The Supreme Court Must Rescue Itself From Its Own Madness

 

Simon Lazarus/

March 24, 2025

Reversals

The Supreme Court Must Rescue Itself From Its Own Madness

To stand up to Trump’s lawless power grabs, the Roberts court must disavow its own mirror-image corruptions. It may yet feel obliged to do just that.

To belabor the obvious, given the Senate Republicans’ stubbornly lockstep devotion to Trumpification, the only civic bastion potentially able to brake this flamboyantly lawless White House’s drive for unbounded power is the federal judiciary, in particular the Supreme Court. Long aware of this last potential obstacle to their ambitions, Trump and his team have been unreserved about impugning the court’s authority to dispute their sweeping definition of presidential power. Trump’s most hawkish presidential imperialists, Vice President JD Vance and Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, have trumpeted their zest for defying any judicial orders to respect legal boundaries.

At the same time, Trump himself, along with Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Justice Department, has been more coy, at least until their circumvention of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg’s March 15 order to halt extralegal deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. So all eyes have turned to Chief Justice John Roberts and his five conservative colleagues to divine whether, when, and how they might stand up to this unprecedented existential threat to the rule of law.

In a recent article, I laid out the most promising approach for the justices to take up this challenge. Namely, just do their job, as the Constitution and laws prescribe, as the Framers of those enactments anticipated, and the electorate expects. That means the straightforward civics class imperative: laser-focus on the relevant enacted text of the Constitution and pertinent statutes; interpret that text in good faith, with the lawyerly discipline of their craft, in light of its Framers’ design; and apply and enforce that interpretation, without regard to partisan, policy, personal, or institutional preferences and interests. 

That approach will enable the justices to fight this epochal war on their own turf, playing to their strengths, forcing Trump and his henchmen to play defense—and simultaneously spotlight his agenda as the lawless bid for raw, unbounded power that in fact it is. The justices will have to hope for, and cannily encourage, politically credible allies to mobilize and public support to crystallize. There is a well-known, encouraging precedent—Watergate, the court’s U.S. v. Nixon no-nonsense order joined by three Nixon-appointed justices, and its denouement—Nixon’s resignation. Indeed, there are signs, highlighted recently in these pages by Michael Tomasky and Trump’s most loathed courtroom nemesis, Norm Eisen, that a similar pushback groundswell may already be underway.

But there is a catch. When Roberts and those of his colleagues who choose to join him set out on this high road, they may quickly find themselves saying, “We have met the enemy, and it is us”—that is, themselves and their own record. 

For the most part, the record established by Roberts and Trump’s first-term judicial appointments on and, for the most part, off the high court itself, have vindicated Roberts’s fulminations that they are not “Trump’s” judges. During his first term, on significant occasions, they ostentatiously quashed attempts by him and his appointees to play fast and loose with the facts underlying legally baseless decisions. Most galling to Trump, they repeatedly rejected his multiple bids to enable him to hijack the 2020 presidential election.

However, while thus frequently frustrating Trump, Roberts and his fellow conservative justices were simultaneously hard at work on a quite different enterprise: empowering themselves to circumvent applicable law to pursue various agendas, and aggrandize their own raw power by concocting an elaborate doctrinal edifice enabling that illicit design. Often, that self-aggrandizing framework embraced notions popular in conservative ideological circles, which weakened legal guardrails against presidential abuse. And it is precisely those errant actions, disdaining long-entrenched checks and balances, on which Trump lawyers now rely to justify their power grabs—and which have given them hope, however wary, for ultimate vindication by the high court.

To win a war they cannot avoid, Roberts and his allies must rediscover their belief in a simple notion: The American president is not above the law—and they are, as Chief Justice John Marshall decreed two centuries ago, assigned by the Constitution to have the last word as to “what the law is.” But to assert that claim and make it stick politically, the justices will have to confront—and disavow—their own decisions and rhetoric in which they themselves have spurned the plain meaning of laws and decisions, pandered by mouthing extravagant far-right buzzwords, and jettisoned modi operandi central to the concept of the rule of law itself.

Examples of the Roberts court’s readiness to push aside unambiguous legal text and its Framers’ design are too many and too familiar to burden readers with anything like a complete list. Here I will showcase particularly egregious rulings occupying, in liberal Justice Elena Kagan’s apt chestnut, a “law-free zone,” and that are particularly likely to loom over the court’s responses to lawless Trump misadventures likely to reach the court.

The top of that short list is Roberts’s widely noted decades-long drive to sideline explicit core commands of the 1965 Voting Rights Act and the Fifteenth Amendment. As I and many others have detailed, before and after he joined the court, Roberts had repeatedly vented obsessive hostility to legal race preference provisions, the VRA in particular, as “a sordid business, this divvying us up by race.”

As chief justice, in decisions in 2010, 2013, and 2021, Roberts and his conservative colleagues had, as observed in a fierce 2021 Kagan dissent, repeatedly “rewritten” the VRA, with their “own set of extra-textual rules,“ to gut a statute meticulously drafted to implement President Lyndon Johnson’s instruction to his Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach, “I want you to write the goddamndest toughest voting rights act that you can devise.” In its 6–3 2021 decision upending Katzenbach’s handiwork, the court blew past several VRA provisions, the most egregious being its insistence that the law banned only state election laws or practices that intentionally caused ballot-box discrimination, in the face of “Congress’s use of an effects test, rather than a purpose test, to assess [state actions’] rules’ legality.”

Roberts and his majority didn’t misinterpret the terms of the law in question, they ignored them altogether and substituted an approach “founded,” as the Kagan dissent skewered, “on a list of mostly made-up factors, at odds with [the VRA’s] itself.” Trump’s strategists could be forgiven for reaching the obvious conclusion: If that’s the model deployed by the cadre atop the Article 3 branch to reach their policy or political goals, why shouldn’t the head of Article 2 show the same indifference to applicable law in pursuing his agendas? 

The next best example of the Supreme Court supermajority’s penchant for sidelining laws inimical to their own policy preferences is the conservative justices’ drive to gut provisions of the Clean Air Act, or CAA, that direct the Environmental Protection Agency to adopt and enforce regulations to combat global warming. This campaign reached its most extreme level yet of “We’ll do whatever we want” indifference to duly enacted law on the last day of its 2021–2022 term. The chief justice, writing for the rest of the conservative bloc, barred President Joe Biden’s EPA—in advance, before the agency had even initiated a rulemaking proceeding—from requiring utilities to increase their use of wind and solar sources (rather than coal) to fuel their power plants.

Roberts et al. acknowledged that the switch-to-renewables approach was authorized by the pertinent CAA text, which explicitly commands that the EPA require utilities to deploy the “best system for emission reduction.” But Roberts et al. decreed the text—and the evident design of its congressional Framers—to be irrelevant. They fabricated a novel version of a little used, and theretofore comparatively unexceptionable, “major questions” doctrine, which newly empowered themselves to shelve any agency action that portends “significant economic or political consequences,” even if, as in this case, the agency action in question was within the agency’s core environmental mission, and the statute was crafted precisely to confer broad authority flexible enough to handle urgent needs under unforeseeable circumstances.

Thus, to put Roberts’s CAA demolition in perspective with the Trump administration’s law-shredding antics, the chief justice and his cadre did so in a manner designed to exponentially bloat their own power. They revamped the “major questions” doctrinal construct into a club enabling them to pulverize any agency action that could have what they are willing to label prohibitively significant economic or political impact—in effect, anything that matters at all.

A third “law-free” foray by the justices on the court’s right is the most recent and most blatant: their notorious 2024 conferral of unbounded permanent presidential immunity from criminal liability, for virtually any “official” actions. To reach this result, they did not even pretend to claim any statutory or constitutional authority. As recognized across the ideological spectrum, Roberts’s opinion in Trump v. United States cast aside not just twentieth-century progressive–New Deal–Great-Society liberal governance long derided in far-right ideology, not just the “Second Founding” Reconstruction Amendments sabotaged by a century of Jim Crow rule in the South, but the core grand design for a democratic republic written unambiguously into the original 1789 Constitution, until that moment never questioned. As conservative Professor Michael Rappaport painfully acknowledged, “Presidential immunity does not accord with [the Constitution’s] original meaning.” 

The point pertinent here is not that Trump v. United States rescued Donald Trump from Jack Smith’s investigations, nor even that the decision unleashed Trump to commit second-term crimes. Roberts and at least some of the five justices who joined his opinion may have sincerely believed that tit-for-tat prosecutions of presidential predecessors would spiral over time into a fixed pattern catastrophic for constitutional democracy. Given Trump’s serial threats to prosecute his predecessor, they could have, not unreasonably, viewed Biden as a likely first beneficiary of their decision. (Of course, Trump and his acolytes are now making a mockery of any such notions that immunizing presidential criminality would banish banana republic governance from the United States.)

What matters most is that fabricating presidential immunity out of whole cloth only served to demonstrate that these justices have no compunction about throwing the law and the Constitution overboard when necessary to enable some policy or other outcome they favor. Discerning court-watchers, such as Trump’s henchmen Vought and Vance, are unlikely to have missed this inference. Nor would pundits, politicians, and much of the electorate, cued by the liberal justices’ searing dissents.

Perhaps most telling, as far as esteem for the court’s law-respecting bona fides is concerned, is the Roberts’s majority’s resistance to an enforceable code of ethics similar to that applicable to all other federal judges. In the public eye, this disdain for universally acknowledged standards of conduct must come across as greenlighting overt conflicts of interest, given the brazen misconduct of some justices or their spouses. (Some of the justices, quite possibly a majority, appear to be aware of this reputational threat and seem to favor an enforceable ethics code for their court.)

All of which leads us to the proverbial $64,000 question: Can these justices take Donald Trump or Elon Musk to task, when their own claim to fidelity to law and to ethical norms is thus flawed? Can they disavow their own “law-free” actions? The answer is, maybe they can.

Recently, especially during the court’s 2022–2023 term, bipartisan court majorities have taken steps—inconclusive but more than baby steps—down that very path, as I have elaborated. To take the example that most startled court-watchers: In overturning an Alabama redistricting gerrymander, Roberts struck an audibly different chord from his career-long antipathy to the 1965 Voting Rights Act. Laying out a widely noted “expansive interpretation,“ he lauded the VRA for “creating stringent new remedies attempting to forever banish the blight of racial discrimination in voting.” He labeled the VRA “the most successful civil rights statute in the history of the nation.”

Most eyebrow-raising, he put aside his oft-repeated visceral distaste for race preferences, observing that “the question whether additional majority-minority districts can be drawn, after all, [inherently] involves a quintessentially race-conscious calculus.” (Next Monday, March 24, the court will hear oral arguments in a substantially identical Louisiana gerrymandering case, so we will see whether Roberts and his bipartisan five-justice majority stick to their revisionist pro-VRA guns.)

But, whether or not Roberts and one or more of his conservative colleagues feel inclined to sustain their 2022–2023 tack to the center, there is another, more compelling consideration likely to spur them to prioritize turning back Trump’s second-term muscle flexing. That motivation surfaced in their skirmishes during Trump’s first term. 

Particularly revealing was Roberts’s angry 2019 rejection of Trump’s ploy to add a citizenship question to census questionnaires, intended to frighten noncitizens from participating in compiling the census. What stoked Roberts’s ire was the administration’s disingenuousness to the courts, the “disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given,” which Roberts pilloried with epithets of a sort this decorously professional superlawyer rarely reaches for—“pretextual,” “contrived,“ ”bad faith.” Roberts expressly based his decision to stifle Trump’s census scheme on the need to protect the judiciary, especially, his court—their authority, credibility, and ultimately, their relevance and power.

He explained that when judges review agency actions, “Accepting contrived reasons would defeat the purpose of the enterprise,” effectively rendering them irrelevant. He brandished a quote from Second Circuit icon Judge Henry Friendly, whom he had served as a law clerk, “Our review is deferential, but we are not required to exhibit a naïveté from which ordinary citizens are free.’”

As I and others have observed, the most consistent thread running through Roberts’s two-decade tenure has been his “drive to advance the Court’s power … as the final decider and major direction-setter on the nation’s most fought-over issues.” To his eyes, Trump’s census ploy threatened that priority; manifestly, a far more dire such threat is posed by the second-term Trump team’s ambition to elevate the presidency, not simply over the executive branch, top to bottom, but over the legislative and judicial branches, as well—a power grab far beyond any of the conservative justices’ dabblings in “unitary executive” theorizing. 

His appointees to the Supreme Court, and lower court federal judges appointed by him and other Republican presidents, are of course cognizant of Trump’s and his field generals’ oft-vented enmity toward them, along with the administration’s slow-walking compliance with court orders and threats of outright refusal to comply—most notably in the Justice Department’s March 15 evasion of deportation procedures for alleged Venezuelan gang members, an apparent actual act of noncompliance.

They know they are in a veritable war for the life of the institution over which they had been set to preside for their entire professional lives. They have no option but to wage that war, as fiercely but cannily as feasible. If Roberts and his cadre cannot meet this imposing challenge, their legacy will be the enfeeblement of what had long been admired as the most powerful judicial institution in the world. The irony will be that the precedent-shattering, often lawless decisions they rendered to boost that power ended in facilitating its destruction, by an even more power-hungry and lawless White House wannabe authoritarian.

Simon Lazarus

Simon Lazarus served as associate director of President Jimmy Carter’s White House Domestic Policy Staff, and since then with private and public-interest law firms in Washington, D.C.

 

Boasberg Will Not Relent.

And that’s an important public service for the country

Harry Litman Mar 24

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Chip Somodevilla / Shutterstock.com; United States District Court for the District of Columbia

D.C. District Court Judge Jeb Boasberg is a man on a mission, and it’s a very good thing he is.

It's a mission that has made him a target and even put him at physical risk—one he easily could have declined to undertake or abandoned. But it's very much in the country’s interest that he stay the course, as he is doing, at considerable personal cost.

The task sounds simple, and it would be simple but for an ongoing campaign of obfuscation and avoidance by the Trump administration. Boasberg wants to know whether the administration intentionally disobeyed the orders he announced at the end of an emergency hearing last Saturday.

That hearing arose because the administration had begun to put plans into place to deport over 250 Venezuelan nationals whom they believed were part of a transnational drug organization known as Tren de Aragua. That was after quietly invoking the Alien Enemies Act in a presidential proclamation on Friday night.

(An intriguing sidenote here: Trump said he never signed the proclamation and had nothing to do with it. However, it bears his signature. The White House scrambled to clean up his admission, suggesting he was referring to the original 1798 Alien Enemies Act as opposed to the proclamation signed Friday. That interpretation is risible in context, which leaves no doubt he was talking about the proclamation. So how did the signature get on the proclamation? By autopen, which Trump derided this week in reference to Biden's pardons? By Trump, who proceeded to completely forget this singular assertion of executive authority? By Stephen Miller, whose dark arts extend to channeling the boss’s signature? The Shadow knows…)

Acting as lawyers for six of the deportees, the American Civil Liberties Union sought an emergency hearing before Boasberg on the evening of Saturday, March 15. They proffered striking legal weaknesses with the administration’s reliance on the AEA and said that some of the nationals taken to Venezuela were not part of the gang—which now looks increasingly likely to be the case.

A little after 6:45 PM on Saturday, Boasberg issued an oral order directing the government not to deport anyone pursuant to the proclamation and, if there were any planes in the air, to turn them around. The order was utterly unambiguous:
“Any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States. This is something you need to make sure is complied with immediately.”

Boasberg issued a written order at 7:26 PM reiterating his command not to try to enforce the proclamation, but not specifying to turn the planes around.

During these minutes, White House officials huddled with administration lawyers and determined not to turn the planes around.

News reports indicate that the planes took off at about 6:45 and, at the time of the order a few minutes later, were off the Yucatán Peninsula.

So, notwithstanding Boasberg’s orders, two planes with approximately 250 Venezuelan nationals flew from the United States to El Salvador that night, where the nationals were immediately placed into a notoriously brutal high-security prison.

El Salvador’s president, referring to a news article about Boasberg’s order, posted a laughing-crying emoji and the message: “Oopsie… Too late.” U.S. Secretary of State Mario Rubio reposted that message.

---

So Boasberg ordered the administration not to deport the Venezuelans, and they did it anyway. The screaming question: did they knowingly violate his order or do they have some explanation?

The stakes of that question, it is no exaggeration, go to the heart of the erosion of the constitutional order and the rule of law since Trump took office. And the administration has not inspired confidence with its shifting series of inconsistent explanations and various efforts to avoid answering to the court at all.

Last week, Boasberg convened a series of hearings to address the administration’s compliance with his order. He ordered—and then ordered again, and then a third time—for the Department to provide straightforward factual information: the dates and times of the flights after his oral order; the passenger list or at least counts (i.e., how many people were on each flight); whether any of them were subject to the stay; and whether any were asylum seekers or had pending legal claims. As the week wore on, he also ordered specific information on who in the administration received his order, what communications took place, whether steps were taken to halt or reverse the flights, and, if not, why.

On Monday, the DOJ lawyer asserted they had not violated the order but refused to give any further information, suggesting it was protected by national security.

On Tuesday, the Department, at Boasberg's order, submitted a legal filing that failed to provide the very specific additional details he had requested, again citing national security concerns. They also suggested that the oral order from the bench was not binding—only the later written order was. Pointing out that it is routine for district courts to examine classified information, Boasberg ordered the same explanation for the following day.

On Wednesday, the administration chastised Boasberg for pursuing a "picayune dispute” and for “continuing to beat a dead horse.” Again, they failed to supply the requested information. This time, they suggested they might invoke the state secrets privilege.

On Thursday, the administration told Boasberg it hadn't decided whether to invoke the state secrets doctrine. It submitted a new declaration that gave no new information whatsoever. Boasberg pronounced it “woefully insufficient” and wrote that the government had “again evaded its obligations.” He has now given them until Tuesday at 10 AM to submit a sworn declaration by a person with direct involvement in the Saturday deliberations and a brief showing cause why they didn’t violate his court order.

The implication of the order to show cause is that Boasberg is actively considering holding the administration in contempt.

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To date, Boasberg has exercised judicial power in two ways. First, he imposed a temporary restraining order on the administration’s use of the proclamation so that its legality could be determined.

That’s an entirely expected move under the law. The Alien Enemies Act—which previously has only been used during the War of 1812, World War I, and World War II—requires, in the absence of a declared war, that there be a foreign nation or government that has made a predatory incursion into the U.S. The administration is suggesting that the Tren de Aragua drug group is its own nation or is acting at the direction of Venezuela.

There is also the issue of whether all the people on the plane were in fact Tren de Aragua members covered by the order. Trump said in his news conference Friday that “we don't want to make mistakes there.” Um—that’s true; and it points directly to judicial review. Moreover, there are indications that, in governmental parlance, “mistakes were made,” meaning totally innocent people were flown down to a hellhole in El Salvador outside of U.S. jurisdiction. It’s a Kafkaesque nightmare that the Constitution does not countenance.

These determinations—of whether an administration’s actions fit within the law—are the bread and butter of district courts (which, of course, can always be appealed). It's a wholly pedestrian and straightforward judicial function.

Second, Boasberg, with patience and decorum, is ordering the administration to explain why they didn’t comply with his order. Again, pretty routine stuff.

But look what those modest exercises of judicial power have brought Boasberg. He has become the victim of a repugnant and phenomenally ignorant campaign to vilify him for the two rulings.

Trump started the ball rolling by referring to him as a "radical left lunatic,” labeling him a "troublemaker and agitator," and calling for his impeachment. There is no president in our history other than Trump who would be simultaneously so vicious and so off-base.

Trump's tirade triggered a public statement by none other than Chief Justice John Roberts, emphasizing that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement with judicial decisions, which can be addressed through the appeals process.

Then, in a stunning illustration of the rule of holes principle ("if you're in a hole, stop digging"), Trump the next day sent out a fundraising email calling for Boasberg's impeachment. Elon Musk made maximum contributions to the House members who had introduced articles of impeachment against Boasberg and three other judges.

That’s only the beginning of the harassment Boasberg has endured from Trump supporters. Perhaps the most vile was Trump associate Laura Loomer, who called Boasberg's family a national security threat to her 1.5 million online followers.

Republican members of Congress and the White House Press Secretary have also blithely accused Boasberg of “legislating from the bench,” which is an empty Republican talking point with not even the slightest application to this case.

The criticisms all amount to one thing: a district court judge ruled against the Trump administration. For that reason, the judge must be a radical leftist who deserves to be impeached.

The charge would be comic if it weren’t so alarming and dangerous. Boasberg is one of the most respected judges in the entire federal judiciary. A law school roommate of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, he is known as a judge of impeccable calm temperament and a rule-of-law centrist who has ruled against Democratic presidents. Anybody—Republican or Democrat—who knows the federal judicial system knows that, at best, Trump and company have no idea what they’re talking about; and at worst, they are lying through their teeth.

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Having been jerked around and threatened repeatedly by the administration, Boasberg could easily let the violation of his order fade away and focus only on the merits of the Alien Enemies Act—e.g., is Tren de Aragua a foreign country that has made a predatory incursion into the U.S.?

But I think Boasberg has calculated that it is critical to get to the bottom of the administration’s readiness to simply violate judicial orders. The administration has already proven itself capable of squirreliness and obfuscation; but outright defiance is the line that, in many people’s minds, defines a constitutional crisis.

Moreover, given his role as Chief Judge on the D.C. District Court (which, recall, the administration snubbed by issuing pardons for the hundreds of January 6 offenders these judges had tried), he understands that he has both the institutional prestige and the personal credibility to force the issue.

And while I can’t say for certain, I think both the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit and the Supreme Court are unlikely to throw him to the wolves. And if that’s wrong and the Supreme Court is going to give Trump carte blanche, it’s better to know that now.

All of which is to say: this is a good time and a good case to force the administration to show its cards. Putting off the showdown gives the administration more time to aggregate power and choose their optimal next case to defy judicial review.

Judge Boasberg is rendering the country an important service—one that makes him public enemy #1 for the MAGA faithful and puts him and his family under tremendous stress. Just as on January 6, it’s Trump’s responsibility to call off the dogs; but don’t hold your breath. And the pressure and danger will increase many times over should Boasberg determine that the administration violated his order and move to impose contempt or other sanctions. It’s shameful that judges in this country should ever be put in such a tight corner. But it’s fortunate that the judge on duty as the showdown looms is universally respected and a person of unimpeachable integrity. He won’t let the loathsome threats affect his judgment or his sense of responsibility.

Not this time, Donald.

PUTIN'S PUSSY

 

Dept of Re-Education

 

Howard Tullman Joins Lisa Dent on WGN Radio to Discuss His Latest INC. Magazine Column

 LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

LISTEN TO THE SHOW HERE

Michael Gerson

 

President George W. Bush's chief speechwriter, Michael Gerson, has a message for people who are excusing President Trump's racism:

 

"I had fully intended to ignore President Trump’s latest round of racially charged taunts against an African American elected official, and an African American activist, and an African American journalist and a whole city with a lot of African Americans in it.

 

I had every intention of walking past Trump’s latest outrages and writing about the self-destructive squabbling of the Democratic presidential field, which has chosen to shame Joe Biden for the sin of being an electable, moderate liberal.But I made the mistake of pulling James Cone’s 'The Cross and the Lynching Tree' off my shelf — a book designed to shatter convenient complacency. Cone recounts the case of a white mob in Valdosta, Ga. in 1918 that lynched an innocent man named Haynes Turner.

 

Turner’s enraged wife, Mary, promised justice for the killers. The sheriff responded by arresting her and then turning her over to the mob, which included women and children. According to one source, Mary was 'stripped, hung upside down by the ankles, soaked with gasoline, and roasted to death. In the midst of this torment, a white man opened her swollen belly with a hunting knife and her infant fell to the ground and was stomped to death.'

 

God help us. It is hard to write the words. This evil — the evil of white supremacy, resulting in dehumanization, inhumanity and murder — is the worst stain, the greatest crime, of U.S. history. It is the thing that nearly broke the nation. It is the thing that proved generations of Christians to be vicious hypocrites. It is the thing that turned normal people into moral monsters, capable of burning a grieving widow to death and killing her child.

 

When the president of the United States plays with that fire or takes that beast out for a walk, it is not just another political event, not just a normal day in campaign 2020. It is a cause for shame. It is the violation of martyrs’ graves. It is obscene graffiti on the Lincoln Memorial. It is, in the eyes of history, the betrayal — the re-betrayal — of Haynes and Mary Turner and their child.

 

And all of this is being done by an ignorant and arrogant narcissist reviving racist tropes for political gain, indifferent to the wreckage he is leaving, the wounds he is ripping open.Like, I suspect, many others, I am finding it hard to look at resurgent racism as just one in a series of presidential offenses or another in a series of Republican errors.

 

Racism is not just another wrong. The Antietam battlefield is not just another plot of ground. The Edmund Pettus Bridge is not just another bridge. The balcony outside Room 306 at the Lorraine Motel is not just another balcony. As U.S. history hallows some causes, it magnifies some crimes. What does all this mean politically? It means that Trump’s divisiveness is getting worse, not better.

 

He makes racist comments, appeals to racist sentiments and inflames racist passions. The rationalization that he is not, deep down in his heart, really a racist is meaningless. Trump’s continued offenses mean that a large portion of his political base is energized by racist tropes and the language of white grievance. And it means — whatever their intent — that those who play down, or excuse, or try to walk past these offenses are enablers.

 

Some political choices are not just stupid or crude. They represent the return of our country’s cruelest, most dangerous passion. Such racism indicts Trump. Treating racism as a typical or minor matter indicts us."— Michael Gerson