Bombthrower-in-Chief
If you’re a deeply uncivilized person like me, schadenfreude is a beautiful thing. I felt the pleasure of it late last week, when SCOTUS turned up the heat on POTUS. After giving out free passes like a PEZ dispenser gone wild, the Supreme Court decided to read the Constitution. Lo and behold, only Congress can tax us! The President’s orgy of tariffs is illegal! He may still enjoy unnatural immunity, but the court affirmed the existence of constraints. Imagine that: we have a separation of powers!
Sauron will, of course, find a way. It was the second thing he said when the verdict came down. There’s a short-term fix that allows him to impose tariffs, but unless he decides to ignore the court’s authority, these expire within 150 days. They are also limited to modest increases, at least by the standards of the Orange One’s program. The administration will also be distracted by the inevitable demand for refunds. Perhaps the best we can hope for is a slowing down, but that will be better than what has happened so far: economic policy as the plaything of a man using the American marketplace to pursue personal vendettas.
But the first thing Trump said should concern us more. It was less a speech than the shriek of metal against metal. Feeling the sting of the Court’s rebuke, he castigated its members as “disloyal” to the Constitution. Since that can’t possibly be what he meant to say, read “disloyal to the authority of Donald Trump.” He called his own appointees disgraceful and declared them embarrassments to the families that produced them. He then baselessly claimed that they were tools of foreign powers, promise to reveal the evidence in time. Already there is a unanimous judgment that such poisonous claims have never before been made.
That doesn’t mean that there is no one to defend him. The very night that the decision came down, Scott Jennings used his pulpit on CNN to explain away the President’s screed. Jennings tutted briefly about the President’s tone, but tried to persuade us that Trump was just angry, that his words had no meaning beyond the moment. Like many other episodes in his so-called presidency, they were yet another instance of rhetorical steam, and we should properly sympathize with Sauron’s frustration. Anyone would feel the same under the circumstances, and this was the common response of a passionate soul. This is the strange idea that speech is not behavior, that it exists in a zone devoid of consequence.
The truth of course is that it is just the opposite. Many presidents have faced uncooperative courts, but no one has spoken about them with such venom, or debased himsef so deeply in the process. Obama’s critique comes immediately to mind. He was clearly frustrated in his State of the Union, but kept himself from the edge of the cliff. That’s what a president is supposed to do, to avoid the sewer of what cannot be unsaid. Instead, Trump stoked rage against the judiciary—including families, including children.
Scott Jennings of course knows all of this, but when you give your soul to the Devil, he doesn’t give it back. Nothing will change until the November elections when the process of reclamation can truly begin.