This particular SCOTUS would have no grounds to complain if Trump defied a ruling, since they've now ruled that he doesn't need to respect the law at all, And to make that ruling for his benefit, they had to flout the language of what they claim is their own sacred guiding law.
Similarly, Ailene Cannon knows very well that Trump willfully violated the law, but she believes he should get away with it, to serve her political agenda and personal ambition.
The Trumpite position, in the end, is not that Trump is innocent of criminality and is being persecuted by a "weaponized" justice system. It's that he should never have to pay any penalty for violating the law. This is the logical culmination of the original "Let Trump be Trump" principle and the insistence that he must be exempted from the usual standards of ethics.
At one level, it's all about Trump: When the rank-and-file formed a cult around a sociopath, "conservative" thought-leaders adjusted their principles accordingly. When he promoted some policies they like, they doubled down on moral exceptions for his sake.
But at bottom, it isn't all about Trump, because those accommodations wouldn't have been made without a prior willingness to make them -- a disposition to say that rules, both moral and legal, can and should be bent or mowed down in service to a political agenda, framed as an existential imperative or the will of God. There had to be a prior willingness to elevate someone with deep and conspicuous character defects as the best instrument and public face of one's purposes.
It's the law of "by any means necessary" that conservatives used to decry as a leftist pathology. Then, some people on the right became anti-institutional and counterrevolutionary, and they embraced that law. Often it's under the guise of fighting back against "corruption," but that pose cannot be wholly sincere.
This particular SCOTUS would have no grounds to complain if Trump defied a ruling, since they've now ruled that he doesn't need to respect the law at all, And to make that ruling for his benefit, they had to flout the language of what they claim is their own sacred guiding law.
Similarly, Ailene Cannon knows very well that Trump willfully violated the law, but she believes he should get away with it, to serve her political agenda and personal ambition.
The Trumpite position, in the end, is not that Trump is innocent of criminality and is being persecuted by a "weaponized" justice system. It's that he should never have to pay any penalty for violating the law. This is the logical culmination of the original "Let Trump be Trump" principle and the insistence that he must be exempted from the usual standards of ethics.
At one level, it's all about Trump: When the rank-and-file formed a cult around a sociopath, "conservative" thought-leaders adjusted their principles accordingly. When he promoted some policies they like, they doubled down on moral exceptions for his sake.
But at bottom, it isn't all about Trump, because those accommodations wouldn't have been made without a prior willingness to make them -- a disposition to say that rules, both moral and legal, can and should be bent or mowed down in service to a political agenda, framed as an existential imperative or the will of God. There had to be a prior willingness to elevate someone with deep and conspicuous character defects as the best instrument and public face of one's purposes.
It's the law of "by any means necessary" that conservatives used to decry as a leftist pathology. Then, some people on the right became anti-institutional and counterrevolutionary, and they embraced that law. Often it's under the guise of fighting back against "corruption," but that pose cannot be wholly sincere.