Supreme Court is leaning towards a ruling that will indefinitely postpone Trump trials

Of all the hyperconservative judges on the Supreme Court in Washington, Samuel Alito is perhaps the most notorious after the corrupt Clarence Thomas. One of the demonstrators in front of the US Supreme Court on Thursday held up a sign: “Jail Thomas & Alito”. Alito serves the Republican cause, and therefore that of Donald Trump, to the point of absurdity. But on Thursday he fried it extra brown during the discussion of Trump’s claim that a president has absolute immunity for everything he does.

“A stable democratic society,” Alito said, “requires that a president who loses an election relinquish power peacefully. So it would be a bad idea to allow criminal prosecution of a president, because that would give him an incentive not to relinquish power.”

The high court said this in a case involving a president who has already committed a paper coup to stay in power and who is clearly considering doing so again – especially if he gets the green light from the judges.

Alito’s colleague Sonia Sotomayor responded: “What a stable democratic society needs, I think, is administrators who have good faith, and who are held accountable when they violate that trust.” But Sotomayor is one of only three more progressive judges of the nine on the Court.

Radio play behind the curtain

We would have liked to see the faces, but alas: following the discussion of the Supreme Court debates is a radio play in a chic setting. It seemed like a golden opportunity to see this supreme court, so controversial since the many Trump appointments, live at work. The Supreme Court is an impressive, but also heavily secured building. In the past, this institution was revered by American citizens, but today only die-hard Trump fans still do so.

The rules of the game for the media are imposed with a heavy hand. With a serial number for the assigned seat, you are led into the monumental courtroom – a kind of temple in a circle of fifteen-meter-high Ionic columns. At least as far as we could see, because the press areas were located in a side aisle. The luckiest ones could see a judge or two between the columns and enormous burgundy curtains. We were unlucky and had to make do with half a Brett Kavanaugh. A radio play, in which you just had to hear who was talking by the voice. For a Court that once made important judgments on press freedom, this is quite disrespectful to the media.

Kill with impunity

The judges questioned Trump’s lawyer, John Sauer. Did his plea for the absolute immunity of a president also mean that that president could kill a competitor with impunity? “Yes,” Sauer replied. “It would be bad behavior for that president, but our Founding Fathers provided no punishment for it.”

It does not look like the Court will follow this very extreme interpretation, because as Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson said: “What prevents a president from turning the White House into a crime headquarters?”

But the conservative justices steered the case away from Trump as much as possible. “We are making justice far into the future,” said Neil Gorsuch. According to him, making presidents liable to prosecution threatens to undermine their power.

Everything indicates that the judges will seek an intermediate position in their judgment, which is expected by the end of June. After all, there was already intense talk on Thursday about the difference between a president’s official and personal actions – or in Trump’s case in this matter, his attempts to sabotage the transition of power: whether he was acting as a sitting president or as a self-interested candidate.

In the press room afterwards, Jess Bravin, a veteran Supreme Court reporter, said The Wall Street Journal us: “You can sense where this is probably going. They will send the case back to a lower federal court to decide what are public and what are private acts. That will take a long time and an appeal is possible again.”

Trump will not get what he wanted, because he will still be prosecuted, but he will still get it. Because if the Supreme Court decides this way, the chance that the major criminal cases about his opposition to the transfer of power – the federal one in Washington and the state level in Georgia – will be started before the November 5 elections will suddenly be very small.

Meanwhile in New York

And so Trump should mainly be concerned about the hush money and election fraud case in New York. There the news was once again less good for him. David Pecker, the pulp newspaper emperor who worked for Trump in the run-up to the 2016 election, was very clear: Trump’s hush money payment to Stormy Daniels had nothing to do with family or decency, it was purely for campaign reasons. This confirms the statement that it was a plot to commit electoral fraud. Pecker can testify freely: he signed a non-prosecution agreement with the prosecutor’s office.