"Oh, Calm Down," They Told Us

SCOTUS's immunity decision is even worse than it looked

"The President of the United States would be liable to be impeached, tried, and upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crime 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." — Alexander Hamilton, Federalist 69

Well, so much for originalism.

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Happy Friday.

To the Contrary is a reader-supported publication. You may disagree with me from time to time (and I expect you will, because I’m not promising you a safe space here). But I’ll always try to give it to you straight. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Friday Dogs

If you’ve been reading this newsletter, you know the drill. Before we dive into our Angry Days, we need some obligatory dog pictures.

The boys are getting ready for the annual invasion of the French grandkids (which begins today.)

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Leo dressed for the holiday:

An Overdose of Hopium?

Joe Biden is campaigning here in Wisconsin today. Tonight, we’ll see his interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos.

So, if he’s going to turn this around it starts (or ends) today.

But nota bene: The interview is necessary, but not sufficient. It’s not enough for him to do well tonight — from now on he has to do well every night. His margin for error is vanishingly small.

We’re told that Biden has good days and bad days… but the reality is that he can’t afford any more bad days. And things are moving fast:

• Democratic donors say they won't finance party until he drops out (cnbc.com)

• Biden staffs "miserable," alarmed as pressure builds (axios.com)

• Some Voters Who Supported Biden in 2020 Now Want a New Nominee - The New York Times (nytimes.com)

• Biden’s aging is seen as accelerating, lapses described as more common -Wapo

• The Economist: Why Biden must withdraw (economist.com)

**

As Democrats scrabble out from under the rubble of Joe Biden’s ghastly debate performance, they really need to ask themselves several nagging (and urgent) questions:

Why were they so shocked? Why had they been in denial so long? Had they been misled? Or had they simply refused to see what was happening right in front of them?

In other words: were they living in their own (dangerous) alternative-reality silo?

It’s not as if Democrats hadn’t been repeatedly warned about Biden’s increasingly visible frailty. Polls consistently found that huge majorities of the electorate worried about Biden’s age. Respected voices tried to sound the alarm.

But Democrats kept their eyes wide shut, choosing instead to quaff massive doses of hopium: Of course he’s old, but he’s fine. Reports of his decline are greatly exaggerated or fabrications. He’s actually “very sharp.”

Then Joe Biden shuffled out onto the debate stage. And Democrats were confronted with the sum of all their fears.

My latest piece in the Atlantic:

Even casual observers of American politics have long known that Trump-supporting conservatives are trapped in an information silo of their own making. But last week, it became clear that the Democrats are also in desperate need of a reality check.

In the Democrats’ epistemic bubble, wish-casting prevailed, the evidence in front of their own eyes was ignored, and critics were shut down.

Although the Joe Biden bubble comes nowhere near the cultist post-truth bubble that surrounds Donald Trump, the parallels are still troubling: As in the MAGA bubble, truth and facts came second to a longer-term strategic goal. As Mark Leibovich wrote in The Atlantic last night, it turns out that “Republicans are not the only party whose putative leaders have a toxic lemming mindset and are willing to lead American democracy off a cliff.”

Again and again, establishment Democrats brushed off warnings of a problem. Polls consistently found that huge majorities of the electorate were worried about Biden’s age. Even inside the White House, Politico reports, Biden’s “growing limitations were becoming apparent long before his meltdown in last week’s debate.” One apparent sign of worry in Biden’s camp, according to some analysts: He skipped the traditional Super Bowl interview and seemed reluctant to sit down with reporters. He has held the fewest press conferences of any president in the past three decades. There was also the nagging visual evidence—clips of him in public appearances that seemed to show a president in decline.

Journalists and strategists such as Leibovich, Ezra Klein, David Axelrod, and James Carville warned repeatedly that Biden’s age was an issue. In June 2022, Leibovich wrote in The Atlantic that “the age issue will only get worse if Biden runs again. The ‘whispers’ are becoming shouts. It has become thoroughly exhausting—for Biden and his party and, to some extent, the country itself.” In retrospect, these warnings feel like notes smuggled out from behind the barbed-wired wall of denial that Team Biden and its allies built.

The result was not just a Category 5 political crisis, but also a very real crisis of credibility.

Were the Democrats being duped?

It’s possible that some establishment Democrats and even members of Biden’s staff were shielded from the president’s condition…

Still, this offers at best a partial explanation for the Biden bubble, because lots of people both in and out of politics and the media knew or suspected that the president was showing signs of cognitive impairment. For the most part, though, they chose not to talk about what they were seeing, and the pressure not to break with the groupthink was intense.

“There was a collective-action problem,” Klein explained last week. “Any individual politician or Joe Biden staffer or adviser or confidant who stepped out of line and said privately or publicly that Joe Biden shouldn’t run faced real career risk. Whereas saying nothing did not pose a risk.”

Another factor is what Ruy Teixeira calls the “Fox News Fallacy,” the idea that if a right-leaning outlet such as Fox News “criticizes the Democrats for X then there must be absolutely nothing to X and the job of Democrats is to assert that loudly and often.”

The louder and more vicious the right’s attack on Biden’s age, the deeper Democrats dug in. There was furious pushback to news reports about Biden’s alleged frailty, and critiques of “cheap fake” videos that tried to make him look senile. Some of those reports and misleading edits were, indeed, dishonest. But in reacting to them, Democrats and journalists with glaring blind spots drew the circle even tighter around their denialism….

Then came last Thursday night. Millions of Democrats were genuinely shocked: They were confronted with the massive disconnect between what they had been telling themselves and what they saw with their own eyes. And the public’s response is hard to ignore: A new New York Times/Siena poll found that Trump is leading Biden by six points among likely voters—Trump’s largest lead in this poll since 2015. Seventy-four percent of voters view Biden as too old for the job.

The question now is: Can the party break out of the bubble it has created and sustained for so long? Or will it double down on the denial?

You can read the whole thing here.

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Bonus: When bubbles burst, they really burst. Sources who’ve stayed mum, are now coming forward with devastating (and belated) stories, like this one from Olivia Nuzzi’s new piece, “The Conspiracy of Silence to Protect Joe Biden.”

When they discussed what they knew, what they had seen, what they had heard, they literally whispered. They were scared and horrified. But they were also burdened. They needed to talk about it (though not on the record). They needed to know that they were not alone and not crazy. Things were bad, and they knew things were bad, and they knew others must also know things were bad, and yet they would need to pretend, outwardly, that things were fine. The president was fine. The election would be fine. They would be fine. To admit otherwise would mean jeopardizing the future of the country and, well, nobody wanted to be responsible personally or socially for that….

Those who encountered the president in social settings sometimes left their interactions disturbed. Longtime friends of the Biden family, who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, were shocked to find that the president did not remember their names…

Saying hello to one Democratic megadonor and family friend at the White House recently, the president stared blankly and nodded his head. The First Lady intervened to whisper in her husband’s ear, telling him to say “hello” to the donor by name and to thank them for their recent generosity. The president repeated the words his wife had fed him. “It hasn’t been good for a long time but it’s gotten so, so much worse,” a witness to the exchange told me. “So much worse!”

There’s more and it’s worse. Of course, it’s possible that some of this may be exaggerated. But if even a fraction is true, it is monumentally disturbing… including the fact that all of this was kept quiet for so long, with the stakes so high.

I feel the love

Yes, I’m aware of the blowback out there. Social media is ablaze with STFUs and other missives of affection.

But I’m not really sure that we can save democracy by telling folks to ignore the evidence of their own eyes.

**

And, a quick reminder:

Let’s get something out of the way right away. I am with Bill Maher when he says, “I’d vote for Biden’s head in a jar of blue liquid versus Trump.”

Never Trump means absolutely never Trump, as in never ever.

Restoring that mendacious Vesuvius of deceit, sedition, and corruption to power would be a constitutional and moral catastrophe — and a tragic chapter in the American story. Some of us have been sounding that alarm for the last nine years; and it is now more alarming than ever.

That’s why we are having this conversation — not because we are squishy, but precisely because we grasp the urgency of the threat we face.

**

Calm down? Nope.

"The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority's reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution. Orders the Navy's Seal Team 6 to assassinate a political rival? Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold onto power? Immune. Takes a bribe in exchange for a pardon? Immune. Immune, immune, immune…. Even if these nightmare scenarios never play out, and I pray they never do, the damage has been done. The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably.” —Justice Sonia Sotomayor, dissenting in Trump v. United States.

“It is cruel irony that the Supreme Court issued its abominable decision in Trump v. United States three days before this Independence Day 2024. The American Revolution was fought in order that Americans would secure our nation’s independence from the British monarchy and its then-ruling King George III and could establish its own system of constitutional self-government in which no man -- last of all the President of the United States -- would be above the law.” Judge Michael Luttig.

“The decision immediately takes its place alongside the Supreme Court’s most poorly reasoned rulings, including in 1857, Dred Scott v. Sandford, which denied citizenship and constitutional rights to people of African ancestry; in 1896, Plessy v. Ferguson, which upheld racial segregation; and in 1944, Korematsu v. United States, which justified the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. — Sharon L. Davies, Kettering Foundation.

**

Oh, calm down, the cool kids (including Chief Justice Roberts) told us. The Trump immunity decision is not as bad as it looks, they told us.

And, in one respect, they were right. Because on more sober analysis, it is far worse.

For the moment, let’s leave the Seal Team Six thing aside, and just focus on the Court’s absolute immunity to a president’s interactions with the Department of Justice. As Hugo Lowell notes in the Guardian, under this ruling, Trump would be free to obstruct justice in a second term.

He would have carte blanche to tell prosecutors who he wants them to charge and what cases he wants to quash.

No evidence? Not a problem.

The president simply wants to fuck with a political opponent? Immune.

Shield a felonious crony from prosecution? Total green light.

Weaponize the power of the DOJ to retaliate against political critics? Have at it.

**

The substance of the decision — which invents standards of presidential immunity out of whole cloth — is breathtaking enough. But, as Quinta Jurecic and Benjamin Wittes make clear, it is the context in which it was issued that makes it genuinely appalling.

The justices were not dealing with a disembodied abstraction of presidential conduct: As they conferred vast new powers, they were looking directly at Donald Fucking Trump.

This is very much worth your time: “A Decision of Surpassing Recklessness in Dangerous Times.” The Supreme Court’s decision”would have been wrong and dangerous at any time,” they write. “It’s uncommonly so with Trump poised to retake power.”

It is a case in which the Supreme Court was asked whether it wanted to enable Trump’s avowed authoritarianism in a future presidency by disabling his prosecution for crimes committed in his prior presidency. 

It is, in other words, about some very immediate—and very non-hypothetical—dangers.

And it comes at a very specific political moment: Trump is currently leading in most polls. According to Nate Silver’s forecast, Trump has a 71 percent chance of winning the election in November. That chance is only 51 percent if you prefer the 538 forecast. But he’s the current front-runner by any reasonable measure. His opponent’s campaign is in no small turmoil following Joe Biden’s disastrous performance in last week’s debate. Trump is, in short, the single most likely person in the world to wield the powers of the American presidency come Jan. 20, 2025.

He is also a convicted criminal—no small matter when one is writing a “rule for the ages” about prospective presidential impunity, as Justice Neil Gorsuch put it during oral arguments. The court majority may flatter itself that it’s staying out of politics. But this is a fairy tale the justices are telling themselves—if they are, in fact, telling themselves this pleasant little tale. In fact, they are handing a powerful immunity to an adjudged felon who may be about to assume “the executive power” of the United States, and they are doing it by corroding—and perhaps rendering impossible—accountability for his past crimes.

It seems worth noting that the weekend before the SCOTUS decision, Trump amplified posts calling for a televised military tribunal for former congresswoman Liz Cheney on charges of “TREASON.”

Cheney fired back: “This is the type of thing that demonstrates yet again that you are not a stable adult—and are not fit for office.”

GOP's Trump cult

I have some additional thoughts over at Aaron Rupar’s newsletter.

“In many ways, Republicans are being held hostage by their own voters,” Sykes said. “The party is afraid of its own supporters. That Republican base wants the kind of Trumpist anger that he continues to stoke.”

“My concern is that there’s an entire generation of young ‘conservative’ activists who are coming into politics now and think this is normal,” Sykes said. “They understand what the incentive structures are, and the incentive structures will continue to push them to the extremes. That’s troublesome. This is not something that’s going to go away in four or five years.”

Finally

A holiday reminder of the malignant monarch-in-waiting.