Alan Zendell, July 2, 2024

Before yesterday’s Supreme Court decision that presidents performing “official duties” are immune from criminal prosecution, the contrast between Joe Biden and Donald Trump was already starkly evident. Both men have been clear about their ideologies and values. We don’t need another debate to define who they are and how they want to govern.

Joe Biden has been a staunch supporter of labor and the middle class, and of social and economic justice and opportunity. He believes in the inscription on the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free. As Senator, Vice President, and President, he consistently stressed our need to be united in defense of our allies against military threats from Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. Most important, he has always been an unabashed patriot and defender of democracy and the rule of law.

Donald Trump has consistently favored the interests of wealthiest Americans and pandered to right-wing fringe groups, racists, and religious extremists. He has demonstrated disdain and disrespect for our military leaders, and promised to use the Office of the President as a weapon against his political opponents. Playing on the smug ambitions of people like Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, he stacked the Supreme Court with the most conservative, extremist majority it has ever had. He routinely courts favor from murderous dictators while threatening to abandon our allies and dismantle NATO. Most important, he has no respect for either truth or the rule of law and has explicitly asserted that presidents can do anything they wish with complete immunity from criminal prosecution.

As I read the last two paragraphs, the choice for Americans who love their country is so clear, it makes my head spin that so many of us have been taken in by Trump’s self-serving claims of making America great again. No nation has ever been close to perfect, but until Trump came along, few questioned that America was as close to that ideal as any country has ever been, as well as the country most feared by its enemies. Trump has done nothing but tarnish that image and weaken us. To him, making America Great (again?) is simply Orwellian Doublespeak.

The Supreme Court’s decision granting a president full immunity for any action performed during the official duties of the office changes the game completely. The arguments about which president is the greater threat to democracy were rendered meaningless by the Court. Trump is very clear about his intentions to grab and hold as much power as he can, and the Supreme Court has made it far more likely that if he is re-elected, there will be few if any legal barriers to achieving his fascist-style ambitions. Rather than fortify the Constitution, the Court has turned the possibility that another Trump presidency could destroy our democracy into a likelihood.

There has not been such a stark difference in presidential candidates since the Civil War, yet Trump and our profit-oriented media seem to have successfuly made the coming election about which old man will be the last one standing. That’s the choice our flawed political system has given us, but it has little to do with what’s really at stake. Before the decision on presidential immunity, the arguments about the future of our fragile democracy were hypothetical. The Court made them urgent and immediate.

The Supreme Court left the argument over what constitutes the official duties of the president to be worked out by lower courts, after which SCOTUS itself will decide if they got it right. The first obvious conclusion we can draw from that is that we will have no clear definition of presidential duties before Election Day, so we can safely assume that if Trump is re-elected, he will take office with every intention of using his presumed immunity to neutralize his opposition the way Vladimir Putin dealt with Alexei Navalny.

The more sinister conclusion is that if, as many observers believe, the Court’s intention is to help Trump achieve his ends, it will be virtually impossible to convince the right-wing majority that anything Trump does incurs criminal liability. And there’s a particularly nasty irony in that, since in the past, three of the most conservative Justices (Roberts, Alito, and Kavanaugh) wrote that it is a fundamental tenet of our democracy that no one including a president is above the law.

It’s extremely unlikely that either Biden or Trump will drop out of the race. Thus, our choice isn’t about age or hoping Biden is up to the challenge of another term. It is plainly and simply about whether a fringe group of extremists is going to be allowed to trash the legacy of the American dream, and whether our grand experiment in democracy will simply result in scholarly works about The Rise and Fall of America.