It’s impossible to overestimate the damage the United States Supreme Court caused to the rule of law, and original constitutional intent, when it awarded absolute immunity to a former president.
Whatever Justice Roberts and his fellow Republican leaning colleagues on the bench might claim, this was a ruling designed specifically for one man. Roberts wrote, Immunity for former presidents is “absolute with respect to their core constitutional powers,", and a former president has "at least a presumptive immunity" for "acts within the outer perimeter of his official responsibility," The latter statement, all but places a former president beyond the law.
This was Trump’s wet dream come true. The ruling has now been used to build a foundation for him to rule as a king. When America’s founders debated the US Constitution in 1787, three years after the Revolutionary War, they worked hard to define the role and powers of the new head of state. The one thing they absolutely did NOT want, was a king. Therefore, It is a deplorable dereliction of duty by the Supreme Court to deliver exactly that, in the form of a convicted felon.
The founders intent was clearly to deliver a framework in which an elected president’s powers, would be balanced by a legislature and an independent judiciary. The sole purpose being, to subject the executive to reasonable checks and balances. These were also to include impeachment by Congress if necessary. More importantly, the Constitution states, the president ‘shall nevertheless be liable and subject to Indictment, Trial, Judgment and Punishment, according to Law’.
NOBODY with any respect for the Constitution could possibly arrive at the ruling the conservative justices passed down. Far from being an interpretation of the document, it represents a total reimagining of the original intent. You don’t have to be a constitutional scholar to deduce that the ruling was in itself a dangerous act perpetrated by the very people who swore an oath the protect the integrity of this sacred founding document.
No member of the bench, let alone the Supreme Court, should be guilty of handing down such an egregious ruling. Especially at a time when Trump was publicly reminding his appointees, (as every good mafia boss would), they were only there thanks to him. Just as Trump is now extorting Zelenskyy for rare earth minerals, he extorted the ruling from the Court, to clear the way for an American autocratic nightmare.
I could talk all day about the corrupt activity of Justice Thomas and the undeclared gifts gratefully received by Justice Alito from Republican donor and billionaire Paul Singer, but that’s for another day.
Suffice to say, it’s not a stretch to conclude these judges were bought and paid for by those with close ties to the Heritage Foundation. An organization who were at that time, creating a permissive environment for their useful idiot to burn down the government. They knew the loopholes to subvert the legislative process, allowing their Supreme Court sleepers to protect their asset, all while furthering their own ideological zealotry.
Once you have the highest court in the land actively protecting a convicted felon, I’m really not sure what you can do to curb his ravenous appetite for absolute power. This is clearly evidenced by his current behavior, as he attempts to bypass the judiciary, as a co-equal branch of government. King Henry VIII would be proud of him.
Trump is a man who would burn the constitution in the blink of an eye, if it blocked his route to absolute power. It seems terrifying to think one man can render as impotent, the power vested in the institutions created to guard against such malign intent.
In 2020 when he incited an insurrection to retain power, he told the world exactly who he is. This is a man who had he been allowed, would have instructed the National Guard to shoot Black Lives Matter protesters in the legs. He’s a convenient fake Christian Nationalist, adhering to the Project 2025 playbook. A handbook which advocates for invoking the insurrection act should he faces any significant resistance from the American people.
The sole driver for every action Trump is taking, is PROFIT. Immunity is enabling him to break every rule in the book, including the selling of private access for legislative influence. The tech bro consortium who bought him the White House, received $3.04 billion in fines for breaking laws on both sides of the Atlantic in 2023. Seven days and three hours into 2024, they had already earned enough to pay all those fines. This is just a small measure of their ever increasing power.
Trump is not building an America for all, he’s building an America in which the very rich get even richer by squeezing every last drop of fiscal security from the middle and the bottom. Since Trump took up his second spell in the White House, the preparation work done in the previous two years by the Heritage Foundation, has clearly paid off. He now has loyalists installed in every corner of government and all roads to power and control lead to the White House.. He’s sacked all the Inspectors General and is already destroying evidence of any criminal act as he goes.
The addition of Elon Musk to Trump’s team relatively late in the cycle, while fiscally imperative at the time, threw a spanner in the works. However, the Heritage Foundation quickly adjusted to reluctantly accommodate his very large bank account.
Trump’s campaign was bankrolled by just ten billionaires who provided half the funding for his election run. They didn’t do that because they liked him, they simply invested to gain a seat at the table. As a result, they now hold key positions within his administration.
The Republican messaging monster did an outstanding job of creating a narrative around the Biden administration. They painted it as a corrupt fiscally incompetent government. Don’t know about you? but I have a visceral hatred of injustice. Joe Biden was buried under a mountain of egregious lies which persist to this day. Every time Trump is economically put on the back foot, he paints to a picture of him inheriting a failed economy and ever increasing levels of crime. At the same time, he places legislative failure on immigration from both sides of the aisle squarely at the feet of the previous administration.
Once Biden failed after the 2022 midterms to deliver on his promise in 2019, to be a bridge to the next generation of Dem leaders, I’m afraid the writing was on the wall. It was a fatal error that in my view lost the election in November.
Putting that aside for a moment, Despite Trumple Thinskin’s claims to the contrary, Biden handed over the world’s strongest economy and it’s important to understand just how strong it was. He presided over the fastest post pandemic recovery of ALL G7 nations. Indeed, it was faster than almost every developed country in the world. He enjoyed half century low unemployment, as wages consistently grew. Government data show employment grew more under Biden’s was presidency than under Donald Trump, and that most employment went to U.S.-born workers.
Employment grew by 13.4 million. 7.9 million for U.S. born workers and 5.5 million for foreign-born workers. The U.S. was also the number one destination for overseas inward investment.
The path of economic growth in 2024 defied expectations. In both 2023 and 2024, real GDP exceeded public and private forecasts. Despite inflation being the primary target of a highly effective GOP disinformation campaign, real inflation decreased quicker than most US economic competitors. The CHIPS Act brought hi tech manufacturing back to the US and 300,000 green jobs WERE very real and well paid. Trump could not have picked up a more healthy economy. Unlike the economic wasteland he left behind having added $7.8 trillion to the national debt. This is the president who in my opinion, caused the unnecessary deaths of over 200,000 Americans with his incompetent handling of the COVID pandemic. It’s also worthy of note, 11 out of the 12 last economic recessions were under Republican presidents.
In Trump’s usual style, he wants to lay his failures at the feet of someone else. In this case Joe Biden. Unfortunately, his arguments simply don’t hold water. Despite appearances and his daily EO proclamations, I think we can safely assume Trump is simply the useful idiot for the people with the real power and money. They kept him out of jail. Now it’s time to pay the debt.
Billionaire wealth in 2024 grew by 2 trillion. That’s 3 times faster the previous year. In a deeply unequal society with a long colonial past, the biggest beneficiaries are unsurprisingly the rich. People of Color, women and marginalized groups have been and continue to be systematically exploited at massive human cost. Most billionaire wealth is taken, not earned. 60% of it comes from either inheritance, cronyism, corruption or monopoly power.
We are now living in a time when the failure that was ‘trickle down economics’, has become ‘siphoned up economics’. This represents the next chapter in the fiscal mugging of the poor by the rich. Middle and lower income workers are now being mercilessly squeezed into fiscal insecurity to keep them in line.
I don’t think the oligarchs want to just reimagine a US economy with no guardrails and protections for the vulnerable, I think they want to burn down the global economic order. They want rid of European regulations and are prepared to destroy the EU to achieve their objectives. The destabilisation of previously valued trading partners is in my view, part of a much wider plan.
Of course I could be wrong and Trump might just be the global village idiot I originally thought he was.
Next week I’m going to dig a little deeper into where this might all go, in Part 2 ‘What next for economic Darwinism’.