Donald Trump‘s inner circle doesn’t expect the Supreme Court to go along with his extreme arguments about executive power in the immunity case before the justices. But what the high court does now is almost beside the point: Trump already won.
Three people with direct knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone that many of the former president’s lawyers and political advisers have already accepted that the justices will likely rule against him, and reject his claims to expansive presidential immunity in perpetuity. Bringing the case before the court — after a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., shut down their arguments on executive power — was a delaying tactic designed to push Trump’s criminal election subversion trial past Election Day this fall. The strategy paid off so much more than MAGAworld anticipated.
“We already pulled off the heist,” says a source close to Trump, noting it doesn’t matter to them what the Supreme Court decides now.
I’m fortunate enough to be practicing in a field that does help people (though not nearly as much as I’d like…someone give me Elon’s money and then I’ll be able to make a real difference). The problem is that lawyers/judges like the ones who are handling cases like Trump’s are destroying the rule of law, the efficacy of the courts, and doing whatever they can to dismantle the very system we use to determine whether we have rights or not (dismantle it and the answer is a very clear “not”). The US legal system is already a clusterfuck with not enough budget and inequitable treatment depending on who you are; if things like precedent no longer mean anything, as SCOTUS has recently started making clear, then the legal system becomes completely unnavigable.