Fash Supremes Helping Immunize Amerika Against what's Left of Democracy

In Service to the The Divine Right of Herr Trump

People still clinging to naïve hopes that the dominant bourgeois legal institutions will cancel the fascist animal Donald “Take Down the Metal Detectors” Trump received another blow yesterday.

I am fasci[st]nated by the way in which the “liberal” (Trumpists even say “left”) New York Times’ tries to soften the horror of the hearing held yesterday at the Christian fascist Supreme Court on Trump’s claim of monarchical immunity from prosecution for crimes committed as president.

In cool, Prozac-like prose, Times correspondent Adam Liptak reports that:

“The Supreme Court’s conservative majority appeared ready on Thursday to rule that former presidents have some degree of immunity from criminal prosecution, a move that could further delay the criminal case against former President Donald J. Trump on charges that he plotted to subvert the 2020 election. Such a ruling would most likely send the case back to the trial court, ordering it to draw distinctions between official and private conduct. It would amount to a major statement on the scope of presidential power. Though there was seeming consensus among the justices that the case could eventually go forward based on Mr. Trump’s private actions, the additional proceedings could make it hard to conduct the trial before the 2024 election.” (emphasis added).

“Conservative majority?” Look at its record on abortion, guns, religion, voting rights, affirmative action, environmental regulation, and discrimination in the provision of business services and more.  This is a radical right, neo-fascist Court.

It is also a scandalously corrupt and broadly illegitimate Court.

“Appeared ready” to rule significantly on behalf of the fascist putschist Trump’s insane claim to possess the divine right of Fuhrers? Try “showed itself damn near certain” to rule that that way.

“Charges that he plotted to subvert the 2020 election”? Hello? Any intelligent person who has reviewed the plentiful evidence in the public record since the summer of 2022 at the latest knows very well that Trump and his team of anti-democratic election subverters did precisely that.

“Most likely” to send the case back to a lower court and “could make it hard to conduct the [Supreme Court] trial before the 2024 election”?  Please.  “Such a ruling,” which looks like a lock after yesterday, will of course do precisely both of those things, as Liptak certainly knows — this before an election that is tilting significantly Trump’s way and a possible Trump victory that would obviously lead to the rapid cancellation and nullification of all the relevant criminal cases against him.

“There were only glancing references to the timing of the trial and no particular sense of urgency among the more conservative justices at Thursday’s argument. Instead, several of them criticized what they suggested was a political prosecution brought under laws they said were ill suited to the case at hand,” writes Liptak.

Here the Times says nothing about the abject Orwellian absurdity of (a) the “conservative” (radical right) justices suggesting that the statutes special federal prosecutor Jack Smith cites in his January 6 indictment of Trump are ill-suited to Trump’s highly documented coup attempt and of (b) calling the Justice Department’s fatally belated effort to apply the rule of US law to tyrannical executive branch overreach a “political prosecution.”  

“If the court effectively blocks a prompt trial, particularly after it acted quickly in March to restore Mr. Trump to the ballot in Colorado,” Liptak writes, “it will surely ignite furious criticism from liberals and others who view the former president’s actions as an assault on democracy and the rule of law.”

Please.  There’s not much “if” about it. That aside, notice how the Times correspondent writes as if it’s just “liberals” and “others’” “view” that the openly fascist Trump attacked “democracy and the rule of law.”  There’s doubt this? Seriously?

But here comes the biggest pile of fetid shit in Liptak’s report:

“The argument, which lasted more than two and a half hours, was largely focused on whether Mr. Trump and other presidents could be prosecuted for their official conduct and on how to tell the difference between those actions and private ones. D. John Sauer, Mr. Trump’s lawyer, argued for an expansive understanding. In answer to hypothetical questions, he said that presidential orders to murder political rivals or stage a coup could well be subject to immunity. But several of the conservative justices seemed disinclined to consider those questions or the details of the accusations against Mr. Trump. Instead, they said the court should issue a ruling that applies to presidential power generally.“ ‘We’re writing a rule for the ages,’ Justice Neil M. Gorsuch said. Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh also said the court should think about the larger message of its decision. ‘This case has huge implications for the presidency, for the future of the presidency, for the future of the country,’ he said, adding: ‘It's going to cycle back and be used against the current president or the next president.’ Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., in an inversion of the conventional understanding of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, said that a ruling for Mr. Trump could enhance democratic values. ‘A stable, democratic society requires that a candidate who loses an election, even a close one, even a hotly contested one, leave office peacefully,’ he said, adding that the prospect of criminal prosecution would make that less likely. ‘Will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?’ he asked. ‘And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process, where the loser gets thrown in jail.’ Justice Gorsuch identified what he said was another negative consequence of allowing prosecutions of former presidents. ‘It seems to me like one of the incentives that might be created is for presidents to try to pardon themselves,’ he said.”

Holy shit.  Note the absurd notion that the United States is a “democratic society”: it’s actually a bourgeois capitalist-imperialist class dictatorship that is right now actively repressing youthful protest against its sponsorship and protection of genocide in Gaza.

Then zero in on the part of the above block quoted passage that I italicized and boldfaced: the mother*#king fascist Trump’s lawyer actually went before the nation’s highest “rule of law” Court and said that “yes, the king-like immunity we are claiming for our Dear Leader could extend to him ordering the assassination of his political rivals and staging a coup.”

Let that sink in. 

Okay, got that? Now get this: the fascists in the majority of the Court were not interested in considering such possibilities! ….or in “the details of the accusations against Trump” – details that include the richly documented fact that the Big Orange Proud Boy f’ng tried (however sloppily) to overthrow previously normative bourgeois electoral and rule of law democracy in the United States!! 

Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh, unconstitutional agents of savagely restored forced motherhood, clearly think that the systemic necessity of preserving the US imperial presidency’s capacity to transgress civilized laws and norms “when necessary” at home and abroad trumps any effort to prosecute Trump for criminally trying to establish himself as a de facto fascist Amerikaner dictator.  And, hey, so what if that means sending out Seal Team Six to assassinate one of the president’s political rivals and overturning and election you lost or cancelling an election you might lose or….fill in the blank.

The Orwellian/Hitlerian truth inversion is ingenious. Each of these three justices wrap their embrace of authoritarianism in an anti-authoritarian pretense: properly prosecuting Trump for trying to become a dictator would open the door to un-American dictatorship, they claim to believe.

What a darkly comedic farce of justice.

“Justice delayed,” an old legal maxim runs, “is justice denied.” The Florida classified documents case has been hopelessly delayed by a right-wing Trump-appointed hack of a judge.  The Georgia election interference case will not reach trial before Trump possibly gets back into office to nullify it.  It looks like the New York Stormy Daniels-Michael Cohen-National Enquirer campaign finance case will reach a verdict before the election but “exoneration” seems likely and a guilty verdict would be unlikely to impact a locked-in/polarized electorate and move the democracy right-tilted Electoral College.

All in all the belated, delayed, obstructed, and insufficient prosecutions of Trump – he is not even charged with insurrection, contrary to the recommendations of the 2022 US House Select Committee on January 6 – have proved a polling and fundraising boon for the top Republi-Nazi. He has used the feckless legal actions against him to his advantage, absurdly claiming that he is being persecuted by “the radical left deep state.” 

This Georgia mugshot has been fundraising gold for Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump.

If America was actually controlled by a “radical left deep state,” Trump would have been deep-sixed long ago, as in six feet under. What we really have is a failing and oxymoronic capitalist democracy – cloak for a de facto dictatorship of imperial capital – that is careening towards a far more openly authoritarian and neo-fascist form of governance, aided and abetted by people who continue to hold misplaced faith in the power of worn-out bourgeois-establishment institutions to hold back the far-right tide.  Much of the US ruling class will be fine with the dramatically escalated authoritarian sea change in the US political superstructure, which will come with major tax breaks and deregulation for the already obscenely rich and parasitic Few.

It's called chickens coming home to roost. A reckoning is due as something like a new but far-too one-sided American civil war looms over the nation.

Let’s get F’ng real here: if you think the establishment bourgeois US institutions are going to save “democracy,” decency, and the common good, you are in a dream world. Wake up! That's all played out. One by one, as I argued in my essay “The U.S. Bourgeois Democracy Farewell Tour,” the different institutions, practices, and values that were supposed to check and balance Amerikan white nationalist tyranny and keep fascism at pay are “failing,” to use one of the open Hitler-channeler Donald “Retribution” Trump’s favorite words. The incremental reform game is done. Play for the whole thing --- an actual revolution --- or go home because you are wasting your own and everyone else's time.

Postscript

In other news, one of Trump’s likely vice-presidential picks, South Dakota governor Kristi Noem, has recently released a memoir in which she boasts of having murdered a 14-month-old pheasant-hunting dog for “acting up.” This sadist is running to rule the world after Trump dies in office in 2026. She failed to properly train her ill-fated wirehair pointer Cricket. When poor Cricket “acted up” one too many times for Frau Noem, “having the time of her life” (in Noem’s words), the governor shot it dead.  The fascist Noem says this is proof that she is ready to make the tough political decisions required in America today.  The killing and torture of animals is a major sign of psychopathic cruelty towards humans as well. Fascism has always attracted psychopaths, killers, murderers, and sadists - people for whom cruelty is the point. 

I am the only grandson of the pheasant-hunting South Dakotan architect Ursa Freed, who would never have executed one of his dogs for “acting up,” for f*#’ks sake. Ursas’s second son Connie Freed died at the hands of French fascists in North Africa in 1942. My beautiful and anti-fascist border collie-pit mix Oreo has some behavior issues. Any fascist psychopath who comes after her or any other dog in my vicinity is going in for a fight: