Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches
POSTED BY: JJ
UPDATED: Friday, September 11, 2026 21:58
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PAGE 113 of 137
Trump Wants to Introduce New Battleships Named After Him. Oh Boy.
By Fred Kaplan
Dec 23, 2025 2:49 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/trump-class-battleships-us
s-defiant.html
The good news about President Donald Trump’s announcement of a new “Trump-class battleship,” based on his own vision of what a modern war vessel should look like, is that it will almost certainly never be built.
The bad news is that, over the next few years, the Navy will spend hundreds of millions of dollars—maybe even a few billion—pretending that it’s working on the project.
Nobody in the Navy has asked for a new battleship of this sort—a behemoth weighing three times as much as the vessel it replaces (which itself is a very heavy ship), staffed by twice as many personnel (recruited from where?), and hoisting every type of weapon imaginable, including nuclear-armed cruise missiles, which, to the relief of every Navy commander, no U.S. surface vessel has carried since the end of the Cold War.
Quite apart from the megalomania of a president naming a warship after himself, the project contradicts a growing consensus among naval analysts for building and dispersing a larger number of smaller, less vulnerable ships. Given that the Chinese navy now has more ships than the U.S. Navy (370 vs. 294) and, more important, hundreds of anti-ship ballistic missiles, which can strike our ships from 900 miles away, the Trump-class battleship is simply wrongheaded for the modern era: It would heighten the U.S. Navy’s already-stressed vulnerabilities at sea.
In a news conference at Mar-a-Lago where the project was announced, Trump—standing next to Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—said he would push the Navy to build the first of the new ships in two-and-a-half years, i.e., before his term is up. (He envisions building 20 to 25 of the ships in all.)
Several retired Navy officers and weapons analysts (including two that I interviewed, who requested anonymity in order to avoid retribution) see this as a pipe dream. The newest Burke-class destroyer ships take about five years to build—and they are much smaller and based on existing designs. To design, construct, weaponize, and deploy a much larger ship based on an entirely new concept would likely take a decade.
The retired officer and naval analyst estimate the first of these ships would likely cost about $10 billion, four times that of the newest Burke destroyer—and that’s not counting the cost of the weapons onboard.
Those weapons are another problem. According to Trump and to subsequent information released by the Navy, much of it compiled by the private research group GlobalSecurity.org, the new ship would carry a lot of new, as-yet-unproven types of armaments, including hypersonic missiles, laser weapons, and an as-yet-undecided power source. Testing all these new weapons, and then integrating them all on one platform, is a very complex task.
The retired admiral told me that the Navy’s most successful project in recent decades is the Aegis-class cruiser. Started in the late 1970s, it works well, and was efficiently built, because it put together existing elements—the Navy’s best missiles, fire-control system, and air defenses—all already-proven. The only new element was an air-defense radar.
By contrast, the much newer Zumwalt-class destroyer, contracted in 2002, tried to integrate lots of new technologies, and it was a disaster. The Navy had planned to build 32 of those ships, but, owing to various delays and cost overruns, ended up building just three.
The same is likely to happen with the Trump-class battleships, if any ever get built at all.
One other problem: The United States just doesn’t have the shipbuilding capacity for this project. The retired admiral and the naval analyst told me the shipyard in Newport News, Virginia, is the only one capable of building a boat this big. Yet it is also where the next aircraft carrier is being built. Which vessel will get priority? There is neither the space nor the workforce t
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Trump’s Vanity Fleet
The Trump-class ships are about branding, not strategy.
By Tom Nichols | December 22, 2025, 8:43 PM ET
Tom Nichols is a professor emeritus of national-security affairs at the U.S. Naval War College
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/trumps-vanity-fleet/68539
9/
Imagine the CEO of a car company telling his engineers and designers that he wants them to make a new line of automobiles. He knows nothing about cars and has no interest in how they’re produced, but he knows one thing for certain: The line will be named after himself. Everyone claps—because of course they do—but no one really knows what comes next, except that the line needs to look sexy and sporty.
That’s pretty much what the president did today when he announced that a new class of ship named after one Donald J. Trump would be added to the “Golden Fleet,” his name for a renewed U.S. Navy. (You might wonder about the propriety of a sitting president naming naval vessels, among other things, after himself. Pardon the expression, but that ship has sailed.)
Trump’s press conference today was among his more haywire performances, and his slushy delivery and meandering answers will not halt speculation about his cognitive health. When asked for his endgame in the confrontation with Venezuela, for example, he launched into his usual lines about people being sent into the United States from prisons and mental hospitals, as if someone had hit the wrong button and played the wrong recording. He also reiterated that he wanted U.S. ships to be more attractive, noting that he would be involved in the design of the new vessels because “I am a very aesthetic person.”
(Apparently, no one has ever explained to him that sharp design does not equal military value. The B-52 bomber, the mainstay of the U.S. bomber force for decades, was affectionately called the BUFF by its crews. Big, ugly, fat … the rest you can figure out.)
Trump and Navy Secretary John Phelan did make some news today. (Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegeseth were also on hand, but they limited themselves to some standard-issue sycophancy.) First, we learned that the president of the United States clearly has no idea what battleships are. Second, the United States is going to invest in a new class of naval vessel. Third, America is going to reverse more than 30 years of wise policy by putting nuclear weapons back on U.S. Navy surface vessels.
Trump announced that the new Trump-class ships will be “battleships,” but they seem to be supersize versions of the existing workhorse of the Navy, the Arleigh Burke–class destroyers; the first ship, called the Defiant, will be about three times the size of a Burke. The Navy has also announced the development of a new class of frigates. Destroyers and frigates, as the Navy knows (and as the commander in chief should know) are not battleships. Battleships are huge and powerful, and are meant to dish out —and withstand—serious punishment. Destroyers and frigates are less rugged, and perform missions that require more speed and agility than battleships can muster. But none of that matters: The goal, apparently, was to give a childlike president a new toy, named after himself, in exchange for gobs of money that the Navy will figure out how to spend later.
Indeed, defense investors cheered the announcement, but the spending will likely come much later, because the United States does not have the capacity to build vessels it hasn’t even designed yet. Trump told a reporter today that he expects the first ship to arrive in two and a half years, which is possible if the Navy slaps some gold paint on a Burke class, adds some missiles, and then stencils USS TRUMP on the side. But the last time the Navy really tried to create a new kind of ship—the Zumwalt-class destroyer—the process took years and ended in failure.
The biggest news came today when Phelan said that the new Trump class will carry nuclear weapons. Why? Perhaps Phelan, who has no experience in, or with, the Navy, figured that Trum
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Whiner, whiner, whiner, whiner, whiner...
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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Quote:6ix, like every Trumptard I know, you are an evil little prick. So was Eichmann.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Whiner, whiner, whiner, whiner, whiner...
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
https://www.google.com/search?q=eichmann+in+jerusalem+summary
Echoes of Eichmann: The industrialization of mass deportation
December 24, 2025
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/12/24/echoes-of-eichmann-the-ind
ustrialization-of-mass-deportation/
The Washington Post reports:
The Trump administration is seeking contractors to help it overhaul the United States’ immigrant detention system in a plan that includes renovating industrial warehouses to hold more than 80,000 immigrant detainees at a time, according to a draft solicitation reviewed by The Washington Post.
Rather than shuttling detainees around the country to wherever detention space is available, as happens now, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement aims to speed up deportations by establishing a deliberate feeder system, the document says. Newly arrested detainees would be booked into processing sites for a few weeks before being funneled into one of seven large-scale warehouses holding 5,000 to 10,000 people each, where they would be staged for deportation.
The large warehouses would be located close to major logistics hubs in Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Missouri. Sixteen smaller warehouses would hold up to 1,500 people each.
The draft solicitation is not final and is subject to changes. ICE plans to share it with private detention companies this week to gauge interest and refine the plan, according to an internal email reviewed by The Post. A formal request for bids could follow soon after that.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokeswoman for the Department of Homeland Security, said she “cannot confirm” The Post’s reporting and declined to answer questions about the warehouse plan.
NBC and Bloomberg News previously reported on ICE’s internal discussions about using warehouses as detention centers. The full scope of the project, the locations of the facilities and other details contained in the solicitation have not been previously disclosed or reported.
The warehouse plan would be the next step in President Donald Trump’s campaign to detain and deport millions of immigrants, which began with a scramble to expand the nation’s immigrant detention system, the largest in the world. Armed with $45 billion Congress set aside for locking up immigrants, his administration this year revived dormant prisons, repurposed sections of military bases and partnered with Republican governors to build immigrant tent encampments in remote regions.
The administration has deported more than 579,000 people this year, border czar Tom Homan said earlier this month on the social media platform X.
The new facilities will “maximize efficiency, minimize costs, shorten processing times, limit lengths of stay, accelerate the removal process and promote the safety, dignity and respect for all in ICE custody,” the solicitation said.
“We need to get better at treating this like a business,” ICE Acting Director Todd M. Lyons said at a border security conference in April, according to the Arizona Mirror. The administration’s goal, he said, was to deport immigrants as efficiently as Amazon moves packages: “Like Prime, but with human beings.” [Continue reading…]
The Intercept reports:
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already hired 10 contractors to carry out its immigrant bounty hunting program, according to records reviewed by The Intercept. The firms included companies that had previous deals with spy agencies and the military, private investigators that boast of their physical surveillance skills, and a private prison giant.
In November, ICE launched a process to get private sector “skip tracing” services, where corporate investigators use digital snooping tools and on-the-ground surveillance to track
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Every Trumptard I know is an evil little prick. So is JD Vance.
Who Is JD Vance? (No, Seriously. Who Is He?)
The vice president is a cynical shapeshifter, willing to say anything — and be anybody — to become the most powerful person in America.
By Monica Potts | Dec 25, 2025
https://newrepublic.com/article/204626/jd-vance-maga-monster-cynical-s
hapeshifter
At the Turning Point USA conference at the University of Mississippi in October, an audience member asked Vice President JD Vance about the tension between his interracial, interfaith marriage with Usha, the daughter of Indian immigrants, and his beliefs that the U.S. should reduce the number of immigrants. He began with his thoughts on immigration policy, then veered toward the personal by saying he hopes Usha converts to Catholicism. “Do I hope eventually that she is somehow moved by the same thing that I was moved by in church? I honestly do wish that because I believe in the Christian Gospel, and I hope eventually my wife comes to see it the same way,” he said.
It wasn’t the most grotesque statement Vance has made — there are plenty of contenders for that — but it exposed his twisted priorities. Here was the vice president defending the administration’s vile immigration policies in a way that fundamentally degrades the experiences and traditions of his own family, of people he is bound by vows — vows that should be sacred to a Christian — to love and protect. It sums up Vance’s journey into public life and politics: There is nobody he won’t betray, and no principle he won’t cast aside, in his quest to accrue more fame and power.
This has been clear since he rose to fame. Vance grew up in Middletown, Ohio, a suburb between Cincinnati and Dayton. In his memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, Vance describes the hardships of his childhood there — his mother’s addictions, his absent father, his feuding grandparents — which he left by joining the Army and later going to college. His grandparents were from the Appalachians in Eastern Kentucky and had moved there for factory work, like so many other transplants looking for work in the middle of the last century. Because of that history, Vance claimed a kind of hillbilly mantel. “We called our hometown of Middletown Middletucky because so many of the residents actually came from Kentucky,” he said on Fresh Air in 2016. “So it was this massive transplantation of one culture and one group of people into an entirely different area. And a lot of times, of course, they kept the culture, and they kept a lot of their habits with them when they moved.”
Of course, he was not from Kentucky. He visited it in summers and briefly describes a visit for the book, but doesn’t portray it as a real place where people still live. If he thinks of himself as a hillbilly, maybe it’s partly because that’s how Ohioans thought of him and his family, but he and his mother both grew up in Ohio. Writers from Kentucky have rejected his characterizations and portrayed him more as a carpetbagger who doesn’t understand mountain culture.
Vance had already graduated from Yale Law School, dabbled in corporate law, and worked at Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm by the time he wrote Hillbilly Elegy, which now made him a sort of public intellectual — or at least a sought-after hillbilly whisperer. Lots of young adults go through similar odysseys of becoming, but at the end of the day, they become someone; their worldview crystallizes. But Vance’s mind seems to keep changing. After his memoir became a bestseller and was adapted into a movie, he explored the sense of want and identity that had helped elect President Donald Trump. But he was no fan at the time. He was instead aligned himself with the elite Ivy League and Big Tech conservatives who found him distasteful. In 2016, he called Trump “America’s Hitler,” and said Trump was like a needle in a vein for people who needed hope to get through their tough lives.
Within three years, though, Vance was running for a Senate seat in Ohio as a MAGA-fied conservat
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With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society
By Radley Balko | December 24, 2025
https://newrepublic.com/article/204227/trump-immigration-nightmare-hap
pening-here
The most basic definition of a police state is a society in which the police themselves are above the law. In 2024, Donald Trump campaigned on promises to make police officers completely immune from both criminal prosecution and civil liability. Whether a president could actually do that isn’t as important as the fact that a major party’s nominee for president was, quite literally, promising to turn the country into a police state. And then he won.
The United States has long had a problem with holding bad cops accountable, and, to be fair, much of that problem predates Donald Trump. The George Floyd protests in 2020 provoked public discussion about qualified immunity, a legal doctrine wholly invented by the Supreme Court in 1967 that makes it extremely difficult to sue state and local police for abuses that violate the Constitution.
Less discussed is that it’s even more difficult — all but impossible, really — to sue federal law enforcement officers. For years, the only real avenue to do so was through the precedent set in the 1971 Supreme Court case Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents. But the court has been gradually chipping away at that case ever since and all but overturned it in 2022. There is one remaining, far more complicated law, the Federal Tort Claims Act, which lets people sue federal police officers, but to sue under that law is an immensely complicated process. The law also bars punitive damages, and it, too, is being eroded by the federal courts.
“People ask me questions like ‘Is it constitutional for them to wear masks?’ or ‘Can they really detain U.S. citizens incommunicado?’ or ‘Is it really legal for them to scare children like that?’” said Bidwell, the IJ attorney. “The answer is that it doesn’t matter if what they do is legal. Because they know that fundamentally they can’t be sued, either as the government itself or individually.”
So while the administration sets arrest and deportation quotas, attacks immigrants with dehumanizing rhetoric, and tells immigration officers that they’ve been “unleashed,” Bidwell said, there’s nothing pushing back to keep deportation forces in line. “There’s no incentive for these officers to act in a cautious manner that’s compliant with the Constitution.”
“Back when I worked for ICE, there would occasionally be times when they’d inadvertently arrest or detain an American citizen or legal resident,” said Javad Khazaeli, who was an immigration prosecutor during the Obama administration and now works as an immigration defense attorney. (Disclosure: Khazaeli is also a friend.) “When that happened, it would be all hands on deck. It was like, OK, what went wrong here and how do we fix it? Now there’s nothing like that. Now they just don’t care.”
The immunity problem pervades the chain of command from top to bottom. Thanks to a spate of Supreme Court rulings from the case that all but killed Bivens, to rulings protecting political appointees for policy decisions, to the Supreme Court’s infamous ruling on presidential immunity, everyone is protected, from the Border Patrol officer who abandons a baby in the back seat of a car after detaining his immigrant parents (as happened in a suburb of Chicago) to the Border Patrol commander who tear-gasses elementary schools, to the president who says immigrants are “poisoning the blood of the country.”
That leaves only criminal liability. It seems unlikely that Trump’s DOJ would ever prosecute an immigration officer, even for egregious abuses. Some have suggested that local police and prosecutors arrest and charge Border Patrol agents caught committing clear crimes, or that states pass laws prohibiting masking by law enforcement, and then arrest officers who violate it. But state and local charges against federal police are almost always removed to federal court, at which point the Trump admin
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American women want to opt out
More want to leave the country than ever before. That’s not the only way they’re escaping.
By Constance Grady | Dec 26, 2025, 6:00 AM CST
https://www.vox.com/culture/473273/american-women-expat-trad-wife-opt-
out
Young American women, it seems, want out of America. A Gallup poll in November found that 40 percent of US women ages 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. That percentage is up 10 times since 2014, and it is shared by neither other American demographic groups nor young women in other developed economies.
These women seem to want to leave at least in part because of Donald Trump. Gallup found that this trend began in summer 2016, shortly after Trump became the Republican nominee for president. It continued to climb during the Biden presidency, but there’s a 25-point gap in the desire to leave between those who approve of the country’s leadership and those who don’t. That suggests that getting away from Trump plays at least some role in the appeal of the fantasy of expatriating.
But the desire to leave America can also express itself in ways that sound, at first glance, apolitical.
A recent BBC article about the trend spoke to a 31-year-old who decided to move from LA to Lisbon in 2021. “There’s not a strong work-life balance in the US,” she said. “I wanted to live somewhere with a different pace, different cultures, and learn a new language.” In Portugal, she says, she feels “more like a whole person again.”
Well, sure: Who hasn’t wanted a better work-life balance than the one the US offers? Who hasn’t wanted more than a minimal social safety net; a capitalist hustle culture; and a guiding belief that everything must be earned, including things like child care and health insurance, which in other countries are considered human rights that the government will take care of for you?
It’s the child care, it seems, that is increasingly the last straw for women — the way it’s becoming both more compulsory and more difficult to do.
In the same article, the BBC quoted a 34-year-old who moved from the US to Uruguay after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. “I have children, and I don’t plan on having more, but the increasing governance of women’s bodies terrified me,” she said. She added, “People don’t realise how far behind the US is on maternal care, parental leave, and healthcare, until they leave the country.”
America is a hostile country if you’re having children. Child care is so expensive that it can eat up the salary of at least one parent, which frequently leads to women leaving the workforce to take care of their children. Parental leave is rarely mandated: Press secretary Karoline Leavitt has made much of her decision to go back to work three days after giving birth. We have the highest maternal mortality rate of any high-income country, and we have for a long time. And if, for all these reasons and many others, you get pregnant and you find that you’d prefer not to be, it’s become increasingly difficult to act on that choice in a safe and legal way.
So a person might wonder: Why not simply leave? Go somewhere that doesn’t make you choose between work and children, somewhere you can leave behind both the stresses of capitalism and the pressures of family life. Somewhere you can have kids and also afford to spend time with them.
We often talk about the idea of fleeing America and its feeble social safety net as a liberating, progressive act, as though by leaving the US a person has the chance to become James Baldwin in Paris. But the idea of escaping the work-life balance trap has darker echoes in contemporary American pop culture. When I think of the fantasy of the ex-pat through this lens, it comes to look strikingly similar to the fantasy of the trad wife.
When your kids are your job, you never have to choose between them
Trad wife influencers have become some of the most discussed figures on social m
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
American women want to opt out
More want to leave the country than ever before. That’s not the only way they’re escaping.
By Constance Grady | Dec 26, 2025, 6:00 AM CST
https://www.vox.com/culture/473273/american-women-expat-trad-wife-opt-
out
Young American women, it seems, want out of America. A Gallup poll in November found that 40 percent of US women ages 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. That percentage is up 10 times since 2014, and it is shared by neither other American demographic groups nor young women in other developed economies.
Also, young, low-IQ college "educated" American women:
Quote:
While there's no precise statistic,
a large majority of women in viral social media polls choose a grizzly bear over an unknown man in the woods, reflecting deep-seated fears of male violence, harassment, and assault, where a bear's threat (kill or leave alone) feels more predictable and less personally violating than the potential for prolonged harm from a man, which often carries societal disbelief.
This video shows some of the women's responses to the question:
You fucked up our country single-handedly, so get the fuck out.
Buh-Bye!
You won't be missed.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:6ixStringJoker supports Trump because both have done the same things to women:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Also, young, low-IQ college "educated" American women:
You [women] fucked up our country single-handedly, so get the fuck out.
Buh-Bye!
You won't be missed.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Trump made his attitude about women clear long ago
By David Remnick | Dec 23, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede/trump-epstein-and-the-women
Just weeks before the 2016 Presidential election, the American public was provided with dispositive information on Donald Trump’s beliefs about women, sex, and the rights of men, particularly famous men. The information was delivered, unmistakably, in his voice. On October 7th, the Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold published a video of Trump, circa 2005, chatting merrily on a bus with Billy Bush, the co-anchor of “Access Hollywood,” as Trump prepared to make a guest appearance on an episode of the soap opera “Days of Our Lives.”
Trump bragged of his impulsivity. “I don’t even wait. And, when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
In the same session, Trump was recorded saying that he had tried and failed to seduce Bush’s co-host at the time, Nancy O’Dell. “I did try and fuck her. She was married,” he said. “And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. . . . I moved on her like a bitch. But I couldn’t get there.”
Initially, Trump failed to follow the dictum he had learned at the feet of Roy Cohn: Never apologize, never explain. After a fashion, he did both. He minimized the offense as “locker-room talk,” adding that his opponent’s husband, Bill Clinton, had “said far worse to me on the golf course.” Soon, however, he began denying that the recording was even genuine. At Trump’s second debate with Hillary Clinton, Anderson Cooper asked him, “You bragged that you have sexually assaulted women. Do you understand that?”
Trump, after allowing that he was embarrassed by the incident, tried to change the subject—to ISIS terrorists chopping off heads—and insisted, “I have great respect for women. Nobody has more respect for women than I do.”
COOPER: So, for the record, you’re saying you never did that.
TRUMP: Frankly, you heard these things I said. . . . I have tremendous respect for women—
COOPER: Have you ever done those things?
TRUMP: —and women have respect for me. And I will tell you, no, I have not. And I will tell you that I’m going to make our country safe. We’re going to have borders for our country, which we don’t have now. . . . We’re going to make America safe again, and we’re going to make America wealthy again.
Many things go into a voter’s decision, but the “Access Hollywood” tape and the gross lack of character reflected in it did not prove disqualifying in the 2016 election. A year later, Billy Bush, who is George H. W. Bush’s nephew, wrote an Op-Ed in the Times declaring, “Of course he said it.” Bush said that he and “seven other guys present at the bus at the time . . . assumed we were listening to a crass standup act. He was performing. Surely, we thought, none of this was real.” But, after reading numerous firsthand accounts of women who had been on the receiving end of Trump’s forcible affections over the years, he believed them. He was appalled and clearly resented Trump’s attempts to deny that the voice on the “Access Hollywood” tape was his. Bush wrote, “To these women: I will never know the fear you felt or the frustration of being summarily dismissed and called a liar, but I do know a lot about the anguish of being inexorably linked to Donald Trump. You have my respect and admiration. You are culture warriors at the forefront of necessary change.”
Trump’s attitude toward women was never unclear. As a businessman on the make for publicity, he was always eager to describe his
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The Republicans on the Supreme Court Have Cast Their Lot With Trumpism. They Should Be Very Worried.
By Dahlia Lithwick, Mark Joseph Stern | Dec 27, 2025 5:45 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/supreme-court-trump-robert
s-kavanaugh-thomas-alito-gorsuch-coney-barrett.html
During his first year back in office, President Donald Trump amassed an unprecedented amount of power in pursuit of his far-reaching agenda. His quests to crush the Democratic Party’s electoral power, seize control over the economy, and deport millions of immigrants were all actively abetted by the Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed justices. Time and again—often over the shadow docket, with no explanation—the 6–3 supermajority cleared the path for Trump’s aggressive executive overreach. Those who believed that SCOTUS might serve as a modest check on the administration’s abuses were proved wrong almost weekly, as the court’s far-right bloc delivered win after win to the president it had helped return to the White House. The justices’ rare rebuke to Trump on Tuesday over his deployment of the National Guard in Chicago illustrated just how far outside the law this president must go before a majority is willing to tell him no.
On this week’s year-end episode of Amicus, co-hosts Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern ponder the two big questions posed by this alliance: Why did the Supreme Court conservative supermajority align with Trump, and what consequences might it face for its choices? A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Dahlia Lithwick: A year ago, we were operating under the theory that three of the six conservative justices were not all in for MAGA and genuinely cared about democracy. That was a mistake. Instead, what we have seen is the so-called center go all in for Trump, doubling and tripling down on the idea that this administration is like every other administration and any judge who tries to thwart it is a woke liberal—including fistfuls of Trump judges who aren’t auditioning for the Supreme Court. And just as the Supreme Court went after DOJ officials during Jack Smith’s prosecution of Donald Trump, it’s now going after judges who stand in the president’s way, suggesting that they are anti-Trump zealots suffering from “Trump derangement syndrome,” while we the justices are normal and must put a stop to it.
Why? It’s hard to believe that they go to cocktail parties with only the furthest of the far-right donors. It’s hard to believe that they don’t occasionally read the Washington Post or the New York Times. So what is going on? And this is the real thing I think we haven’t grappled with, but I’m not sure people who are watching the court have yet satisfactorily explained it, at least to my ears. What possible benefit is there to being the stewards of the MAGA destruction of America?
Mark Joseph Stern: My top-line thesis—and I want you to dispute it, because I don’t know if it’s entirely right—is that these justices have fully cast their lot with Trump and Trumpism. And a big part of Trumpism is antidemocratic, ensuring that political minorities can entrench their own power through undemocratic institutions like the Senate, the Electoral College, and the judiciary, as well as through voter suppression and assaults on democracy. Trumpism seeks to perpetuate a system that privileges the elites, the wealthy, white people, Christians, non-LGBTQ+ people. And I fear that the Supreme Court is now intertwined with that perception of who deserves power and who can legitimately exercise power—which is Trump and his GOP and their supporters. So it fills the need to protect Trump’s entire project from the direct forces of actual democracy.
That’s why one of the big pieces of this puzzle is voting rights. The Supreme Court is currently on the brink of delivering another blow to the Voting Rights Act in Callais v. Louisiana. It has been green-lighting voter suppression for so long. Just this month it reinstated Texas’ racial gerrymander that benefits Republicans. Any conver
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