Donald Trump, a corrupt wannabe strongman, is also a boastful, needy narcissist who fancies himself knowledgeable about all manner of things about which he knows next to nothing. He prizes the loyalty of sycophants, rather than the professional judgment of experts; self-serving transactional arrangements, rather than honest, aboveboard procedures; and getting his way in the moment, no matter the consequences to follow.

Each episode of the man’s redo of the Reflecting Pool has presented a multitude of critics with a welcome diversion from the MAGA rampage the country has experienced during Trump’s second stint in the White House.

Equally satisfying has been watching the MAGA media universe scramble to diminish and detract from the misadventure (led by Fox News Channel, which has run with the whining chyron, “Liberal Media Focused on a Pool Nobody Swims In“).

Sad.

As Trump wreaks havoc (an effort supercharged by the corrupt Roberts Court and enabled by a supine GOP Congress) in a wave of destruction of democratic institutions and of the liberties of Americans (both much more consequential than his trifling redecorating binge to self-sooth and his compulsion to place himself front and center at every opportunity), attention to the drama of the pool that nobody swims in has provided comic relief. The less consequential blunders, which exemplify the man’s cognitive limits and mental kinks, are not just easier to stomach; they allow for a measure of pleasure at watching Trump stumble.

Trump and acolytes put his name on the Kennedy Center and the United States Institute of Peace and his face on banners before the departments of Justice, Labor, and Agriculture, on national park passes, on commemorative coins, and more — with a $250 bill in the works. He gilds the White House with globs of gold to outdo Louis XIV and makes plans to erect a massive arch designed with an eye to France, not the American republic. And, of course, in a bitter testament to his wrecking ball presidency, he rips down the East Wing of the White House so he can build his ballroom. (His ballroom.) As redecorating goes, that’s more significant than his (temporary, correctable) blunders inflicted on the Reflecting Pool. The pool, with proper care, will recover, which leaves us free to delight, albeit fleetingly, in the ongoing spectacle.

The saga of the Reflecting Pool in brief.

On May 4, not for the first time, Trump boasted of his renovation of the Reflecting Pool:

This will last for at least 50 years. And you’ll never have a leak. It’s very strong. You couldn’t, if you had a knife – I don’t want to give anyone ideas – if you had a knife, you can’t even cut it. So strong, so powerful. It is beautiful. Sealed. And I look at just one of the little pieces that they did to finish. It’s like a piece of glass. Beautiful color. Beautiful every – you could never get anything like this.

Three days earlier Trump, evincing evident enthusiasm for his project, posted an AI image of himself and several shirtless guys and a bikini-clad gal lounging in the dark blue (if not quite American Flag Blue) pool. Fun times. (How slender Trump appears; AI can be so flattering.)

On June 3, Trump announced the completed project on Truth Social and showed off a chart, “Our Pool is Bigger than Skyscrapers.”

But, alas, not all was well.

Photo, CBC: “Trump spent $14M US to make reflecting pool look blue. Now the water is green.”

Photo, USA Today, “Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool paint peeling off: See images.”

The pool quickly turned green — the result of an algal bloom. And then the “American Flag Blue” sealant — Trump personally selected the color — started peeling off in chunks. These mishaps drew attention to the contractors chosen for the project. It turns out there was no competitive bidding for applying the sealant; instead, the Department of Interior awarded a no-bid $14.7 million contract to a company that had worked on pools at Trump properties.

The no-bid $1.7 million contract to install the water purification system went to Greenwater Services, affiliated with John J. Cafaro, Trump’s Mar-a-Lago neighbor, $255,600 donor to Trump’s 2020 campaign, and a man convicted of violating campaign laws and bribing a member of Congress.

John J. Cafaro, pictured with former cast member of “The Real Housewives of Orange Country,” who told TMZ that she doesn’t know Cafaro, but because he looked “funny,” like a villain out of central casting, she couldn’t resist the photo opportunity.

When asked about holding the contractors responsible, Trump waived this off, unconvincingly blaming vandals for slicing a 290-300 foot cut through the sealant.

Q: Are the contractors who did the initial work for the reflecting pool to blame for the condition of it?TRUMP: No no. We had vandalism. They went in there with a knife.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-22T20:19:29.130Z

(What started out as a 250 foot gash eventually reached 350 feet on Trump’s telling.)

Trump has suggested that there are photos of the vandalism, though they are as hard to come by as the millions of pages of Epstein files still hidden away.

Q: You mentioned that the Interior Dept has video of photos. We reached out to them & they haven't shared it w/ usTRUMP: They will share it. They've arrested I think 6 people on the reflecting pool. So, the reflecting pool looks fantastic. Somebody went in with a knife and cut it, a 350 foot slit

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-23T17:22:59.852Z

A search for other possible causes of the failures.

The president’s claims about damage inflicted by vandals have met with considerable skepticism, especially from folks who suspect that Trump’s no-bid selections are likely incompatible with merit-based results.

Since no convincing evidence has been provided (“Trump’s Unsupported Claims About Reflecting Pool Vandalism“), speculation has ensued about other possible causes of the peeling sealant and green algae.

Here are 2 possibilities to fill the gap in reliable information:

Hypothesis 1: driving a motorcade across the length of the pool could have damaged the sealant before it had set.

On May 7 — most of us learned of this much later — the president decided to check things out personally, so his motorcade (with, by my count, a dozen vehicles, including an MPDC escort trailing a UTV, a parade of black Cadillac and other SUVs, and the Commander-in-Chief’s armored vehicle — the Beast, which weighs in at an estimated 7 to 10 tons) rolled across the full length of the pool.

🚨 INCREDIBLE SCENE: President Trump just directed his motorcade straight into the drained Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool for an up-close look at the ongoing renovation progress!

Trump wanted to personally inspect the major “American flag blue” resurfacing project — and the… pic.twitter.com/baHZItEEmu

— The Patriot Oasis™ (@ThePatriotOasis) May 8, 2026

Hypothesis 2: Primping for Trump’s UFC birthday party caused the explosion of algae in the pool, as the New York Times reported: “How the Reflecting Pool Turned Green: Missing ‘Bubblers’ and a Rush Job.”

Greenwater Services had installed enormous, unsightly nanobubblers enclosed within bulky black fences around the perimeter of the pool as a temporary measure to purify the water, which appeared dark blue. But the National Park Service ordered the machines removed just before Trump’s big day.

Photo from NYT.

By the time the nanobubblers were put back in place 36 hours later, the algae had begun to spread, turning the water green. No need to invoke vandals or “Radical Lunatics” (as the White House press release put it) to explain this fiasco. Simple ignorance and shortsightedness will do.

Metaphor and leading indicator

I’ll let the reader sort out whether a metaphor is to be found in the twisted saga of the Reflecting Pool, but I’ll turn to a possible foreshadowing.

I can’t be certain, of course, but as the Reflecting Pool story has unfolded, things have appeared to shift for Trump’s MAGA crusade.

Let’s review what we are seeing: public opinion surveys, the results of special elections since January 2025 and primary elections thus far in 2026, accumulating problems caused directly by Trump and his policies, and Trump’s inability to admit error and strategically change course.

Make no mistake: the best case scenario with two and a half years left in Trump’s second term is incalculable damage yet to come. This is inevitable.

But could Trump’s bungles and excuses in recent months suggest that his regime is headed for a significant fall? And that the country is headed toward a more sanguine, less Trumpian future?

In my view, as Americans have watched this play out — in tandem with a series of more consequential failures — the drama will cement an image of Trump that will not soon disappear. Many 2024 Trump voters have been burned. Those outside the MAGA tribe have learned a lesson about Trump. Trump’s Reflecting Pool comedy of errors and accusations is illustrative of a bigger picture.

Whenever Trump has an audience, his long digressions on the Reflecting Pool or the Triumphal Arch or his ballroom reveal where his interests lie. While he is bored by negotiations with Iran, he is engaged with his redecorating projects. He is energized by repairs to fountains across D.C., not so much by efforts to tame inflation. He and his family are getting rich; so what if working folks are having a tough time?

Trump’s comments yesterday regarding the bipartisan housing legislation just passed by Congress — “It’s a yawn” — are completely in character.

Q: Will you sign the housing affordability bill?Trump: It's a yawn. Just about everything is a big yawn

— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 2026-06-29T19:48:23.538930492Z

Trump’s Reflecting Pool follies are hardly, in themselves, significant. But they have occurred at a moment when the tide has begun to turn.

Small-d democrats, distressed by what we’ve experienced since January 2025, have reason to hope.

On the web this morning, Jamelle Bouie comments on “The Real Reason Trump Never Stops Talking About Voter Fraud.”

His commentary begins:

Donald Trump knew as well as anyone that he had lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square. He knew there was no conspiracy to commit voter fraud — no mysterious mail ballots, no “illegal” voting, no suspicious activity in key swing states. When he told his supporters that the election had been “rigged,” he was lying.

Bouie notes that Trump’s VP, AG, director of national intelligence, White House attorneys, and others in the executive branch, as well as Trump campaign strategists and staffers advised him that there was no fraud. Joe Biden had won. And, indeed, Trump himself acknowledged as much behind the scenes.

This lie, often referenced as the Big Lie back in the day, has been extraordinarily effective as disinformation. Two-thirds of Republicans accepted the lie as true when his supporters rioted at the Capitol in January 2021 and in a January 2024 survey two-thirds of Republicans continue to accept it.

Trump is still at it. Claiming without a shred of evidence that elections are rigged whenever his opponents win.

WOW – Trump crashes out & cuts his interview w/ Welker short as she presses him on his lack of evidence for claiming elections are rigged"You're either crooked or you're stupid. I've had enough. Thank you darling," he tells her""I traveled all the way to Wisconsin for this interview," she pleads

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-07T14:50:42.139Z

Republican politicians (even those who know that Biden won in 2020) are willing to go along with Trump’s lies. Long before Trump, as Jonathan Chait noted six years ago, it has been an article of faith among Republicans that Democrats cheat at elections: “The Republican strategy has several sources of motivation, but the most important is a widely shared belief that Democrats in large cities — i.e., racial minorities — engage in systematic vote fraud, election after election.” Not just in 2020, but in elections whenever they take place. In that regard, Speaker Mike Johnson’s comments on the 2026 California primary represent a Republican platitude:

RAJU: But what evidence is there to prove the California election is rigged?MIKE JOHNSON: Look, some of these efforts are so diabolical and so far upstream it's impossible to prove. But I think everybody knows instinctively that something is wrong here.

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-08T19:56:22.798Z

It’s still a lie, but there is another claim embedded within the lie that Republicans lose because Democrats cheat.

Trump was lying when he asserted in 2020 and 2021 that the election was rigged, that there was systemic voter fraud. (As he continues to lie today.) “But,” Bouie writes, “Trump was also making a specific political claim.” That claim is that only Trump voters may legitimately cast ballots. Only Trump supporters are genuine Americans.

When Trump (and other Republicans) point to elections in Pennsylvania and Georgia and Michigan as rigged, Republicans focus on the cities — Philadelphia, Atlanta, Detroit, populated with people feared and despised by the MAGA base — where the rigging happens.

Republicans since Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich and a multitude of talking heads on Rupert Murdock’s Fox News Channel have denigrated their political opponents as unworthy, illegitimate, as deserving of contempt. Decidedly not as equal participants in our American democracy.

This go-to approach justifies vilification at every opportunity, from JD Vance’s lie about Haitians in Ohio eating pets, which he rationalized as a way to garner media attention …

… to Stephen Miller’s puerile denigration of a Democratic senate candidate.

The Democrats made history in Texas by nominating their first transgender senate candidate. https://t.co/KaGDLn2naP

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) May 27, 2026

Bouie again:

“Voter fraud” is not about fraud. It is about who votes and how. It is about the breadth and scope of the political community. It is, as with most MAGA obsessions, about who can call themselves Americans — entitled to govern as equals — and who are mere subjects. Trump’s obsession with voter fraud is just another expression of the reactionary populist belief that the people who inhabit a place are not equivalent to the people, who are entitled to rule.

This MAGA obsession lies behind so much of the Trump agenda: voter suppression, extreme gerrymanders, undermining the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, mass deportations, immigration confined to white South Africans, the executive order on birthright citizenship, and the vice president’s view of citizenship based on heritage and bloodlines, rejecting Lincoln’s vision (reflecting the ideals of the Declaration of Independence) of a democratic nation of equals.

The Roberts Court has, in a rush, offered “a series of major upheavals in the past month,” beginning with Louisiana v. Callais, which gutted the Voting Rights Act while pretending not to, followed by a pair of quick shadow docket rulings (which cast aside the court’s Purcell principle that cautioned against changing voting rules close to scheduled elections) setting off a frenzied scramble in Republican states to create freshly gerrymandered districts, eliminating Black representation, before the states’ 2026 primaries.

Rick Hasen began a commentary (quoted above) on these judicial machinations with these words: “Over his two decades on the Supreme Court, United States Chief Justice John Roberts had consistently played the long game when it comes to the court’s weakening of voting rights. That was until the past few weeks.”

Hasen cites an op-ed he wrote in 2013 (after the Shelby County decision) to illustrate the chief justice’s pattern of playing the long game:

In an opinion brimming with a self-confidence that he hides behind a cloak of judicial minimalism, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., writing for a conservative Supreme Court majority in Shelby County v. Holder, cripples Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.
The court pretends it is not striking down the act but merely sending the law back to Congress for tweaking; it imagines that Congress forced its hand; and it fantasizes that voting discrimination in the South is a thing of the past. None of this is true.
In the Shelby decision, we see a somewhat more open version of a pattern that is characteristic of the Roberts court, in which the conservative justices tee up major constitutional issues for dramatic reversal. First the court wrecked campaign finance law in Citizens United. On Tuesday it took away a crown jewel of the civil rights movement. And as we saw in Monday’s Fisher case, affirmative action is next in line, even if the court wants to wait another year or two to pull the trigger.

You can still count on the court’s pattern of pretending, imagining, and fantasizing without regard for what is true. That hasn’t changed. But, until recently, you could count on the chief justice’s drawing things out, signaling before pulling the trigger, playing the long game. “That was until the past few weeks.” Now the court is in a big hurry. Hasen continues:

The court did not have to proceed in such a hurried fashion. It could have waited to intervene in the Alabama case until the fall. It could have waited its typical 32 days for Callais to go into effect. It could have even held the case until the end of its term in late June or early July, when the primary season was over. It could have signaled, as the Supreme Court did in 1964’s Reynolds v. Sims, establishing the “one person, one vote” rule for state legislative districts, that because of “equitable considerations,” it would not be applying the new rule to the impending elections. It could have said that Purcell considerations militated against immediate change. Instead, the court’s conservatives have made an unusually mad dash toward radical change.

Why the rush?

Hasen offers three possible reasons. Although he offers them as either-ors, it’s easy enough to see each of them as factors motivating Roberts and his Republican colleagues.

First, pure partisanship. There is little doubt that the redistricting decisions (Callais and the shadow docket follow ups) will advantage Republicans and disadvantage Democrats in the 2026 and 2028 Congressional elections. (Yeah, but wouldn’t you expect Roberts to look a bit further ahead than a couple of election cycles?)

Second, motivated reasoning. In other words, the decisions advantage Republicans, but the Republican justices are not conscious of their gross partisanship. (Implausible? Maybe, maybe not. My first response to Alito’s declaration of historical progress in his Callais opinion — “And if, as a result of this progress, it is hard to find pertinent evidence relating to intentional present-day voting discrimination, that is cause for celebration.” — was: He’s trolling us! But other observers appear to accept this as what the man actually believes. It’s hard to doubt that the Republican justices are living in a bubble that could spark motivated reasoning.)

The third possibility: Roberts has decided it’s time to cut to the chase. Here’s how Hasen puts it:

Third, perhaps John Roberts sees the court as running out of time, and he wants to get many rulings in the books that change American politics in his preferred direction and forestall the move toward a multiracial democracy. He’s a 71-year-old chief justice now, not a 26-year-old staffer. The Supreme Court’s rulings in cases ranging from abortion to presidential immunity to the power of the government to fight climate change are growing increasingly unpopular. In the most important cases, the court is now splitting along not just ideological lines but party lines: All the conservative justices on the court have been appointed by Republican presidents, and all the liberals by Democrats.
Roberts well knows that Democrats and progressives are mobilizing against the court. The chief justice has complained about the public viewing the justices as political actors, but that is exactly what they are. People, including me, who had resisted Supreme Court reform, increasingly see it as the only way to save American democracy.

I wholeheartedly agree that Roberts “wants to get many rulings in the books that change American politics in his preferred direction and forestall the move toward a multiracial democracy.” It is possible that the other Republican justices forced the chief justice’s hand; there may have been a majority for this decision even without Roberts. Or perhaps Roberts would have done less slow-walking in previous years if the majority then had been less restrained.

Republican justices have constituted the Supreme Court’s majority for more than 50 years, but the confirmation of Donald Trump’s three nominees — after the Federalist Society’s vow of “no more Souters” — tilted the balance of the court dramatically.

Following Rucho v. Common Cause (2020), when two of Trump’s picks had been seated and Republicans constituted the 5-4 majority, the Callais decision this year, with an additional Republican joining the majority for a 6-3 victory, set off a furious scramble in Republican controlled statehouses to implement extreme gerrymanders of Congressional district maps. (State legislative maps and redistricting of localities will come next.)

The Roberts Court deliberately brought about this race to bottom, undermining fair representation and equality among voters. This was a choice. A partisan, political choice. Rucho and Callais taken together appear laser focused on impairing the Democrats’ prospects of winning elections at the federal, state, and local levels.

Add a third ruling, after the 6-3 Republican supermajority was in place: Trump v. United States (2024) was completely untethered from the Constitution or anything else that could possibly justify such a reckless decision. We have witnessed the results with Trump 2.

Each of these three decisions — and there have been a number of others — are fundamentally at odds with democratic principles. They are antithetical to American democracy. But never before fall 2020, with the confirmation of the third Trump justice, has the Republican majority on the Roberts Court been more powerful or more unaccountable. Playing the long game, holding back now, makes little sense. Never in the Trump era has an authoritarian victory been so close at hand.

While Democrats (some of them) have begun to realize that undoing these decisions and disempowering these justices are critical to winning elections, to regaining power, and to implementing public policies that the Roberts Court will not strike down, the Republican justices have done their best to diminish Democratic prospects and marginalize Democratic voters.

The Roberts Court, seeing an opportunity to secure a convincing and durable victory over opponents of a MAGA America, has no interest in restraint.

If you have 22 minutes and you’re curious, John Oliver on “Last Week Tonight” explains the shadow docket. Steve Vladeck, the man who wrote the book (The Shadow Docket: How the Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings to Amass Power and Undermine the Republic) recommends Oliver’s explanation.

Other than discovering that I’m apparently John Oliver’s son, @lastweektonight.com’s deep dive into the shadow docket is really quite good:www.youtube.com/watch?v=qKeq…

— Steve Vladeck (@stevevladeck.bsky.social) 2026-05-11T11:50:23.172Z

Plus: gerrymandering race to the bottom and the chief justice’s complaints that the court is misunderstood

On a related note, Professor Vladeck, a savvy court watcher, weighed in today (at One First) on the redistricting chaos the Supreme Court chose to unleash and the unconvincing insistence of the chief justice that the court is not political.

I really didn’t want to write about redistricting again, but events in the latter part of last week seemed to demand it. It’s not just the brazen racism we’ve seen in some of the state legislatures that are rushing to eliminate majority-minority districts (e.g., “y’all need to shut up, boy”), or the not-exactly-obvious reading of Virginia law that the Virginia Supreme Court adopted to nix Virginia voters’ attempt to belatedly redraw the Commonwealth’s congressional districts, but also Alabama’s … aggressive … requests for emergency relief to the U.S. Supreme Court to let it get out from under earlier district court rulings—including ones the Supreme Court affirmed on the merits—so it can re-draw its maps in time for this cycle.
All of this came the same week that Chief Justice Roberts, in remarks at the Third Circuit Judicial Conference, complained about the public perception that the Court is “political.” In his words, “I think [people] view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.” Shortly after that, he added that the Court is “simply not part of the political process.”
Roberts may tell himself that the Court is not part of the political process, but the (growing) evidence is overwhelmingly to the contrary. Indeed, the Court inserted itself into the midterm cycle—and set off this race to the bottom—knowingly (if not deliberately), both in what it ruled in Callais and in its willingness to issue the judgment immediately. That latter development was an unmissable signal that it was not averse to having this exact kind of chaos unfold on the ground—a point Justice Jackson made explicitly in her dissent from last Monday’s order. In her words, “as always, the Court has a choice.” By issuing the Callais judgment immediately, the majority “unshackles itself from [doctrinal] constraints . . . and dives into the fray.”
This, to me, is the key point: whatever one thinks of the ruling in Callais, the Court chose this chaos. And now that it is on the receiving end of applications from Alabama (and with an application from Virginia apparently on the way), to suggest the Court is not “part of the political process” is to deny the entirely obvious (and entirely predictable) consequences of the Court’s own behavior—not just in Callais, but before April 29 and since. Worse than that, all of these developments rather fatally undermine what I’d always understood to be the animating purpose of the so-called “Purcell principle”—which makes sense only as a strong norm against federal judicial intervention in the middle of election cycles. The Court’s own interventions are now wreaking havoc—and a majority of the justices either don’t think it’s their fault, or don’t care that it is. Either way, they don’t seem to mind the inconsistency—in a context in which it’s having the remarkably coincidental effect of benefiting Republicans.

Vladeck elaborates on these points and explains the Tim Robinson meme — image above — that inspired the title of his post at One First.

“I think, at a very basic level, people think we’re making policy decisions, we’re saying we think this is how things should be, as opposed to what the law provides. I think they view us as purely political actors, which I don’t think is an accurate understanding of what we do.” — Chief Justice John Roberts, May 6, 2026

Come hell or high water in the Trump era the Roberts Court has almost always found a way to enable Donald Trump and advance the interests of the contemporary Republican Party. The 6-3 Republican supermajority has given us Trump v. United States (July 1, 2024) and Louisiana v. Callais (April 29, 2026), which, among a host of other decisions, have strengthened the evidence that the Republican justices have less fidelity to the Constitution than to a partisan agenda. The latter decision, the latest in a pattern, illustrates the Roberts Court’s hostility to the Reconstruction Amendments.

Of these amendments, Eric Foner has written:

 The 13th Amendment irrevocably abolished slavery. The 14th constitutionalized the principles of birthright citizenship and equality before the law. The 15th sought to guarantee the right to vote for black men throughout the reunited nation. All three empowered Congress to enforce their provisions, radically shifting the balance of power from the states to the nation.
The amendments had flaws. The 13th allowed involuntary servitude to continue for people convicted of crime, inadvertently opening the door to the creation of a giant system of convict labor. The 14th mandated that a state would lose part of its representation in the House of Representatives if it barred groups of men from voting but imposed no penalty if it disenfranchised women. The 15th allowed states to limit citizens’ right to vote for reasons other than race.
Nonetheless, the amendments should be seen not simply as changes to an existing structure but as a second American founding, which created a fundamentally new Constitution.

The majority on the Roberts Court is intent on clawing back what Congress intended in the post-Civil War era and again (as recently as 1982) what Congress intended following passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. With the decision on April 29, the six Republican justices have succeeded in demolishing the VRA.

Louisiana v. Callais will have dramatic consequences going forward — eliminating Black representation in Congressional districts, state legislatures, and local governing bodies. In fact, dramatic changes are already taking place, as a number of Republican states rush to redistrict and disable Black voting strength before the November 2026 elections.

[“Deadline: White House,” July 1, 2024. Marc Elias begins speaking at the 8:27 mark]

On the day theTrump v. United States decision was handed down, Nicolle Wallace asked voting rights attorney and activist Marc Elias for his response, which is worth quoting in full:

I think that we run the risk even on a day like today of overly lawyering, legalizing what the Supreme Court has done.
Let’s be clear. As you know, you’ve heard they knew exactly what they were doing not just for the past but for the future. Donald Trump is campaigning on a platform of being a dictator for a day and of seeking vengeance against his enemies. And, you know, to do that he needs the support of a lot of people who are going to go along with him.
Well, what have those people who have gone along with him learned in the past couple weeks? Number one, that the U.S. Supreme Court was going to narrowly construe a statute that went after January 6 insurrectionists. Number two, the Supreme Court was going to let Donald Trump remain on the ballot. Number three, that the Supreme Court was going to give him basically absolute immunity, not just for what he did last time, but what he may do in the future. And that his pardon power is absolute.
So let’s be clear. It’s not just that the Supreme Court knew what it was doing with respect to the to the criminal cases that have been indicted. The Supreme Court knows what it’s doing with respect to empowering his attitudes and his impulses and those of his followers as we are four months from the next election, four and a half months from the next set of lawsuits, five months from the next insurrection at the Capitol, and then potentially four years of him seeking vengeance and misusing power to go after his political opponents and to prosecute his case against the American people.
It is a shameful day for democracy. The court has disgraced itself. And I’ll tell ya, everyone one of us needs to be steeled for a battle to stand up for the rule of law going forward.

Wallace followed up: “Can I just ask you one last question, Marc Elias. In your view, why?” His response:

Because they agree with him.
You know, one of the things that has always struck me as odd in this town is that people look at a bunch of justices and they say: Well, you know they all went to Harvard and Yale Law School. And they all went to the best colleges. And they send their kids to the same schools that our kids go to. And you know they enjoy a glass of wine with a crudité at a reception at the Supreme Court. And they wear robes and they speak in very flowery language. They’re just like us.
No. They actually believe that Donald Trump is the future of America. They believe that the flag should be flown upside down, indicating distress, when Joe Biden wins. They believe that Donald Trump as a strongman should have immunity.
And it’s time that, you know, people that are in the center, the center-left, the center-right, stop looking at justices and thinking, Well, they must share our value system.
They don’t share our value system. They share his value system.

We have no reason to doubt this assessment and every reason to believe that when we watch the Roberts Court, we understand exactly what it is doing. This court is making policy decisions based on partisan preferences. It is enabling an authoritarian Republican president. At the same time, it is disabling Democratic public policies (such as the Voting Rights Act).

The Roberts Court is relying not on the Constitution, not on originalism, not on conservative judicial principles (such as judicial restraint, adherence to precedent, or respect for the coequal branch of government established by Article I). These Republican justices are dedicated to boosting the MAGA political agenda, because they prefer an earlier America than the one we have lived in since the second founding. They are imposing their political preferences on the nation.

With last week’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais the six Republican justices on the United States Supreme Court wrung the life out of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, killing off the protections it had offered minority voters.

Election maven Rick Hasen offered this assessment:

Wednesday’s 6–3 party-line decision in Louisiana v. Callais will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act.
This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation. It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy.

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 has been called “the single most effective piece of civil rights legislation ever passed by Congress.” In fact John Roberts himself has made reference to this judgment. Quoting (in an internal memo during his service in the Reagan administration) a sentence of Section 2 of VRA, Roberts wrote: “This provision, which is an important part of what has been uniformly described as the most successful civil rights law ever enacted, is applicable nationwide.”

Voter suppression

Don Moynihan offers a graph that presents registration rates of Black and White voters in Louisiana from 1878 to 2010. As you can see, the most dramatic changes in Black voter registration occurred with the advent of Jim Crow and then with passage of the VRA.

Regarding the graph, Moynihan observes:

In a single image, it tells the story of political power and discrimination. Black voters had power, briefly, then it was taken from them. A series of policies that were more or less explicit in their discriminatory purpose worked as intended, disenfranchising Black voters, and some poor White voters along the way.
This ended with the Voting Right Act of 1965, which removed the ability of governments to put in place facially neutral but clearly discriminatory practices, and in doing so ratcheted up Black registration in Louisiana until it matched White voters. This effect was immediate and enduring across the South.

While violence and intimidation were widespread during the Jim Crow era ( just months before passage of the VRA the country witnessed the bloody clash at the Edmund Pettus Bridge), election law was often enough to keep Black folks from registering. And note that the practices that disenfranchised Black voters during the Jim Crow era were represented as color-blind; in Moynihan’s words, they were “facially neutral but clearly discriminatory practices.” Poll taxes, literacy tests, exams assessing good character, property requirements, and so on were effective instruments in the hands of state officials who wished to preserve White rule.

The decades-long crusade of John Roberts

When a young John Roberts wrote the memo quoted above, he was the Reagan administration point person to defeat an amendment to the VRA. A 1980 Supreme Court opinion (City of Mobile v. Bolden), a 6-3 ruling with the Republican justices constituting the majority, had overruled an appellate court decision that the VRA rendered a gerrymandered district map (icing out Black representation) illegal. The SCOTUS majority, in overturning this decision, held that “action by a State that is racially neutral on its face violates the Fifteenth Amendment only if motivated by a discriminatory purpose.”

Congress, granted the power to enforce the Fifteenth Amendment by Section 2 of that amendment, did not agree. Roberts and the Reagan White House lost that battle. The 1982 legislation — passed with bipartisan support and signed into law by President Reagan — clarified that states were prohibited from introducing voting procedures with discriminatory effect.

But Roberts stayed the course. It was his “life’s work,” as Hasen noted. The Roberts Court has chipped away at the VRA in decision after decision. Finally, more than four decades after that initial defeat, Roberts has finally succeeded in demolishing the VRA. Sam Alito wrote the 6-3 decision in Louisiana v. Callais, powered by the Republican supermajority on the court.

Elena Kagan dissents

In the opening paragraphs of her dissent (joined by justices Sotomayer and Jackson), Justice Kagan offers a hypothetical illustration to clarify what’s at stake:

Consider the story of a hypothetical congressional district in a hypothetical State, subjected to a redistricting scheme. The example is admittedly stylized, but in its essence simulates the dispute before us, and clarifies the immense issues at stake. The district, let’s say, is a single county, in the shape of a near-perfect circle, sitting in the middle of a rectangular State. The State is one with a long history of virulent racial discrimination, and its many effects, including in residential segregation and political division, remain significant even today. The population of the circle district is 90% Black; the rest of the State, divided into five surrounding districts, is 90% White. And voting throughout all those districts is racially polarized: Black residents vote heavily for Democratic candidates, while White residents vote heavily for Republicans. The circle district thus enables the State’s Black community to elect a representative of its choice, whom no neighboring community would put in office. But that arrangement, in this not-so-hypothetical, is not to last. The state legislature decides to eliminate the circle district, slicing it into six pie pieces and allocating one each to six new, still solidly White congressional districts. The State’s Black voters are now widely dispersed, and (unlike the State’s White voters) lack any ability to elect a representative of their choice. Election after election, Black citizens’ votes are, by every practical measure, wasted.
That is racial vote dilution in its most classic form. A minority community that is cohesive in its geography and politics alike, and that faces continued adversity from racial division, is split—“cracked” is the usual term—so that it loses all its electoral influence. Members of the racial minority can still go to the polls and cast a ballot. But given the State’s racially polarized voting, they cannot hope—in the way the State’s White citizens can—to elect a person whom they think will well represent their interests. Their votes matter less than others’ do; they translate into less political voice. Or, as this Court put it recently, the cracking makes “a minority vote unequal to a vote by a nonminority voter.”

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Cracking districts creates two tiers of voters. The first tier dominates the second. Votes cast by the dominate group count. Votes cast by the disadvantaged group are, as Kagan writes “by every practical measure, wasted.”

Cracking a district is simpler than ever before with today’s computers. Denying fair representation to Black voters — so their votes matter less than others’ — is a snap. Congress, Kagan continues, chose to remedy this inequality by passing the Voting Rights Act. And by renewing it again and again. Congress made such unfairly apportioned legislative districts illegal because of the sordid history of voter suppression.

Even after the Fifteenth Amendment banned racial discrimination in voting, state officials routinely deprived African Americans of their voting rights. Through a seemingly boundless array of mechanisms—most of them facially race-neutral and among them the drawing of district lines—States either prevented Black citizens from casting ballots or ensured that their votes would count for next to nothing. The Voting Rights Act was meant as the corrective. And when this Court construed it too narrowly—insisting that a person suing under Section 2 had to prove discriminatory intent—Congress amended the law so that it turned solely on discriminatory effects. . . . And for 40 years now, this Court has recognized that language to encompass districting decisions that, in the way illustrated above, result in vote dilution—the “minimiz[ing]” of minority voters’ “ability to elect their preferred candidates.”
But no longer.

No longer. Not with the Roberts Court, especially not now that there is a Republican supermajority on the court.

The Republicans in power abhor multiracial democracy

The vision of the Roberts Court is at odds with the Reconstruction amendments to the Constitution and with the authority of Congress to pass legislation to enforce those amendments. This is a court that adamantly opposes multiracial democracy. The Republican justices prefer a return to an earlier time when the domination of White folks was unquestioned and the Black community was kept in its place. The court’s vision is akin to the Jim Crow era, which was ushered out by the civil rights revolution of 1960s America.

This Supreme Court majority is intent on turning back the clock, as implied by Donald Trump’s divisive invocation, Make America Great Again. This corruptly partisan majority has, often in brazen defiance of the Constitution and the rule of law, aggressively sought to impose its vision on the country.

John Roberts pledged at his confirmation hearing, “I will remember that it’s my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”

That’s hardly how things have worked out during his tenure as chief justice. Roberts has pushed the court toward the MAGA vision as much as the Republican justices in the majority have permitted him. The contrast between word and deed, especially during the Trump era, has been dramatic. Either Roberts was being disingenuous. Or he has had a massive change of heart since Ginsburg’s death, the unscrupulous maneuvers in the Senate, and the resulting 6-3 Republican supermajority (with no more Souters among them).

What was evident (though many observers deferred judgment of what they were witnessing in order to give Roberts and the Republican majority the benefit of the doubt) before 2020 — that partisan preferences, not the Constitution or the rule of law move these justices — has become unmistakable.

This is a court that is committed above all else to advancing the interests of the contemporary Republican Party. Disenfranchising Black voters is a priority of the national party in order to retain political power. The Roberts Court has proven willing, again and again, to enable the MAGA GOP in the quest for political domination.

Last week I posted “This is Trump being Trump waging war on Iran.” Trump is still being Trump of course. Here’s another installment, beginning with his post on Pope Leo.

[Link on Truth Social.]

Thirty-seven minutes later he posted this:

After getting “rare criticism from the religious right and allegations of blasphemy,” Trump deleted the post (an altered version of a post that appeared on the web previously). The Washington Post, which helpfully notes that the post was AI-generated, describes some of the criticism in an Instagram post.

Afterwards Trump acknowledged the posting, but denied that it depicted him as Jesus Christ. “I did post it. I thought it was me as a doctor and had to do with Red Cross, as a Red Cross worker, which we support. And only the fake news could come up with that one.”

Reporter: Did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?Trump: It wasn't a depiction. I did post it and I thought it was me as a doctor. And had to do with red cross as a red cross worker, which we support and only the fake news could come up with that one.

— Acyn (@acyn.bsky.social) 2026-04-13T16:45:19.663Z

Thus begins a Washington Post report of the high court’s hard shift to the right. The story continues:

Note that, “Overall, the Supreme Court has consistently leaned to the right for 50 years. That pattern has persisted despite the country being closely divided politically and the White House and Congress regularly changing hands between Democrats and Republicans.”

Republican presidents have chosen every Chief Justice since Eisenhower’s appointment of Earl Warren in 1953. Republican-appointed justices have comprised the court’s majority since 1970 — over half a century.

Nonetheless, the Roberts Court — packed with 3 Trump appointments — has set itself apart by its crusade against the rights of women and racial minorities.

Assault on democracy

The Roberts Court has also made history in attacking voting rights; attacking fair small-d democratic representation by enabling gerrymandering; and opening the floodgates of money in American politics. In the words of Adam Liptak

In the two decades Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has led the Supreme Court, the justices have reshaped American elections not just by letting state lawmakers like those in Texas draw voting maps warped by politics, but also by gutting the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and amplifying the role of money in politics.

Gutting voting rights has been a career-long mission of the Chief Justice since he served in the Reagan White House, where he sought vainly to undermine the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Roberts has found considerable success in the past decade leading the court, beginning with Shelby County v. Holder (2013), decided 5-4. This was an especially cynical ruling, with Roberts writing for the majority, striking VRA’s pre-clearance requirement: “Racial disparity in those numbers was compelling evidence justifying the preclearance remedy and the coverage formula. There is no longer such a disparity.”

Ruth Bader Ginsberg’s dissent was on the mark, “Throwing out preclearance when it has worked and is continuing to work to stop discriminatory changes is like throwing away your umbrella in a rainstorm because you are not getting wet.” Within 24-hours of the decision Texas gloated that it would enforce its voter photo id law. Other Republican-led states followed with a range of voter suppression measures (closing polling places; cutting back on early voting; purging the voting rolls).

In Citizens United v. FEC (2010), McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), and a host of other decisions, the Roberts Court shredded campaign spending limits. The sums of money from billionaires (aka oligarchs) are staggering (“The Scale of Billionaires’ Campaign Donations is Overwhelming U.S. Politics”). And dark money compounds the problem.

In Rucho v. Common Cause (2019) the Roberts’ Court not only refused to uphold lower court rulings striking down gerrymandered redistricting schemes, it forbade federal courts from consideration of constitutional violations resulting from partisan redistricting. Justice Elena Kagan dissented:

For the first time ever, this Court refuses to remedy a constitutional violation because it thinks the task beyond judicial capabilities.
And not just any constitutional violation. The partisan gerrymanders in these cases deprived citizens of the most fundamental of their constitutional rights: the rights to participate equally in the political process, to join with others to advance political beliefs, and to choose their political representatives. In so doing, the partisan gerrymanders here debased and dishonored our democracy, turning upside-down the core American idea that all governmental power derives from the people. These gerrymanders enabled politicians to entrench themselves in office as against voters’ preferences. They promoted partisanship above respect for the popular will. They encouraged a politics of polarization and dysfunction. If left unchecked, gerrymanders like the ones here may irreparably damage our system of government.

The Rucho decision has led to mid-decade redistricting across the country to amplify gerrymandered Congressional districts. “The current frenzy is just the latest example of the most antidemocratic feature of American politics in 2025. It’s the toxic combination of the conservative Supreme Court majority and a political party that believes longstanding norms are for suckers and that lacks any commitment to fair play and majority rule.”

Enabling an off-the-rails wannabe strongman in the White House

Trump v. United States (2024) took the cake for the most outlandish, anti-constitutional decision of the Trump era. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent:

Today’s decision to grant former Presidents criminal immunity reshapes the institution of the Presidency. It makes a mockery of the principle, foundational to our Constitution and system of Government, that no man is above the law.
Relying on little more than its own misguided wisdom about the need for “bold and unhesitating action” by the President, ante, at 3, 13, the Court gives former President Trump all the immunity he asked for and more. Because our Constitution does not shield a former President from answering for criminal and treasonous acts, I dissent.
…
Looking beyond the fate of this particular prosecution, the long-term consequences of today’s decision are stark. The Court effectively creates a law-free zone around the President, upsetting the status quo that has existed since the Founding. This new official-acts immunity now “lies about like a loaded weapon” for any President that wishes to place his own interests, his own political survival, or his own financial gain, above the interests of the Nation.

Since that 2024 decision, the Roberts Court’s supercharging of Trump’s authoritarian ambitions and lawless conduct have often come through the shadow docket — in rulings without full briefings, oral arguments, or explanation. Often the majority’s reasoning is mysterious (if the Republican-appointed justices actually agree on a rationale). The lower courts are denied guideance and often the authority to act. Trump wins again and again, while the court’s GOP majority preserves exclusive right to decide such controversies on a case by case basis.

Former judge and conservative scholar J. Michael Luttig has taken the court to task: “The supreme court was never intended to function like this. Never before has it entertained such challenges from the president, and never before has it decided them so flippantly.” Luttig again:

“The supreme court has pulled the rug out from under the lower federal courts, and it has done so deliberately and knowingly,” Luttig said. “The chief justice has no higher obligation than to protect the federal judiciary from attacks by this president, and in my view he has utterly failed.”

[Link at Truth Social]

[Link at Truth Social]

Senate Republicans:

Iran would be wise to take President Trump at his word. 

They can choose the easy way or the hard way.

— Senate Republicans (@SenateGOP) April 7, 2026

Deal for 2-week ceasefire

[Link on Truth Social]

Iran’s 10 point peace plan

1. The US must fundamentally commit to guaranteeing non-aggression.

2. Continuation of Iran’s control over the Strait of Hormuz.

3. Acceptance that Iran can enrich uranium for its nuclear program

4. Removal of all primary sanctions on Iran.

5. Removal of all secondary sanctions against foreign entities that do business with Iranian institutions).

6. End of all United Security Council resolutions targeting Iran.

7. End of all International Atomic Energy Agency resolutions on Iran’s nuclear program.

8. Compensation payment to Iran for war damage.

9. Withdrawal of US combat forces from the region.

10. Cease-fire on all fronts, including Israel’s conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon.

[Source: Wall Street Journal]

David French reviews an argument made by Trump’s evangelical followers: Progressives, by focusing on the suffering of undocumented immigrants, women with unwanted pregnancies, the poor and vulnerable in other countries, and so on have duped Christians into wavering from the necessity to “to do tough, hard things.”

These MAGA advocates argue against “the sin of empathy” and “toxic empathy” (transgressions which were overlooked in the Sermon on the Mount). This is, French suggests, misguided:

The problem in those cases isn’t with empathy, which is a vital human virtue, but rather in its selective application. Just as we wouldn’t call love a sin because we might be stingy in our love, empathy isn’t a sin because its application is incomplete.
Or, put another way, our problem isn’t with too much empathy, but too little. We’re unwilling to place ourselves in other people’s shoes, to try to understand who they are and what their lives are like.
It’s hard to talk about this issue without recognizing a fundamental truth of the moment: The attack on empathy would have gained very little traction in the church if Donald Trump weren’t president. He delights in vengeance, and he owes his presidency to the evangelical church.
I’ve shared this statistic before, but if you look at 2024 exit polling, you’ll see that Trump won white evangelical and born-again voters by a 65-point margin, 82 percent to 17 percent. He lost everyone else by 18 points, 58 percent to 40 percent.
Given the sharp differences between Trump and every other Republican president of the modern era, in my experience evangelicals are desperate to to rationalize their support for a man who gratuitously and intentionally inflicts unnecessary suffering on his opponents.
That’s exactly how empathy becomes a sin.

xxx