I have long said that Trump’s lone universal appeal is his ability to inevitably humiliate someone that everyone wants to see dressed down in front of the whole world, and now it’s Chief Justice John Roberts’ turn in the fire. Trump’s pig-headed greed and selfishness means that he truly does not discriminate in who he is willing to discriminate against. He will humiliate anyone if it benefits him, and whether he was aware of what he was doing or not, after last night’s State of the Union, Trump etched John Roberts’ legacy into the fabric of the universe by confirming what definitely wasn’t a quid pro quo in front of the entire country, imploding the lie Roberts has been selling his whole career.
The audio/video mismatch on this clip from a journalist drives my brain mad, but you can see Roberts all but runs out after Trump says it: x.com/TomDreisbach…
This clip from a right-wing influencer has the video/audio matched up (even if his transcription is wrong): x.com/BehizyTweets…
— Chris Geidner (@chrisgeidner.bsky.social) March 4, 2025 at 10:25 PM
While Trump summarized the Chief Justice’s career in just a few seconds for the world to remember forever, John Roberts authored his own legacy by allowing the rampant corruption Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito flaunt in front of the whole world. He authored it by being the justice who oversaw the decimation of the historic advancements in women’s health and civil rights made a generation ago. Roberts wrote his own epitaph as one of history’s great monsters by enthusiastically driving an extreme right-wing Court off the rails even by the depraved standards of America’s most illegitimate institution. And now because of John Roberts’ ham-fisted bumbling of one of the American elite’s greatest kept secrets, that the Court has mostly been hostile to democratic progress, this is his legacy too.
The Supreme Court, Earl Warren’s Court excepted, has always been a project dedicated to enshrining American capital and its reactionary allies as the rulers of our new age of Kings, but no one in the public broadly realized this until John Roberts thought he could push his luck while pretending to be the Court’s “respectable” Republican vote, which was the lie we were all sold by George W. Bush when he appointed this institutional wrecking ball. If there is anything a basic Supreme Court observer has noticed these days, it’s that Roberts has dropped the respectable Republican shtick now and the lone bulwark between us and Sam Alito’s perfect world is Amy Coney Barret and the handful of days that Roberts still pretends to try.
He can try all he want, but Roberts is both Sam Alito and Clarence Thomas forever. Somehow worse than both combined, actually, and Trump just confirmed it. I’m sure Mr. perfect phone call “won’t forget” something entirely unrelated to the litany of beneficial rulings for him out of the Supreme Court, like, oh I don’t know, overturning part of the 14th Amendment to allow Trump to run again or the one insulating him from all criminal liability.
John Roberts more than anyone represents the fraudulence of the “respectable Republican center” this century, as they are just pure MAGA people who are too ashamed to admit it. Compare Roberts to one of the neocon architects of the Iraq War (wild thinking that the Iraq War could potentially be Bush’s second-biggest mistake) in Bill Kristol, who is currently fighting for trans people’s rights because his ideological commitment to democracy is very real in a lot of contexts that are admittedly a bit confusing at times–but the point is that bathing in the same slop as John Roberts does not condemn anyone to a life there forever. It’s a choice to remain there.
Especially for those who supposedly Know Better who we are told are there to Manage Things like John Roberts. If anything, Trump has demonstrated more reticence to go as far as John Roberts has already taken the Court, and the reason why Trump “won’t forget” John Roberts is that no one will forget Roberts as the right-wing crook who facilitated the wholesale destruction of American democracy.
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