Charles Davidson: The Supreme Court and the Death of American Democracy

Cutting straight to the heart of its harrowing July 1, 2024, decision from the bench, the blatantly partisan majority of U.S. Supreme Court justices sounded its death knell for American democracy, decreeing that the rule of law does not apply to the official decisions of the President of the United States.

The court granted carte-blanche legal immunity to any president, current or future, who deigns, by means of his or her official actions, to engage in criminal behavior in the furtherance of tyranny. 

By granting presidents “absolute” and “presumed” immunity before the law, the high court crowned the occupant of the office of the presidency with unfettered dictatorial powers.

As dissenting Justice Sonia Sotomayor chided, “Ironic isn’t it? The man in charge of enforcing laws can now just break them.” Moreover, she added, “In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law”—precisely what the nation’s founders constitutionally sought to prevent. 

Just so, the six Republican-appointed justices astonishingly abrogated their duty to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, which alone is reason for their impeachment and replacement.

The Supreme Court’s verdict means that potentially any American citizen or non-citizen, who so much as even criticizes an autocratic president, which Donald Trump aspires yet again to be, is fair game for the delusional mind that seeks to eliminate his adversaries, whether by harassment, imprisonment, deportation, or assassination as official presidential actions taken without any immediately pursuant legal consequence for the president himself.

With sufficient numbers of his own party in cahoots with King Trump, as we have seen before, not even a congressional impeachment and senatorial trial for presidential high crimes and misdemeanors need succeed as a bulwark against despotism. The Kevin McCarthys and Mitch McConnells of the political class may do just as they have done before: feign displeasure and then utterly capitulate. 

Think about this. 

Think deeply before casually dismissing the court-conferred presidential immunity as a benign condition that cannot possibly metastasize into the deadly cancer of presidential tyranny. Impossible or improbable? Think again. Consider the following hypothetical yet tragically all-too feasible scenarios.

· A pathologically narcissistic President Trump, seething and fuming in his familiar state of myopic paranoia and sociopathic madness, decides to get even with the judge who conducted the hush money trial, and also the jury of citizen-peers that decided its outcome, having found him guilty of 34 felony counts of criminal behavior. Because King Trump deeply resents the shaming ordeal through which the New York court of law put him, he orders a member of his White House staff to orchestrate the exposure of every available detail of those persons’ private lives, with intent to pursue and threaten them and their families until they resort to hiding altogether from public life. Then, not coincidentally, several members of the jury mysteriously disappear and cannot be located by family, friends, or police. King Trump, reveling in the pleasure of his judicially sanctioned powers, absent legal constraint, commences this clandestine modus operandi after taking cues from the guile of Russian president Vladimir Putin whom he admires—with the highest court of the land having given the “mob boss” of the Oval Office the green light to act with impunity and immunity, above the law.

· A volatilely irrational President Trump, severely aggrieved that his former sexual playmate, Stormy Daniels, and his former fixer, Michael Cohen, testified against him at trial, orders his FBI director to assign FBI agents to track those witnesses’ respective whereabouts on a daily and nightly basis, noting their every move while secretly wiretapping their every conversation. Then, later, some months apart, Daniels and Cohen are each found dead. In a democracy operating on the presumption that everyone is treated equally before the rule of law, such a presidentially concocted scheme would appear thoroughly preposterous—that is, except for the fact that a mentally deranged King Trump would interpret his every decree and action as official, with impunity and immunity, above the law. His dirty deeds would have been accomplished before the private or official status of his actions could be adjudicated in the courts. 

· A morbidly vindictive President Trump, apoplectic and loathing all anti-MAGA public demonstrators just as much as he despises certain ethnicities and non-white-skin minorities whom he labels as rapists and criminals “poisoning the blood of our country,” declares martial law as multitudes of Americans take to the streets in city-after-city, protesting his authoritarian rule. King Trump orders the military to arrest the demonstrators en masse, and if need be, at the discretion of his self-appointed chain of commanders, fire upon them to kill. He does so in the same diabolic spirit in which the Chinese Communist government fired upon democratizing Chinese citizens in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989. Meanwhile, King Trump stands erect before television cameras and a cadre of presidential guard in military uniform, holding high in his right hand a copy of the King James authorized version of the Bible—to say to the world that America’s King Trump exercises his authority by divine right, with impunity and immunity, above the law. 

· Simultaneously, a recklessly cruel President Trump, exercising his executive muscle, nationalizes his goon squads under the aegis of a radically reorganized Department of Homeland Security, rounding up immigrants, refugees, asylum seekers, Dreamers, and others of his choosing, separating families and children from parents, confining them in wire cages and out-of-public-purview warehouses until they are summarily deported to only God knows where, and without due process or consideration as to whether they subsequently live or die. The previous time that his attorney general masterminded this crime against human beings will have been but an amateur “practice run.” Meanwhile, King Trump withdraws to his private quarters in the White House, glued to the televised reporting of mayhem breaking out across the country, just as on January 6, 2021, in his sadistic satisfaction he looked upon the storming of the capitol with glee.

Such instances of treachery by an unhinged King Trump could be but the start. For he would require of his loyal, self-appointed heads of governmental agencies that they implement the Heritage Foundation’s Presidential Transition Project 2025 or its equivalent, decimating our constitutional republic in the process of remaking it in his own idolatrous image. 

If you think that no such atrocities can take place in a MAGA-maniacal America, subsequent to Trump v. the United States as it was adjudicated by a hyper-partisan majority of the Supreme Court, then think again. 

And, heaven help you!—because King Trump will not lift a finger to defend you or anyone else against his own wanton and malevolent acts of tyranny. 

The greatest mistake Americans can make when going to the polls in November is to underestimate the damage that Trump and his minions would do. 

Let it be said as plainly as it can be said. 

A vote for Trump will unequivocally be a vote for a fascist dictator. He attempted as much the last time around. If there is a next time, he will be doubling down.

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Charles Davidson, a retired Presbyterian minister, psychotherapist, and professor, is the author of Bone Dead, and Rising: Vincent van Gogh and the Self Before God (Cascade Books) and Foster’s Pie Pan: Stories of Grace Abounding in a Fallen World (Parson’s Porch Books).

Essay copyright 2024 Charles Davidson