If former President Donald Trump is hoping that the United States Supreme Court, which now features three of his own appointees, will ride to his rescue in criminal prosecutions, he may come away disappointed.
In a column written for Bloomberg, Francis Wilkinson argued that the Supreme Court knows that bailing out Trump from his legal troubles would actually dilute the power it currently enjoys, as it would essentially make the court subordinate to the former president.
"The fastest way for Chief Justice John Roberts and company to become irrelevant is for their quasi-kingship to be supplanted by a MAGA dictatorship," he argued. "Unlike, say, House Speaker Mike Johnson, a White Christian nationalist who would gain real power as Trump’s handyman in Congress, there isn’t much in it for the justices. After all, what use would Trump, unleashed in a second term, have for a Supreme Court? No longer constrained by rule-of-law RINOs, the unfettered MAGA king would be the ultimate decider."
Wilkinson also notes that the three Trump-appointed justices can maintain the court's reputation for judicial independence, even if not truly deserved, by once again showing they won't stretch the law to benefit the man who gave them their jobs.
"They can be public champions of the law while entrenching their own sketchy power," Wilkinson writes. "This is likely an especially appealing combo for the three justices appointed by Trump. Forever tainted by association with a lawless demagogue, they would have another opportunity to scrub the stain, as they did when they rejected Trump’s false claims about the 2020 election."
In the end, Wilkinson concludes that Trump "could be done in by the conservative justices hewing to the rule of law."
