Yesterday’s Supreme Court rulings were a masterclass in judicial doublespeak. On one hand, the Court dealt President Trump a series of stinging defeats, rejecting his claims of absolute immunity and curtailing his executive overreach in ways that would make a Victorian constitutionalist weep with joy. On the other hand, they simultaneously expanded the powers of the presidency, granting future occupants of the Oval Office a broader latitude than any since the days of FDR’s court-packing scheme. The message is clear: the man in the chair has failed, but the chair itself has grown more comfortable.
Let us examine the contradictions. In Trump v. United States, the Court ruled that a former president is not immune from prosecution for acts committed while in office, a decision that sent shivers down the spines of those who hoped the imperial presidency might finally be reined in. Yet, in a separate ruling, the Court upheld the president’s broad discretion over federal spending, effectively green-lighting the sort of executive aggrandisement that has become the hallmark of modern governance. The net effect: Trump loses this round, but his successors win the war.
This is the sort of irony that would have amused Gibbon. The fall of Rome, after all, was not a single event but a long process of institutional decay masked by short-term victories. Today’s Court has done the same: it has preserved the appearance of accountability while hollowing out the substance of separation of powers. The presidency, once a temporary magistracy, is now a throne. And we are all subjects.
The intellectual decadence on display here is staggering. The justices, cloaked in robes of supposed impartiality, have instead chosen to play a game of constitutional whack-a-mole, hitting down a tyrant while propping up his office. This is not justice. This is a bureaucratic farce. In the Victorian era, such contradictions would have been resolved through parliamentary reform or, failing that, revolution. But we are not Victorians. We are a people content to watch our institutions rot while arguing about who is the lesser of two evils.
What does this mean for the nation? It means that the next president, whether Republican or Democrat, will inherit a legal framework that empowers them to act with fewer checks than at any point in a century. It means that the rule of law is now subordinate to the rule of the man in the moment. And it means that we, the citizens, have been reduced to spectators in a theatre of constitutional abrogation.
I am not a fan of Trump. I find his vulgarity and incompetence grotesque. But I am even less a fan of the creeping Caesarism that the Court has now endorsed. The defeat of a single man is no cause for celebration when the institution he sought to corrupt has been made stronger. This is a dark day, dressed in the garb of a victory.
