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      Supreme court declines to expedite decision on Trump’s immunity claim in 2020 election case

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      The US supreme court on Friday rejected a request by the special counsel to expeditiously decide whether Donald Trump has immunity from federal prosecution over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results, before a lower appeals court issued its own judgment.The one sentence denial means the case is returned to the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit, where a three-judge panel is scheduled to hear oral arguments in January, and the case against Trump remains frozen pending the outcome of the appeal.In declining to leapfrog the lower court and fast-track the appeal, the supreme court handed a crucial and potentially far-reaching victory to Trump as he seeks to delay as much as possible his trial, currently scheduled for next March in federal district court in Washington.The decision almost certainly slows down Trump’s federal election interference case. Even if the DC circuit rules against Trump quickly, the former president can first ask the full appeals court to rehear the case, and then has 90 days to lodge a final appeal to the supreme court.Trump was indicted in June by the special counsel Jack Smith for conspiring to impede the peaceful transfer of power, but sought to have the charges thrown out by contending he could not be prosecuted for actions he undertook as president that were related to his official duties.The filing contended that all of Trump’s attempts to reverse his 2020 election defeat in the indictment, ranging from pressuring his vice-president, Mike Pence, to stop the congressional certification to organizing fake slates of electors, were in his capacity as president and therefore protected.At the heart of the Trump legal team’s filing was the extraordinary contention that not only was Trump entitled to absolute presidential immunity, but that the immunity applied regardless of Trump’s intent in engaging in the conduct described in the indictment.This month, his motion was rejected by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan. That set the stage for Trump, who had always expected the motion to fail, to lodge an appeal that would stay the case while the DC circuit considered the matter.Obtaining the stay was always part of Trump’s strategy – he is seeking delay because if he wins re-election before the trial occurs, he could arrange to have the charges dismissed – and his lawyers were counting on a lengthy appeals process that would buy the time.The strategy, according to people close to Trump’s legal team, involved Trump going to the supreme court and securing additional weeks or months of delay – only after weeks of delay before the DC circuit.But prosecutors attempted to preempt Trump’s ploy by asking the supreme court to bypass the DC circuit and resolve the immunity question directly. In court filings, the special counsel suggested keeping the March trial date was in the public interest.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe request from prosecutors that the nation’s highest court rule on a case before judgment by an appeals court – and force Trump to contend with the Supreme Court plank of his delay strategy months earlier than he anticipated – was unusual but underscored the gravity of the moment.On Friday, the court essentially sided with Trump, who had argued the day before for the special counsel’s petition to be denied, arguing on procedural grounds that prosecutors had no basis to appeal a trial court ruling that was favorable to them and where the government had not suffered any harm.The denial, appellate experts said, underscored the peril of allowing trial prosecutors to help frame issues before the supreme court, instead of having the solicitor general’s office – which normally argues on behalf of the government – refine arguments to the sensibilities of the justices.The emergency petition on the Trump immunity question did not involve the solicitor general’s office. Although the filing was signed by former deputy solicitor general Michael Dreeben, it also included the special counsel himself and two of his deputies, JP Cooley and James Pearce. More

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      in Elections

      Trump pressured Michigan election officers not to certify 2020 vote – report

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      Donald Trump made a phone call in November 2020 in which he put pressure on two Republican election officers in Michigan not to sign the official document from the state confirming that Joe Biden had won the presidential election there, according to an exclusive report by The Detroit News late on Thursday.The Detroit News outlet has obtained recordings of the call, made on 17 November 2020, where Trump, who was refusing to accept that he had just lost the White House to Joe Biden, and Republican National Committee Chair Ronna McDaniel talked to Wayne county election officials Monica Palmer and William Hartmann and told them they would look “terrible” if they signed to endorse Trump’s defeat in the crucial swing state, according to the report.Palmer and Harmann were members of the Wayne county board of canvassers, one of the state’s official county teams – each with two Democrats and two Republicans – appointed by state election commissioners for duties such as inspecting ballots and certifying elections for all local, countywide and district offices.Trump told them on the phone call obtained and reported by the Detroit News that: “We’ve got to fight for our country. We can’t let these people take our country away from us.”McDaniel is from Michigan and was also reportedly on the call and told the two board members: “If you can go home tonight, do not sign it,” adding “We will get you attorneys.”Trump then added: “We’ll take care of that.”The newspaper further reported that representatives of Palmer, McDaniel and Trump, contacted by the reporter in question through spokespeople, did not dispute a summary of the call that was shared with them. The News said Hartmann died in 2021.On Thursday Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung issued a statement saying that Trump’s call was “taken in furtherance of his duty as president of the United States to faithfully take care of the laws and ensure election integrity, including investigating the rigged and stolen 2020 presidential election”.The call and then Palmer and Harmann’s refusal to add their signatures to Wayne county’s official certification of Biden’s victory at the ballot box was apparently designed to sow doubt about the accuracy of the result.Palmer and Hartmann’s refusal to sign the certification and a failed attempt to withdraw their votes from the day before in which they confirmed Biden’s victory in the county did not impede Biden’s win in Michigan. That was a crucial piece of his 2020 victory on behalf of the Democratic party, with he and now-US vice president Kamala Harris beating Republicans Trump and his Vice-President Mike Pence’s bid for re-election.The report of the phone call has strong echoes of the call Trump made on 2 January 2021, in which he pressed the secretary of state in Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to overturn Joe Biden’s victory in that state, too. News of the phone call emerged almost immediately.The pressure on Raffensperger is part of the criminal case against Trump and multiple co-defendants in Georgia, accusing them in a racketeering case of an election interference conspiracy.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Wayne county tapes in Michigan are understood not to be part at this time of the federal election interference case against Trump brought by special counsel Jack Smith on behalf of the US Department of Justice.Michigan officials are still investigating Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat in the state in 2020. The primary season for the 2024 presidential election begins in January and Trump is the frontrunner for the Republican nomination as he seeks re-election despite facing dozens of indictments in four criminal cases – two federal cases, in which the US supreme court has now become involved, as well as one in New York and the one in Georgia.Jonathan Kinloch, a Wayne county board of canvassers member, but one of the two Democrats, told the Detroit News that the phone call from Trump and McDaniel that the outlet just reported was “insane”.“It’s just shocking that the president of the United States was at the most minute level trying to stop the election process from happening,” Kinlock told the News. More

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      How Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric is taking over the Republican party

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      Donald Trump has the tacit blessing of senior Republican figures as he seeks to put border security front and center of the 2024 election by deploying fascistic language to fire up his support base, political analysts warn.The frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 has called for a sharp crackdown on immigration and asserted at a weekend rally that migrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”.The comment drew on words similar to the Nazi leader Adolf Hitler in his autobiography and manifesto Mein Kampf.But, despite widespread condemnation of Trump’s remarks, some top Republicans have shied away from criticizing the former US president, who is the overwhelming favorite to win the party’s nod to face off against Joe Biden in the race for the White House.Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina told NBC’s Meet the Press: “I could care less what language people use as long as we get it right … I think the president has a way of talking sometimes I disagree with. But he actually delivered on the border.” Nicole Malliotakis, a New York congresswoman, told CNN: “He never said ‘immigrants are poisoning’, though … He didn’t say the word ‘immigrants’.”And this week Greg Abbott, the Republican governor of Texas, signed a law that allows police to arrest migrants suspected of crossing the border illegally and permits judges to order them to leave the US. Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, said: “It is very much in line with what many Republicans like to do or tend to do, which is demonise immigrants and also dehumanise immigrants.”Activists note how the Republican party has veered right with Trump. Maria Teresa Kumar, president and chief executive of Voto Latino, a grassroots political organisation, said via email: “Trump may say the quiet parts loud, but he’s far from alone. There were members of the Republican party not long ago who understood the need for bringing the country together. [President George W] Bush, a Texan, sought immigration reform.“Today, we see elected Republicans use rhetoric and policies for political expediency at the cost of unification. There is no doubt that we are living in a multicultural democracy – the first in history. Instead of embracing this superpower that will serve us well on the world stage, they choose division that hurts millions of fellow citizens.”Immigration is one of the most divisive problems in American politics, and bipartisan reform attempts have repeatedly failed over the past two decades. On Tuesday leaders of the Senate said a deal to bolster border security and provide additional aid to Ukraine is unlikely to come together soon.The White House’s willingness to consider concessions, and even a revival of Trump-like policies, has drawn fierce condemnation from progressives in Congress and activists who say the ideas would gut the asylum system and spark fears of deportations from immigrants already living in the US.Kumar warned against policymaking based on fearmongering. “Right now, extremists have taken the issue hostage, and they are making a commonsense solution impossible. The current immigration debate is way out of step with where Americans are on the issue, and I expect this will drive Latinos and moderates to the polls in 2024.”While Trump’s language echoes Nazis in its extremism, it arrives in the context of years of Republicans shifting the boundaries of what is deemed acceptable. Tom Tancredo, a former congressman from Colorado, pushed for strict immigration laws and enforcement and was accused of ties to white nationalist groups.Steve King, a former congressman from Iowa, once compared immigrants to dogs and defended the terms “white nationalism” and “white supremacy”. (King has recently campaigned with the rightwing Republican candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in Iowa.) Nativist dog whistles have now been replaced by a totalitarian bullhorn.Joe Walsh, elected to Congress in the populist Tea Party wave of 2010, said of Trump’s recent comments: “As someone who used to say shit like that too much, I know that this issue animates the Republican party base better than any other issue, so Trump will keep saying shit like this because it works.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionMore than seven in 10 Republicans (72%) say newcomers are a threat, compared with a far lower percentage of independents (43%) and Democrats (21%), according to a recent survey by the Public Religion Research Institute thinktank in Washington. Two in three Republicans agree with the “great replacement” theory, which posits an elite conspiracy to supplant and disempower white people.Walsh, now a podcast host and outspoken Trump critic, added: “The Republican party base is older and white. You can scare the shit out of them by talking about all these brown and Black people coming from all these different countries into America and it’s going to change America. That scares the white party base more than anything.”But while Democrats abhor Trump’s choice of words, some may be vulnerable to the underlying message. As record numbers cross the US-Mexico border, seven in 10 voters disapprove of the president’s performance on immigration, according to a Monmouth University opinion poll released this week. It is no longer an issue for border states alone as thousands of migrants are bussed to major cities.Walsh commented: “Democrats better watch out because this issue – not Trump’s language – is a huge vulnerability for Joe Biden and the Democrats. There are a lot of people outside of the Maga [Make America Great Again] base who care about our border but are too afraid to say anything. This issue has resonance.”Democrats are on the defensive. At a press conference, Chuck Schumer, the majority leader in the Senate, conceded: “What Donald Trump said and did was despicable, but we do have a problem at the border and Democrats know we have to solve that problem, but in keeping with our principles.”For many it is cause for alarm ahead of next year’s presidential election, expected to be a rematch between Biden and Trump. John Zogby, an author and pollster, said: “What had been evenly balanced between Democrats and Republicans on the border and on undocumented workers has shifted now towards Trump.“He is defining the issue. The stance on border security is much more defined and much more the dominant position than the issue behind fairness, equity, even the role of federal government. Those who care about undocumented workers are just not in the mainstream any more.” More

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      Trump shouldn’t be eligible to run again. But America’s highest court may disagree | Margaret Sullivan

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      Should there be a political price to pay for a president who refuses to engage in a peaceful transfer of power and incites a violent coup to stay in office?Common sense says yes.As does a majority vote of the Colorado supreme court. But since their stunning ruling this week that Donald Trump may not appear on their state’s primary ballot, many a lawyer and pundit is arguing otherwise.They say, for example, that it’s not the role of a court but of the voters to decide a matter of such import. They don’t seem to recall that the voters did decide in 2020 when they elected Joe Biden, but that Trump refused to accept that decision and did everything in his power to reverse it.Others allow that the constitution does provide that insurrection is disqualifying but they ponder whether Trump – without a legal conviction – really fits that definition. And in some cases, these critics twist themselves into verbal knots to express their doubt.“I generally say that Trump attempted to secure an unelected second term in office,” wrote Jonathan Chait in New York magazine. “Insurrection,” he notes, may be useful shorthand for Trump’s role but it’s too imprecise to accomplish what the Colorado jurists say it does.President Biden sounded sensible when asked by a reporter if Trump is an insurrectionist. “It’s self-evident … he certainly supported an insurrection. There’s no question about it. None. Zero.”But even Biden, hardly a disinterested party, admits another obvious factor: the US supreme court will make the ultimate decision.The smart money seems to be on the court’s ruling in Trump’s favor.Elie Mystal, justice correspondent for the Nation, predicted that the highest court will overturn Colorado 8-1, that the opinion will be written by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Elena Kagan, and only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson will dissent.“John Roberts is probably standing outside Elena Kagan’s office like [actor John Cusack] with a jukebox right now,” Mystal quipped, alluding to the iconic pleading-for-attention scene in the 1989 movie Say Anything. “He needs her for cover for what he’s about to do … He’s playing a full 80s mixtape.”Other anti-Trumpers remain more hopeful, for some plausible reasons. One is that that conservative justice Neil Gorsuch, before he rose to his current lofty position, once wrote that states may and should protect the integrity of the political process by keeping candidates off the ballot if they are “constitutionally prohibited from assuming office”.I’m no constitutional lawyer but Trump’s post-election actions like inciting an insurrection and pushing a fake-electors scheme seem strong enough to fit that bill. But, of course, there are ways to justify the opposite.“A serious and careful opinion that reaches a reasonable conclusion,” was how the UCLA law professor Rick Hasen characterized the Colorado ruling. But he noted that, whether on the merits or on doctrinal grounds, the supreme court certainly can find grounds to disagree.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHasen calls it imperative that the court move quickly: “Voters need to know if the candidate they are supporting for president is eligible.” A later determination of eligibility, especially if it were to involve congressional Democrats, “would be tremendously destabilizing”.For me, it comes down to this. Trump is an anti-democracy candidate, and his actions, over the past eight years, have proven that, time after time.Too many Americans are so inured to his firehose of outrages that they don’t see as clearly as the Colorado jurists do that this man now should not be eligible for the leadership of the free world. Mainstream media’s horserace fixation, and rightwing media’s relentless propaganda, has made that blindness worse. (On Thursday morning, Fox News offered this mind-blowing chyron: “GOP leaders suggest removing Biden from red-state ballots over border crisis.”)Even if the Colorado justices don’t prevail, I am grateful to them for stating some obvious truths: that Trump has gone far beyond the limits of what’s acceptable in a candidate for highest office. That the checks and balances of the branches of government exist for a reason. That Trump doesn’t have to be convicted of insurrection, though he may eventually be, to be disqualified via the 14th amendment of the US constitution.After all he’s done – especially in the shocking wake of the 2020 election – Trump is clearly unfit for office.Whatever the outcome, having that recognized by a well-respected state court is a victory for common sense and integrity.
      Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      US supreme court urged to make ‘immediate, definitive decision’ on Trump’s immunity

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      Jack Smith has urged speed for the supreme court to take up the issue of whether Donald Trump is, as the former president claims, immune from criminal prosecution on federal charges over his efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss.On Thursday the US special counsel submitted a new file to the supreme court in Washington DC, reiterating his argument for urgency in their consideration of such a key element of the federal election interference case, in response to Trump’s latest move the day before.On Wednesday, Trump’s team asked the highest court in the US to stay out of the argument about whether he has immunity from federal criminal prosecution, after Smith asked the court last week to take up review of the matter.On Thursday, Smith submitted to the supreme court that in the public interest it should make an “immediate, definitive decision” on the “important constitutional question” of Trump’s immunity or lack of it in the federal election interference case.“The charges here are of the utmost gravity. This case involves – for the first time in our nation’s history – criminal charges against a former president based on his actions while in office,” the latest submission said.Smith’s filing added: “Enforcing federal criminal laws that prohibit such conduct is vital to protecting our constitutional processes and democracy itself.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionSmith is the veteran prosecutor appointed as special counsel by the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, in November 2022, to lead two federal investigations of Trump, the election interference case and the alleged mishandling of classified documents that were discovered at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida after he left office. More

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      Is barring Trump from office undemocratic? Let’s assess point by point | Jan-Werner Müller

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      The decision by the Colorado supreme court to ban Donald Trump from the Republican primary has received pushback from some predictable and some not-so-predictable quarters.The former president’s supporters of course consider him the great Maga martyr, temporarily hindered by nefarious elites from his rightful return and revenge; in this morality play, the US supreme court, besieged with accusations of being undemocratic, can now play the savior by putting him back on the ballot and making the people Trump’s ultimate judge.Some liberals also fuss about the political fallout of the decision, worried that barring Trump from running will provoke chaos and violence. And the left, suspecting a “liberal plot against democracy”, is not happy either: they reproach the liberals who welcome Trump’s disqualification for wanting to short-circuit the political process – thereby revealing deep distrust of democracy or at least defeatism about confronting Trump in an open contest. All these concerns are mistaken.The Colorado supreme court comprehensively refuted Trump’s claims, especially the ones bordering on the absurd. The justices patiently argued that parties cannot make autonomous, let alone idiosyncratic, decisions about who to put on the ballot – by that logic, they could nominate a 10-year-old for the presidency. They also painstakingly took apart the idea that the now famous section three of the 14th amendment covers every imaginable official expectation of the president. In terms clearly tailored to appeal to justices on the US supreme court, they explain that plain language and the intent of the drafters of the amendment suggest that insurrectionists – including ones at the very top – were not supposed to hold office again, unless Congress voted an amnesty with a two-thirds majority.The court’s majority also made the case that the House of Representatives’ January 6 report is not some partisan attack on poor Trump and hence could be admitted as evidence; they then drew on that evidence to show that Trump had clearly engaged in insurrection; they did not have to prove that Trump himself had led it (of course, he didn’t valiantly enter the Capitol to “save democracy” – his words – but tweeted the revolution from the safety of the White House).We know that few Maga supporters will be swayed by the evidence – in fact, the entry ticket to Trump’s personality cult is precisely to deny that very evidence. But it is more disturbing that liberals still think that prudence dictates that Trump should run and just be defeated at the polls.For one thing, the same liberals usually profess their commitment to the constitution – and the Colorado court has given an entirely plausible reading of that very document. Should it simply be set aside because supporters of a self-declared wannabe dictator threaten violence?Some liberals also appear to assume that, were Trump to lose in November 2024, their political nightmare would stop. But someone who has not accepted defeat before, doubled down on the “big lie”, and ramped up authoritarian rhetoric is not likely to just concede. Would the logic then still be that, even if the law says differently, Maga supporters must somehow be appeased?The more leftwing critique is the most interesting. Liberals are charged with having a Mueller moment again. By trusting courts to save democracy, they reveal how little faith they have in the people; they appear to hope that, magically, wise old men (it’s usually men) like Robert Mueller, acting for more or less technocratic “institutions”, will solve a challenge through law when it should be solved politically.The only question is: by that logic, are any measures meant to protect democracy but not somehow involving the people as a whole as such illegitimate? Had Trump been impeached after January 6, would anyone have made the argument that this was the wrong process and that he just should keep running in elections no matter what?Countries other than the US are more comfortable with the notion that politicians or parties expected to destroy democracy should be taken out of the democratic game. The threshold for such a decision has to be very high – clearly, there’s a problem if attempts to save democracy are themselves undemocratic. Here the Colorado decision is more vulnerable: as one of the dissenting judges pointed out, Trump might not have been given due process; even prosecutor Jack Smith, a master legal chess player, is not going after Trump for insurrection.Three factors can mitigate anxieties about undemocratic measures to save democracy, though: one is that, before a drastic decision like disqualification is taken, an individual has to exhibit a very consistent pattern of wanting to undermine democracy. Check, for Trump.Second, there has to be some room for political judgment and prudence: disqualification is not automatic and not for life; in theory, Congress could pass an amnesty for Trump in the name of democratic competition.Third, banning a whole party can rightly make citizens with particular political preferences feel that their voices are silenced; in this case, though, no one is removing the Republican party. And, of course, two Trump epigones remain on the ballot.
      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University. He is also a Guardian US columnist More

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      in US Politics

      Colorado supreme court justices face death threats after Trump ruling

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      Justices on the Colorado supreme court are receiving a barrage of death threats after it ruled to exclude Donald Trump from the state’s presidential ballot next year because of his attempts to cause insurrection.A report compiled by Advance Democracy, a non-partisan non-profit organization, said there was “significant violent rhetoric” against the justices and Democrats on social media, according to NBC News.Some of the worst of it was posted on fringe websites, including one post that said “behead judges” and “slam dunk a judge’s baby into the trash can”.Another post on The Donald, a pro-Trump forum where a Trump supporter once publicly bragged about his involvement with the January 6 insurrection and was arrested as a result, said “this ends when we kill these fuckers”.“The normalization of this type of violent rhetoric – and lack of remedial action by social media entities – is cause for significant concern,” Daniel J Jones, president of Advance Democracy, told NBC News.“Political leaders on both sides of the political aisle need to speak out against these calls for violence, and social media platforms need to reassess their role in hosting and promoting this rhetoric.”Advance Democracy noted that some violent posts are in direct response to Trump’s own furious posts about the ruling on Truth Social. Trump has called it “election interference” and implied it proves the 2020 election was stolen, the lie that eventually led to the January 6 insurrection.It isn’t the first time Trump’s posts and comments have incited threats against a court. A New York court reported last month that the office of the judge overseeing Trump’s fraud trial had been bombarded with death threats and antisemitic abuse, including some levied against the judge’s law clerk. The office received multiple threatening voicemails, including one that told the judge “you should be assassinated … you should be executed”. Another said: “We are coming to remove you permanently.”Trump’s lawyers in his fraud trial argued that the former president, who faces 91 criminal charges and is an adjudicated rapist, has no control over those who levy violent threats.Meanwhile, the court’s ruling has shaken Washington, with Republicans railing against the decision, Democrats defending the court’s ruling and legal scholars presenting a variety of views.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an unusual move, Dean Phillips, a Democratic representative from Minnesota who is running a long-shot campaign against Joe Biden, criticized the ruling on social media, making him one of the few Democrats disagreeing with the Colorado court.“Do I believe Trump is guilty of inspiring an insurrection and doing nothing to stop it? I was there. Absolutely. Do I believe it’s wrong to ban him from the ballot in Colorado without a conviction? Absolutely,” Phillips wrote on X. “Do I believe the SCOTUS must opine immediately? Absolutely.”Other Democrats have praised the ruling. Senator Chris Coons of Delaware, a close ally of Biden, called it “striking” and said it is “undeniable in my view that [Trump] participated in an insurrection and as such should be disqualified from holding federal office.” More

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      A Republican commitment to inequality underscores Trump’s impunity | Rebecca Solnit

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      No one is above the law. That’s a familiar axiom of American life, and it’s often been bent by the power of wealth and those possessing a wealth of power, but it has never been tested as it is being tested now. If it breaks, then something fundamental to the country’s meaning and function breaks, and repair will not be easy.But as far as the Republican party and its leading candidate for the presidency, conservative members of the supreme court, and much of the Republican delegation in Congress – that is, parts of all three branches of the federal government – are concerned, someone should be above the law and all of the rest of us should be unequal under the law. It’s part of their larger commitment to inequality as law and culture.If the person above the law is also the most powerful person in the nation, then this nation becomes exactly what the American Revolution and the constitution were intended to escape and prevent: a monarchy. This week the Colorado supreme court found that the 14th amendment’s provision that anyone who, while under oath to defend the constitution, “shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against it can’t hold office again applies to Donald Trump. That is a challenge to the US supreme court to apply the law to the man who, in the case of three of those conservatives, appointed them, while a fourth member, Clarence Thomas, is married to a leader of the insurrection in question who has yet to be held accountable for her role.Legal expert Elie Mystal said in the Nation that he expects the supreme court to overturn this decision designed to “make the Supreme Court look very ugly and partisan when it bends over backward to save Trump and preserve his ability to threaten the country”.In 2019, in Trump v Vance, the chief justice, John Roberts, delivered the opinion that Trump was not immune from a state court’s demand to see his tax records, citing an 1807 case in which the then president, Thomas Jefferson, claimed to be immune to a subpoena for records. Roberts cited that case when he wrote that no one can “stand exempt from the general provisions of the constitution”, and added that “this Court rejected Nixon’s claim of an absolute privilege”.Trump himself has routinely claimed that his power as president was absolute and that it granted an immunity from prosecution and accountability that has never ended. He has made it clear that if returned to office he would institute an autocracy in open conflict with the checks and balances of the political system of the United States. In the spring of 2020, when he sought to overrule pandemic restrictions imposed by state governments, he declared in a press conference: “When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total.” It’s not, said legal scholars and governors. But he keeps trying.A surprising number of pundits said, placidly, that he was running for election in 2020 to avoid accountability for the crimes committed during his first term. That someone should want to sit atop the system of laws in order to flout the law and keep crime-ing should be shocking – and situations that are both shocking and unsurprising have been a constant of the last several years.The mainstream media have too often normalized or downplayed outrageous, alarming and criminal conduct in order to deliver news that sounds objective and calm, apparently because they believe an accurate description of a country in which one party largely remains what it once was while the other has gone berserk and lawless in unprecedented ways would seem partisan. Rightwing media have created a parallel universe in which these crimes didn’t happen or weren’t crimes or both at once.As a result, we are in a slow-moving insurrection attempt that continues even after many of the participants in the 2021 coup attempt face criminal and civil charges for their acts. If Trump is re-elected, that insurrection will have succeeded after all.The most equivalent event in US history is the civil war, in which a number of states and political leaders broke away from the Republic and waged war on it, in defense of the radical inequality that was slavery. That war, when the Union side eventually defeated the Confederacy, led to the 14th amendment. And that amendment, this week, led to Colorado’s state supreme court ruling that Trump should not appear on the ballot in that state.The US supreme court, in addition to reviewing the Colorado decision, is deciding another case about Trump – whether he has presidential immunity from prosecution in the trial charging him with, as prosecutor Jack Smith put it, “conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding”.All these facts are well known. But what underlies this unprecedented situation is something essential to the contemporary Republican party: a passionate devotion to inequality. Republicans have sought to disenfranchise voters who are likely to vote against them and to undermine the systems set up to protect elections from corruption. They’ve sought to give corporations, including the fossil fuel industry and the gun industry, immunity from accountability as both climate change and gun deaths devastate the nation, as well as to liberate dark money to dominate politics.The legislation and legal cases they have pursued makes women unequal to men by overturning the bodily autonomy necessary to make women free and equal participants in society. Having overturned abortion rights in their pliant supreme court, and launched a new era of persecution of both pregnant people and medical providers in the states they dominate, Republicans are now threatening to overturn marriage equality.Marriage equality threatens conservatives not only by making queer couples equal to straight couples, but by establishing that marriage is a freely negotiated relationship between equals, a blow to patriarchal marriage’s demand that wives submit to husbands. Some Republicans, including the new house speaker, also aspire to eliminate no-fault divorce, which would trap unhappy couples in general and abused women in particular.With their support for Muslim bans and their attacks on immigrants, affirmative action and legislation protecting minority rights, and on first amendment rights to free speech and protest, conservatives have sought to return this country to the inequality that has been increasingly overcome in recent decades. It is in fact exactly this equality that they have fought against, with fury, in recent decades. Additionally, in 2022, five Republican congressmen, including then speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy, ignored congressional subpoenas from the January 6 committee, demonstrating that they considered themselves, too, to be above the law.At the end of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, the pigs who have risen to dominate and subjugate the other creatures eliminate six of the seven commandments they agreed upon in founding their little republic. And they modify the seventh, which declares “all animals are equal”, by adding to it “but some animals are more equal than others”.Donald Trump has lived his life as though he was more equal than others, and he is backed by a party seeking to make inequality prevail as the law of the land and make that law unable to hold some animals accountable. Whether or not the animals who believe they are more equal than others are rendered equal under the law is in part in the supreme court’s hands now. The rest of it is up to, as it usually is, citizens and their elected representatives.
      Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility More