The Roberts Court Unleashed the Worst President in U.S. History

But It Doesn’t Have to Be This Way

Some witty fellow Americans have dubbed Wednesday night’s nationally televised lie-fest “The Pettysburgh Address.” It’s a new low, but really, after everything that Donald John Trump has done and said in 2025–including this week’s vile slander of Rob Reiner–it is beyond clear that there is no bottom. Another day, another dollar, and another noxious act or foul toot. The vainglorious homunculus in the White House is singular in his impetuous destructiveness, compared with all of his predecessors, in ways big and small that actually harm people and routinely shatter one’s peace of mind.

But Trump did not get here alone. The high court, led by John Glover Roberts Jr., super-charged him–even though Trump embodies the worst fears of America’s founders.

As I wrote in my new book, Without Precedent:

Whatever extremes Trump pursues in 2025 and beyond, these sins must fall at Roberts’s feet too. Roberts broke the central pillar upon which our Constitution is built: the American president is not a king… Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress let Trump get away with appointing the most unqualified, reckless, and dangerous cabinet in all of U.S. history.

Just two years ago, in 2023, Trump was facing multiple grand jury indictments: four felonies for his efforts to subvert his 2020 election loss by inciting the January 6 insurrection, 40 counts for taking and mishandling classified documents that he stored in bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, 13 counts for criminal interference in Georgia’s 2020 election count, and 34 counts (on which he was convicted) for falsifying business records. The Supreme Court of Colorado had ruled that the state could keep Trump off the 2024 ballot because he had engaged in an insurrection, a constitutional bar under the 14th Amendment that only an affirmative act of Congress could waive.

But then John Roberts took an ax to the law to save Donald Trump.

As the New York Times detailed, it was Roberts who orchestrated the 6-3 hyper-partisan, counter-constitutional edict declaring Trump immune from criminal prosecution for his so-called “official acts” as president, including his actions on January 6 and before. The Roberts Court also took up the cause of other criminals convicted for the violent acts on January 6 as they sought to interrupt the official counting of the Electoral College votes, under a statute Roberts rewrote to apply only to securities cases, not the security of the peaceful transfer of power being conducted at the Capitol. That was one of the four charges special prosecutor Jack Smith was pursuing against Trump; Smith recently testified under oath that there was evidence beyond reasonable doubt to convict him.

Roberts and his fellow Republican appointees have bookended Trump’s presidency with protection, giving him criminal immunity both retrospectively and prospectively. They’ve issued 24 shadow docket rulings siding with Trump to summarily overturn detailed factual findings of other judges that an array of Trump’s actions since January 2025 have violated the Constitution, statutes, rules, contracts, and/or long-standing legal precedents. This one-two punch has fueled Trump’s delusions that he can do almost anything he wants.

The Roberts Court is out of control. It is acting like an arm of the Republican Party, not like a fair court. It is trying to help Trump rig the 2026 midterms. That’s what the Texas ruling was all about, despite trial court findings that there was evidence the Texas legislature redrew voting maps along racial lines in violation of the Voting Rights Act. John Roberts’ personal devotion to weakening the Voting Rights Act is why the Court is poised to eviscerate that landmark legislation in the Callais case, though he is not on a solo mission; his fellow GOP appointees yearn for that, too.

But, it doesn’t have to be this way.

We have to take some solace in the fact that more and more people now understand that the highest court has been captured in order to roll back our rights. It is aggressively aiding Trump and entrenching Republican power. If we cannot see that the Roberts Court is broken, we cannot fix it. And we have to fix it and limit its destructiveness, or this pattern will continue for years to come.

All legal options need to be on the table: impeachments, term limits, jurisdictional repairs, real and binding ethics rules with consequences, and more. When a majority comes to power to restore and expand voting rights, it will need to include court reform–or those statutes will not survive a Roberts Court that has been eager to abet Trump and whoever the heirs to his regressive, repressive authoritarian agenda may be.

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What I’m Reading:

• I’m still re-reading my book as I work with reporters and allies to help people understand how we got here and how to fix it. Plus, I am actually reading the introduction to the book out loud for the coming audio version in 2026! In the meantime, you can get the hard-bound version at a 20% discount here.

• Pleasure reading for the holiday break! I’m reading Matt Haig’s The Life Impossible, and it is so lovely.

• And, of course, the Constitution, with a view toward what needs to change, like the succession rules in the 20th and 25th amendments, among other things.

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