrett wrote in a partial dissent. "In my view, that conduct is private and therefore not entitled to protection. The Constitution vests power to appoint presidential electors in the states. And while Congress has a limited role in that process, the president has none. In short, a president has no legal authority – and thus no official capacity – to influence how the states appoint their electors. I see no plausible argument for barring prosecution of that alleged conduct.”

Yet Chief Justice Roberts seeks to excuse a movement bent on dictatorship, if Trump’s words of recent are to be taken seriously. At one point, Roberts argues immunity may be warranted involving Trump’s self-serving efforts to pressure his vice president to reject or question Electoral College votes from battleground states sufficiently to allow Trump a path to electoral victory. Vice President Pence refused to do so, citing his strictly ceremonial role as defined by law, including the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution. Yet Roberts trivializes the key fact that Pence, in his role on January 6, was functioning as president of the Senate – and not as vice president.

"When may a former president be prosecuted for official acts taken during his presidency?" Roberts asks in his opinion. "Our nation has never before needed an answer. But in addressing that question today, unlike the political branches and the public at large, we cannot afford to fixate exclusively, or even primarily, on present exigencies. In a case like this one, focusing on 'transient results' may have profound consequences for the separation of powers and for the future of our republic." And thus he cavalierly justifies a bewildering, disordered decision that is more an assemblage of impressions and musings, dispensed with little or no solid foundation and providing no real resolution to our "present exigencies."

Freewheeling Justice Clarence Thomas expands on Roberts' scattershot approach in a concurrence that isn't really even a concurrence, questioning the appointment of "a private citizen as special counsel to prosecute a former president on behalf of the United States." It lands far from the immunity question, yet is perversely intriguing given a member of the Thomas household who, in the wake of the disputed 2020 presidential election, longingly contemplated "the Biden crime family and ballot-fraud co-conspirators (elected officials, bureaucrats, social media censorship mongers, fake stream media reporters, etc.)" being arrested and "living in barges off GITMO to face military tribunals for sedition."

Roberts’ tangled web of arguments for unburdening Trump, even as the court now returns the case to District Judge Tanya Chutkan to sort out to see if a trial is even possible, confirms that we the people are indeed the proverbial frogs in the proverbial slow-boiling pot. The Roberts court has given oligarchs free rein to buy elections and candidates in Citizens United v. FEC (2010) and unleashed an avalanche of anti-democratic laws aimed at making voting harder through Shelby County v. Holder (2013), which gutted the Voting Rights Act that, ironically, might have allowed President Trump to legally prevent the “election irregularities” that supposedly foiled his reelection in 2020. Yet this latest ruling is far more malignant.

For one thing, it’s astounding in its reversal of what so many of these justices claimed during their own nomination hearings. For another, it’s stunning in its cowardice. The former president has immunity in conversations with the vice president – maybe. The former president has immunity in his conspiracy to assemble fake electors – maybe. The former president has immunity in his rhetoric and presumably his dereliction of duty on the Sixth – maybe. The one silver lining is that this bag of worms is back before Judge Chutkan, whose decisive, tightly worded Dec. 1 ruling on presidential immunity revealed far more constitutional resolve than the toxic ambiguities offered by Roberts and his crew of Trump apologists.

Roberts’ Trump v. United States opinion – affirmed by two justices (Thomas, Samuel Alito) who arguably violated federal ethics law by not recusing themselves from this particular case and three more justices who owe their powerful lifetime appointments to Trump – clashes with not only the Declaration of Independence but the Constitution. The president has no legitimate role whatsoever in contesting election outcomes except as a litigant through the courts (in which Trump consistently failed in 2020). And the president certainly has no constitutional right to strong-arm and browbeat governors, state lawmakers and secretaries of state into violating the law.

The Roberts ruling signals not only the court’s plummeting legitimacy but our nation's decline. Consider President Trump's insistence in June 2019 that "Article II allows me to do whatever I want" or his Dec. 3, 2022, call for "termination" of the Constitution to return him to power. Then consider a post-presidential observation in 1913 by Theodore Roosevelt, one of our nation's most vigorous chief executives, yet one cognizant and respectful of our history and the Constitution in ways Trump and the high court are not: “My belief was that it was not only [the president’s] right but his duty to do anything that the needs of the nation demanded unless such action was forbidden by the Constitution or by the laws.”

Former federal jurist Michael Luttig, whose conservatism is beyond question, showed his contempt for the ruling by quoting American revolutionary Thomas Paine from “Common Sense” (1776): “But where, say some, is the king of America? . . . [S]o far as we approve of monarchy . . . in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.” For his part, Luttig in February joined in an amicus brief that asked the high court: "What kind of Constitution would immunize and thereby embolden losing first-term presidents to violate federal criminal statutes through either official or unofficial acts in efforts to usurp a second term?"

The answer, it turns out, pivots on a court that has forsaken originalism and is soaring well beyond our constitutional framework, desperately snatching bits and fragments of text out of context to bolster preposterous positions, paving the way for arguably America’s darkest days. The answer pivots on the court’s awe of a constitutionally contemptuous political figure who seeks to “ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.” As Luttig says, "the decision is irreconcilable with America's democracy, the Constitution and the rule of law." Yet many who pride themselves as patriotic Americans without fully understanding the American Revolution, the Constitution, Jefferson, Paine or Hamilton will celebrate this ruling.

Sotomayor’s rousing dissent finale has been widely quoted; equally relevant is her point that the court majority “invents an atextual, ahistorical and unjustifiable immunity that puts the president above the law.” And quoting the landmark 1821 Cohens v. Virginia ruling by a unanimous Marshall court, dissenting Justice Ketanji Jackson adds: “As we enter this uncharted territory, the People, in their wisdom, will need to remain ever attentive, consistently fulfilling their established role in our constitutional democracy and thus collectively serving as the ultimate safeguard against any chaos spawned by this court’s decision. For, like our democracy, our Constitution is ‘the creature of their will, and lives only by their will.’”

Yet Justice Jackson’s insights draw from another time. One fears America has settled into a bread-and-circus era when many of us rally around leaders who entertain and arouse us with demagoguery, uncouthness and hatred for fellow citizens, saying things decency, manners and political correctness once discouraged. We care little if such leaders cheat on their spouses with porn stars, get caught enriching themselves at the public trough, talk of becoming dictators or try to cancel out votes of our fellow citizens. As Alexis de Tocqueville observed after his travels through America in 1831, “A man's admiration for absolute government is proportionate to the contempt he feels for those around him.”    

In siding with Trump, the Roberts court also thumbs its nose at the spectacle of an angry, resentful mob of Trump supporters brutalizing police outside the U.S. Capitol and chasing lawmakers into hiding as it seized the building and delayed the constitutionally mandated certification of the presidential election. Had the mob stormed the nearby Supreme Court building, justices so desperate to reposition Trump for another destructive term in the American presidency might have had far more sobering thoughts about the rule of law in America. The Roberts court has lost its constitutional compass, let alone any moral compass. It is worthy of contempt and condemnation, infamy and irrelevance, now and forever.

Bill Whitaker spent 45 years as a reporter, editor and columnist in Texas journalism, including a dozen years as Waco Tribune-Herald opinion editor. He is a member of the Tribune-Herald Board of Contributors.