According to the renowned fascism historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, the Supreme Court has become President Donald Trump’s “partner in corruption,” not only working to enrich those who are in on the scam, but reshaping the U.S. as an authoritarian state in which one must “fear and obey” Trump.“This is the summer of corruption,” wrote Ben-Ghiat on Thursday. “Defined as the abuse of power for private gain, corruption can happen in any kind of organization and government, but under authoritarianism it attains a new status: it is how the executive branch operates, expands its power, and recruits elite and grassroots partners. The Supreme Court is one of these partners, as we’ll see below.”The Trump administration and its enablers on the Court, argues Ben-Ghiat, “are providing Americans and the world with a lesson in how corruption can become systemic.” This, she says, is the goal of all authoritarians: they “seek to retool government and the culture to create the conditions to lie, steal and repress people with impunity. That means going after journalists, judges, investigators, opposition politicians and others who expose official wrongdoing. It also means puffing up the leader’s personality cult and inventing narratives, backed by complicit religious institutions, about his selflessness and purity.”She raises the example of Justice Clarence Thomas, who has a well-documented history of “accepting luxury gifts and travel from billionaire GOP donor Harlan Crow,” who in turn “has a garden full of statues of dictators, and collects Adolf Hitler and Nazi memorabilia.” And, according to Ben-Ghiat, “As per the sacred laws of corruption, these ‘gifts’ were likely supposed to be repaid whenever Thomas put on his robes. No matter that the Court, which has no ethical oversight mechanism, finally instituted a code of conduct in November 2023, which states that justices must ‘uphold the integrity and independence of the judiciary’ and avoid actual and apparent impropriety.”Thomas has paid no attention to this code, refusing to recuse himself in cases involving Trump’s election lies, even though Thomas’s wife Ginny was directly engaged in those lies. As Ben-Ghiat muses, “What good would Thomas be as a link in the chain of corruption if he took himself out of the game just when he was most needed?”“And here we arrive at the Supreme Court as a partner in Trump administration corruption, first by giving the President immunity for official acts, and now by upholding his right to dismiss an official on political grounds,” writes Ben-Ghiat. “A landmark ruling in July 2024 gave the president ‘the power of a king,’ as the Brennan Center termed it, conferring upon him absolute immunity (for the exercise of core constitutional powers) and presumptive immunity (for all other official acts). This created the legal space for a lawless individual such as Trump to feel even more emboldened to use corruption and violence to destroy our democracy and make money doing it.”Now, while the Supreme Court has for 100 years upheld that the president does not have the authority to fire heads of independent agencies without cause, Trump’s allies on the court have overturned that precedent, creating conditions for further “systematic corruption.”“We need to see this decision through autocratic eyes,” explains Ben-Ghiat. “Not obeying the Leader, refusing to participate in his corruption, and politicizing the practice of government are acts of negligence and malfeasance in office in the authoritarian world. Such people must be removed from public service, lest they influence others with their moral stances.”The power to fire agency officials at will is exactly what the president needs to shape government to his private agenda. According to Ben-Ghiat, proof of this intention was revealed by the words of Solicitor General John Sauer, who represented the Trump administration in the case, arguing before the court that the president needs to be able to remove officials in the agencies because “the President must have the power to control and…the one who has the power to remove is the one who…is the person that they have to fear and obey.”
A CNN panel had a good laugh as a GOP pundit twisted himself in a "pretzel" defending the Trump family.While discussing recent revelations about how much money Trump and his family made since returning to office last year, conservative podcaster Ben Ferguson had everyone around him in stitches.Ferguson, the host of "The Ben Ferguson Show," argued that the Trump family isn't corrupt for its involvement in billion-dollar ventures involving cryptocurrency and tungsten mining because they were engaged in "actual business."CNN anchor Abby Phillip, who described the Trump family as "real estate developers," shot back by asking, "What do the Trump sons know about mining rare earth minerals? What do the Trump sons know about robotics?"Ferguson's response was, "A lot, clearly, they made a lot of money off of it because they actually invest in it."The panel around him, which included political analyst and attorney Bakari Sellers, former Biden White House staffer Yemisi Egbewole, and former Bush White House official Ashley Davis, could be heard laughing together as Ferguson responded.Sellers chimed in by remarking, "I do hot yoga, and I feel like you're doing a little hot yoga too for that pretzel you got yourself in," which led to Egbewole and Davis laughing more."The president makes $400,000 a year," Sellers pointed out. "This quarter, he's made over $1 billion on crypto alone...that fundamentally is unethical. You can call it what you want."While Sellers mentioned Trump's presidential salary, Ferguson threw in one more defense: "he gives it all away," which also caused laughter around the table.
House Speaker Mike Johnson attempted to pass President Donald Trump's Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or the SAVE America Act, by attaching it to the annual defense budget bill, or NDAA, a strategy devised by conservative hardliners led by Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL). However, the plan backfired when 14 House Republicans blocked the procedural vote, according to Politico. Luna had previously vowed to block all House bills unless the Senate acted on the legislation, but Johnson chose a different approach by combining both measures during the procedural vote. The failure was compounded by Trump's previous claims on Truth Social, when he opposed using the NDAA as leverage for the SAVE America Act. Luna and Johnson proceeded anyway. MS NOW was quick to react, with reporter Mychael Schnell saying, "it's a massive embarrassment and a blow to Speaker Johnson."She continued, "It's never good when a rule vote fails. But the interesting thing here is that the left hand isn't really aware of what the right hand is doing when you talk about Republican leaders, because last week, President Trump had taken to Truth Social and said he did not want these Republicans in the House to be holding hostage these procedural rules in the NDAA in order to get the SAVE America bill passed." The blocked vote has left the House floor paralyzed with no clear path forward for the legislation, though conservatives and Trump remain unwilling to abandon the effort.Watch the video below. Your browser does not support the video tag.
President Donald Trump's image within the MAGA movement is "collapsing under the weight of reality" as his followers find it more difficult to reconcile his brand with the administration's recent fumble in the war with Iran, according to one analyst. Mary Trump, a psychologist and author, argued in a new Substack essay that her uncle is driving a wedge in his base as he continues to tout his brand of strength after he signed a memorandum of understanding with the Iranian regime that some have described as a complete capitulation. The agreement allowed Iran to immediately resume selling oil and lifted some sanctions on the regime in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz, which had been shut since the early days of the war. Trump described the phenomenon as a "growing divide" within the movement itself. "This is no longer simply a disagreement over one agreement with Iran. It is an increasingly public recognition that the image Donald carefully constructed over decades as a fearless negotiator and master dealmaker is collapsing under the weight of reality. The farther reality drifts from the mythology, the harder it becomes for even his most devoted supporters to reconcile the two," Mary Trump wrote."One faction refuses to acknowledge that Donald could ever be wrong and therefore views whatever agreement he signs as, by definition, a success. The other sees what is unfolding as an unmistakable capitulation after months of war, tens of billions of dollars spent, global instability, higher energy prices, and the unnecessary loss of human life," she added.
Donald Trump lost three big cases at the Supreme Court on Monday. His appeal of E. Jean Carroll’s verdict failed. He was blocked from firing a Federal reserve official. And most important, the court upheld the counting of late-arriving mail ballots. He ranted wildly over these losses. On the last one he exploded in a long and angry tirade, seething over the “powerful Communist Movement taking place in our Country” and demanding again that Republicans pass onerous voter suppression. It’s clear why: This deals a major blow to Trump-GOP hopes of stealing the midterms by invalidating untold numbers of votes. Yet Trump won big at the court, too, securing the power to fire independent regulators at will. We talked to Lisa Graves, a former Senate Judiciary Committee counsel who writes about the Supreme Court. We discuss what the ruling on mail-balloting does, why it will thwart a major piece of the Trump-GOP election-rigging scheme, how Trump and the Supreme Court are teaming up to empower themselves at the expense of Congress, and how a future Democratic Congress can fight back. Listen to this episode here.
