05 July 2022 13:22
Last week came new, hallucinatory revelations about Donald Trump from the hearings of the House Committee investigating the January 6, 2021 congressional assault. all over the country, it has a strange effect. The most interesting testimony is that of Cassidy Hutchinson – assistant to the White House chief of staff in the last period of the Trump administration – who tells of a dangerous president, with clearly coup instincts, but also completely powerless.
Among other things, Hutchinson confirmed that at times when the fate of the country was at stake, no official with a minimum of power did what Trump asked him to do: on January 6, immediately after giving the rally from which the procession that attacked the capitol started, the president wanted to return to the demonstration to lead it (“I’m the fucking president”, he seems to have yelled at his staff) and his security guards understandably prevented him (at which Trump would have tried to grab the driver from the presidential car by the neck, trying to get hold of the steering wheel); he asked to remove the metal detectors from the space where his meeting was held despite knowing (or perhaps precisely because he knew) that among his supporters there were many armed people (saying “they are not here to attack me, they will go towards the congress “). Of course, the metal detectors stayed where they were.
What else after abortion?
All of this happened after months in which Trump had tried in vain to persuade Republican officials in some states (for example the secretary of state of Georgia during that absurd phone call) to falsify the ballot books to make him win, and he had put pressure on the minister. of justice and on the vice president to contest in court or not ratify the victory of Joe Biden, always finding himself in front of the same wall.
During those weeks, politicians, soldiers, security officers, bureaucrats and even her daughter completely ignored her delusions. Noting this impotence, on January 6, 2021 Trump (again according to Cassidy Hutchinson’s story) was left to throw a plate against a wall of the White House, smearing it with ketchup.
Yet the supreme court ruling on abortion, which came just four days before Hutchinson’s testimony, tells us that Donald Trump could go down in history as one of the most influential presidents of recent decades. With just one mandate, his administration managed to change the political direction that American society seemed destined to take (more rights, more inclusion, secularization, more attention to the climate crisis), and this without having any major reform approved by Congress (the its only legislative success was the tax cuts law passed in 2017).
He did this by filling the Supreme Court with conservative judges (he appointed three, one more extremist than the other: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett), which in the United States today has become the only way to bring about change. profound social, given that the parties hardly collaborate on anything anymore and that to overcome the obstruction in the Senate, a majority is needed that no party has been able to obtain for now. Last week I talked about other important sentences passed by the Supreme Court that have moved the country to the right: they were then overshadowed by the verdict on abortion, which erased one of the main social achievements of the last fifty years.
And now many people fear that the court may decide to strike at other established rights, not out of hysteria but because it was the conservative judges themselves, in motivating the sentence on abortion, to suggest it. Samuel Alito, who drafted the majority opinion, wrote: “The inevitable conclusion is that the right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the history and traditions of the United States.” Explaining their dissent, the three progressive judges – Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan – have in fact accused their conservative colleagues of being dishonest, noting that the extremely narrow definition of “deeply ingrained” rights poses a threat to so many other rights and freedom: “Or the majority don’t really believe in their own reasoning. Or, if you believe it, all the rights that did not exist in the mid-nineteenth century are threatened ”.
Clarence Thomas, another of the conservative judges, expressed the most reactionary view: he said the court should reconsider other constitutional rights that have been affirmed in the past based on the same legal reasoning (individual freedom protected by the 14th amendment of the constitution) used to legalize abortion in 1973: the right of married couples to use contraception (1965), the right to have sex with whomever they prefer (the 2003 ruling that canceled sodomy laws) and the right to of gay couples getting married (2015). As Ruth Marcus wrote in the Washington Post, Thomas is currently the only conservative judge to think so, but it’s not impossible that other colleagues on the court will end up following him. Most importantly, his opinion will convince conservative activists across the country to challenge those and other rulings. “And thanks to Donald Trump, the lower federal courts are full of magistrates who trained with Thomas, they can’t wait to join the cause and push the law in that direction.” The history of recent years teaches that apparently extreme and out-of-the-box views can quickly end up at the center of the conservative movement’s agenda.
Beyond the rulings on individual issues, the fact remains that very conservative judges appointed for life will be able to determine the political direction of the country for generations (on 30 June the Supreme Court limited the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency, greatly reducing the possibility that this or other administrations will be able to do something significant to reduce carbon dioxide emissions). It would not have happened without Trump, and at the same time it can be said that Trump would never have won the election if he had not promised to fill the court with conservative judges.
The fact that he has kept this promise will be at the center of his eventual candidacy for the presidential elections of 2024
On CNN Chris Cillizza recalled a sentence pronounced by the then Republican presidential candidate during the last debate with Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election campaign: “The supreme court is the fulcrum of everything. It is so, so imperative to have the right judges. The judges that I will appoint will be in favor of life, they will have a conservative orientation “. When the moderator asked him if he was in favor of canceling the right to abortion, Trump replied, “Well, if we put in two or maybe three more judges, that’s what will happen. I think it will happen automatically ”.
Today it is hard to remember, but in 2016 one of Trump’s problems was proving to the Republican electorate that he was indeed a conservative, and the issue of abortion was at the center of it all, because many people remembered an interview, released in 1999, when Trump said he was “very much in favor of free choice” of women. With that sentence during the 2016 debate, the candidate settled his credentials and above all made it clear that as president he would use the supreme court, and the judicial system in general, to carry out the battles of the most radical part of the conservative world. Undoubtedly he has succeeded, and the fact that he has kept this promise will be at the center of his possible candidacy for the presidential elections of 2024.
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