President Donald Trump seems likely to stage a major showdown with the U.S. Supreme Court that a legal expert believes is an intentional effort to gather up authoritarian powers.
The president has been attacking judges who rule against him in legal challenges to his executive orders, and Stanford Law School's Matthew Seligman told The New Republic's Greg Sargent that Vice President JD Vance and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller were even more eager than Trump to break the courts.
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"This implicates an important distinction between Trump as an optical authoritarian versus Vance and Miller as substantive authoritarians," Seligman said. "Trump wants the trappings of authoritarianism. He wants everybody to talk about how he’s the most powerful person, and he wants it to look like he’s in charge."
"He wants the big parade," Seligman added. "He wants the tanks rolling down Pennsylvania Avenue, but he actually doesn’t care as much about the substance. Which is why he’s happy to get into these trade confrontations with other countries and then get some minimal or nonexistent concession from Mexico or Canada and then declare victory. He wants the optics of authoritarian power, but he doesn’t actually really care about exercising power all that much outside of a few small contexts."
The vice president and Trump's deputy chief of staff want to break the court's opposition to Trump so the president carry out the "pure will of the people," meaning the MAGA base, without bureaucratic obstacles, as Sargent put it.
"Miller and Vance, I think, are much more committed to substantive authoritarianism," Seligman agreed. "They actually want to exercise the power. They actually want to degrade the rule of law because they actually want to impose this particular vision — very dark vision — of America’s future on the country. And so for them, the optics aren’t enough. It’s not enough for them that it looks like the Trump administration has prevailed over the Supreme Court. They actually have to break the power of the Supreme Court to put any substantive constraints on their will."