Dear Justice Roberts: Thanks for the Oligarchy*
After writing this week’s post (published separately) which started out as satire . . . until it wasn’t, FOTUS posted, “He who saves his Country does not violate any law,” a quote attributed to Napoleon. I read it simply to mean, ‘lofty ends in the service of country justify extreme measures, including criminality,’ and in FOTUS’s case as he destroys American exceptionalism here and throughout the world, and the GOP-controlled congress cedes him Article 1 power, ‘I will do whatever the fuck I want, and there’s nothing you fuckers can do about it.’
People were shocked, aghast, gobsmacked, which, frankly, surprised me. Everyone knows — or should know — Trump believes he can do whatever the fuck he wants, including violate any laws without adverse consequence to him. He can bash in the heads of migrant infants on Fifth Avenue or anywhere else he chooses. That appears to be how he’s lived much of his life. The evidence suggests that’s what he thought even before the Supreme Court handed him immunity from prosecution for any crime he commits so long as he nominally couches his criminality in some “official presidential act.” As Rolling Stone’s Asawin Suebsaeng said of FOTUS’s ends/means quote, “At least [for once] he’s being honest.” Trump Publicly Admits He Thinks He Can Break Any Law He Wants (February 15, 2025).
During Justice Roberts’s tenure as Chief, three U.S. Supreme Court decisions, in my view, have reasonably assured the demise of democracy and the rise of oligarchy in the United States:
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission (majority opinion authored by Justice Kennedy) handed political power and influence to wealthy donors and corporations like, say, Elon Musk who ‘legally’ purchased the presidency for Trump and himself with $250,000,000. See Campaign Finance Reform Is Dead. Citizens United Killed It (Paul Blumenthal, Huffington Post, January 18, 2025) (emphasis added); see also Inside the rise of US oligarchs and how it opened a dark money ‘floodgate’ (Riley Stuart, ABC News, November 20, 2024). Now we see Trump’s quo to Musk’s quid, the nominal president having turned over massive political influence and executive power to yet another egomaniacal freak on a quest for world domination.
Shelby County v. Holder (majority opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts) wholly undercut the 15th Amendment which assures citizens the right to vote regardless of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude,” and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which outlawed discriminatory voting practices adopted by many southern states after the Civil War. As the country becomes more diverse and less white, white folk are becoming even less interested in making it easy for nonwhites to vote or allowing them to vote at all. After Shelby County gutted the Voting Rights Act in 2013, southern states “wasted no time implementing election changes” meant to suppress the Black vote, attempting to disguise their discriminatory intent in pretext, offering solutions in search of problems. Those laws intentionally target minority voters to enhance the electoral prospects of the mostly white party in power. Shelby County makes it considerably more difficult and time consuming to challenge those laws for what they are.
Trump v. United States (majority opinion authored by Chief Justice Roberts) handed FOTUS criminal immunity. “At least with respect to the President’s exercise of his core constitutional powers,” Chief Justice Roberts, out of whole cloth, penned, “this immunity must be absolute. As for his remaining official actions, he is entitled to at least presumptive immunity.” Breaking down the Trump immunity decision (Scott Bomboy, National Constitution Center, July 16, 2024).
Oh, and when he needs assistance advancing his criminal enterprise, he has the absolute constitutional, unchallengeable ability to pardon his coconspirators.
Finally, Trump can, and likely will, defy court orders. As Trump would say, “there’s absolutely nothing you motherfuckers can do about it.” The courts and congress have no enforcement power. That falls on the executive branch which you might have noticed is currently headed by a 34-time convicted felon with immunity from criminal prosecution. Federal Marshals who traditionally assist the courts in such matters are part of FOTUS’s Department of Justice.
The end.
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.