The Infernal Triangle: A Republic, If We Can Keep It

I got drinks a little while back with the estimable and outstanding editor of this publication at the world’s greatest jazz bar, where, with a respectfulness anyone would want in a boss, he gingerly inquired when I might start writing about the subject he hired me to write about: the 2024 presidential campaign.

I would like to, Dave, I really, really would. I simply do not know how.

In any other presidential year, the routines of parties nominating candidates, those candidates standing at podia rousing crowds with stories of what they intend to do with the opportunity, and the rest of us figuring out which blocs of citizens will vote for whom and why and how the parties plan to persuade them, is the most important thing to understand in the political world—by far.

But this year, hearing the political reporters on NPR every morning yammering on about stuff like that, it sounds like the drone of the adults in a Peanuts cartoon. It’s so far down the scale of factors determining how the world might go in 2025 that I cringe, tune out, and wait for the next story to start.

Muh-mwah, muh-mwah, muh-mwah: Anyone else hear it that way, too?

I’ve been going on for a while now, including in the inaugural edition of this column, about one problem with the old routines: that the question of how many electoral votes each candidate gets on November 5 might pale next to how many people are willing to take up arms should Trump lose. Regarding that, I can’t stop thinking of the rant a podcaster named Brenden Dilley made in the summer of 2020, claiming that he and other “2A-loving Americans” were getting ready for “that one emergency text message from the fucking president of the United States that gives us the green light to finish this entire thing in under an hour …”

Another thing keeping me away from paying attention to the old questions is the kind of thing happening in Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom last week. The Atlantic described the scene: “Trump’s Misogyny Is on Trial in New York.” That’s a standout example right there of how mainstream journalism fails to meet our moment. For what is actually on trial in New York? Trials themselves.

Every time the man who once took an oath to faithfully execute America’s laws and may next year do so again acts in ways that would bring criminal sanction to any other defendant, by brazenly and deliberately intimidating witnesses in direct defiance of Judge Merchan’s orders, Donald Trump imparts a lesson to his millions of supplicants: One of the three allegedly coequal branches of constitutional governance in the United States is illegitimate, should its decisions not break Donald Trump’s way.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., also last week, the highest court in the land ran a sort of trial with even higher stakes: as the man with the beard once put it, whether government of the people, by the people, for the people shall endure—to be replaced by government of, by, and for Donald Trump.

It is, of course, a crisis now long in the making. Six mortals with lifetime appointments, five of them named by Republican presidents who never won a popular majority, routinely abandoning even the pretense of intellectual coherence and procedural norms to press changes in how the nation is governed, so right-wing they could never stand democratic scrutiny.

For instance, by seeking to strip the power of nonpartisan experts to adjudicate highly technical regulatory questions. Or to control the split-second decisions of doctors in emergency rooms about how to keep women alive. Or to usurp judgement of municipalities and states to decide who can carry concealed weapons of war—reserving those rights instead to, in order, the 535 members of Congress, the nutjob Republican majority in the Idaho legislature, and the made-up fantasies about the beliefs of powder-wigged men from back before bullets had been invented.

According to the anguished cri de coeur from the Court’s helpless liberal minority, their conservative colleagues have been cunningly inventing “novel constitutional questions,” in order to “insulate this Court and petitioner”—that’s Donald Trump—“from future controversy.” In short, they have been acting like the nation’s sovereigns, on behalf of a would-be strongman.

Consider, finally, last week’s oral arguments in the aptly titled Donald J. Trump v. United States, and responses to the litigants from the justices. The scene suggests a sort of final surrender of some of the Court’s conservatives to the dreamscape logic of the far right.

By their hypotheticals ye shall know them. The little stories Supreme Court justices devise to probe what could go wrong if a litigant’s argument is accepted are pocket parables of how they see the world.

Stern-faced, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described reality. When she pushed Trump’s lawyer John Sauer about his argument suggesting presidents could not be punished for breaking the law while performing “official acts,” she heard back that presidents could be punished, by impeachment, and if convicted have the presidency taken from them.

And when Jackson replied that if “someone with those kind of powers, the most powerful person in the world … could go into office knowing that there would be no potential penalty for committing crimes, I’m trying to understand what the disincentive is from turning the Oval Office into, you know”—an anguished incredulity crept into her voice—“the seat of criminal activity in this country,” she was describing something that happened. Trump (in the literal if not juridical sense) committed crimes during the course of his presidency, and skated. All it took was 34 politically loyal senators.

Meanwhile, the daily display in Judge Merchan’s courtroom is showing, crimes Trump allegedly committed while he was in the White House (like writing fraudulent checks) are being slowly proven (though it’s up to the jury to ultimately decide), but only after he left office—and thus out of reach of the impeachment remedy: a criminal immunity that is ironclad, once a president packs his trunk and moves out of the East Wing.

But for at least one conservative justice, that seemed not to concern him at all. His concern was quite otherwise: “If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election,” Samuel Alito mused, may be “criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”

There are only two scenarios in which this hypothetical is relevant. The first one is entirely realistic. It is if the actual present incumbent loses an actual very close, hotly contested election, and is criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, namely Donald Trump and his allies. This is exactly what Stephen Miller suggested Trump intends to do: “If they say there’s no immunity for official acts, the moment Joe Biden leaves office, every single red city and red state DA in the country can charge him for financial crimes related to illegal student loan bailouts, can charge him for war crimes related to deaths of servicemembers overseas, can charge him for human trafficking, human smuggling, and by the way, more election interference than you can even count.”

The second, however, is a fantasy—in this case, the particular style of right-wing fantasy we call “projection.”

Democrats choose leaders who fetishize comity with the other party. They promise “competence, not ideology” (Michael Dukakis). They “triangulate” with the other side, against their own party’s causes (Bill Clinton). They banned criticizing the Republican incumbent by name at his nominating convention (John Kerry). They affirmatively pledge not to punish human rights abuses from the previous administration, because we “don’t look backwards, we look forward” (Barack Obama).

And, in the case of this incumbent, they—still!—routinely pine for the “old days,” when liberals sat down with segregationists on terms of cordiality.

That side of Alito’s hypothetical, in other words, only makes sense if one imagines a scenario that is hardly conceivable—but is simultaneously fundamental in the dreamscape of right-wing propaganda, which stands this reality on its head.

It is the kind of dreamscape evidenced in November of 2000, when the people around George W. Bush seeded into the elite media discourse the notion that Al Gore was so fanatically power-mad that, “knowing him as we do”—as MSNBC’s Chris Matthews obediently ventriloquized—he “may have no problem taking the presidential oath after losing the popular vote to George W. Bush” (emphasis added; I remind you that Gore won the popular vote, by half a million votes, and is not referred to with the honorific “President Gore”).

Twenty-four years on, it is the kind of dreamscape exhibited by a post from a popular MAGA blog sent to me by a right-wing cousin titled “The Democrats Have Crossed the Bridge Into Unabashed Nazism.” I punched it into the search box on Elon Musk’s X and found that it had been tweeted out 65 times since it was published a month ago, edging out the most-trafficked piece your humble correspondent has published this year. It says, “The Republican Party wallows in the same mindset and following in the footsteps of the opposition parties in Germany circa 1929-33; they engage in never-ending internal schoolyard squabbles, a near-religious belief in compromise regardless of long-term consequences, and deferentiality to the leadership of the Democrat party … The reality is that the overthrow of this nation is happening apace. The process of defeating these tyrannizers will not begin until the tables are turned.”

How far is that from the kind of dreamscape inhabited by Justice Sam Alito and his conservative colleagues? I guess we’ll soon find out. While we wait, it’s hard for me to care much about the muh-mwah, muh-mwah, muh-mwah coming from election pundits. Wait and see if we can keep our republic. Only then, I’ll start thinking about votes.

Next week, I’ll write about another dangerous right-wing dreamscape we saw emerging last week, based on that post about “unabashed Nazism,” and the effect thinking like this is already having on the people giving the orders to armed defenders of the state. Unless, of course, some fresh new potential apocalypse descends upon us. Watch this space …

Extra! Extra! Got Infernally Triangular questions you’d like to see answered in a future column? Send them to infernaltriangle@prospect.org.