Trump has taught America’s elites they can get away with literally anything

Maybe he was still down the Jersey Shore, worn out from his family’s biggest holiday of the year, Flag Day, but embattled Justice Samuel Alito didn’t bother to show up for last week’s U.S. Supreme Court sessions where a batch of rulings on important topics like gun safety was released. Even though Alito has one job, his disappearance didn’t cause that big of a stir because the world’s worst Phillies fan has already issued his main message for 2024.

He just doesn’t care what you think.

Alito doesn’t care that you think it was a shocking breach of judicial ethics when it was revealed that not one but two flag symbols closely associated with the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection on Capitol Hill flew over his homes in Virginia and Long Beach Island. He certainly didn’t care when two influential Democratic senators asked the justice to recuse from sitting on major cases tied to the Jan. 6 uprising, or when it came out that he’d accepted a luxury fishing trip from a GOP billionaire who later brought cases before the court. I guess an ethics rap or two is no big deal when you’ve already unraveled the reproductive rights of tens of millions of women.

But Alito also knows he can act with total impunity because, frankly, the entire Supreme Court doesn’t care what you think. The high court’s biggest decision that Alito skipped out on last week — which will hang over American democracy, or what’s left of it, for decades — is the one it refuses to make. For 116 days and counting, the nine Supremes have been running out the clock on Donald Trump’s absurd, monarchical argument that a president can’t be criminally prosecuted for crimes while in office — a delay that has all but ensured Trump cannot stand trial for his pre-Jan. 6 election interference before the nation votes on Nov. 5 whether to make him president again.

This is the Supreme Court’s way of waving Alito’s upside-down American flag in your face. Throughout its deeply flawed history, the nation’s highest court has nevertheless in modern times usually grasped the urgency of the moment when the American Experiment was on the line. In the two biggest such cases of the last 50 years, the court took just 54 days in 1974 to unanimously order Richard Nixon to turn over the White House tapes that led to his resignation. And, of course, it moved practically overnight to decide Bush v. Gore and the 2000 presidential election. Those cases lived in a faraway land where the powerful cared about not only the morality of what they did but how it all looked.

That was before the American mantra became, “Whaddya gonna do about it?” Alito and his partner in ethical crime Clarence Thomas — beneficiary of a staggering $4 million-plus in billionaire gifts — know that a House led by an antidemocratic Trump cult of Republicans will never impeach them, that they can just ignore subpoenas or requests from Senate Democrats, that there’s no real code of ethics on the Supreme Court forcing them to recuse from cases with an obvious conflict, and that their lifetime appointments mean they can flip the bird at the American people from under their black robes.

We are living in a moment of staggering unaccountability — and like most rot, the fish stinks from the head. Trump is the idiot savant of teaching America’s CEOs and billionaire investors, its college presidents, its newsroom leaders, and even its judges that you can toss your moral compass — and any lingering sense of shame — into the Grand Canyon and no one will care.

As a 34-time convicted felon in a hush-money plot to influence his 2016 election as 45th president, Trump is — at least technically — barred from traveling to 37 foreign countries. Yet, he can still travel, as he did Saturday night, to the cradle of American democracy and to one of our great campuses, Temple University, and pound the drums for a 47th presidency of forced retribution against his enemies and dead-of-night deportations with the confidence that neither Alito nor his four or five confederates on what is now the Trump court will lift a finger to stop him.

Indeed, a writer today can be accused of sounding like a naive simp for merely recalling that there was a recent time when any one of Trump’s high crimes or misdemeanors — the adjudicated rape, the multimillion-dollar financial fraud, plotting a coup against the peaceful transfer of presidential power, the purloined documents — would have ended his campaign. If you don’t believe it, ask Mitt Romney, whose dad George’s 1968 campaign collapsed when he said U.S. generals “brainwashed” him on a Vietnam tour, or Gary Hart (1987 one-night stand, probably a setup), or, heck, Joe Biden, who dropped out in 1987 because he plagiarized phrases from a British politician.

In 1969, a Democratic-appointed Supreme Court justice named Abe Fortas was the subject of news accounts that he’d received gifts that would have amounted to about $400,000 in today’s dollars, or one-tenth of Thomas’ billionaire haul. There was no liberal freak-out that Fortas’ resignation was handing a seat to Republican POTUS in Nixon, even though history shows this as the start of the journey to today’s conservative majority. Fortas was seen as someone doing the right thing.

Can you imagine?

Look, it’s foolish to pretend the rich and powerful haven’t held the upper hand in America quite often — most famously in the Gilded Age of the late 19th century and the “robber baron” world of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. But also remember a progressive movement broke up their monopolies and taxed their wealth, and the labor unions they so bitterly opposed rose up (before they fell again).

In our 21st-century kleptocracy, the new robber barons of Silicon Valley and the simpatico corruption of Trump are seeing that no such obstacles stand in their way. It’s no surprise the billionaire class is following the path of its ancestors in 1930s Germany and deciding that a Trump dictatorship will be good for their bottom line. Indeed, the rich and powerful outside of politics aren’t just donating to Trump, but increasingly acting like him.

» READ MORE: Pa.’s TikTok billionaire, Donald Trump, and ‘The Selling of the President 2024’ | Will Bunch

In a stunning irony, on the 52nd anniversary of the Watergate phone-tapping break-in that led to a Pulitzer Prize for the Washington Post and the eventual downfall of Nixon, the rival New York Times published a front-page story that linked the Post’s new publisher and its incoming editor to a British journalism scandal involving — wait for it — phone hacking.

Although there was some accountability for this journalistic Watergate at the Post — the would-be future editor backed out — the publisher at the center of this scandal, Sir Will Lewis, got a ringing endorsement from the Post’s owner, Amazon founder and occasionally world’s richest man Jeff Bezos. The billionaire told newsroom staffers in an email that “the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change” — ignoring the reality that they already have.

Did I mention Bezos dictated this directive from his $500 million yacht (or twice what he paid for the storied Post) parked off the Greek luxury isle of Mykonos? You literally cannot make this stuff up.

But why wouldn’t Bezos tell his employees to eat the bitter cake of moral surrender when the CEO of Boeing, David Calhoun, not only kept his job but pocketed a 45% raise, up to $32.8 million, last year — an apparent reward for the fact that doors and other flotsam and jetsam keep falling off his airplanes. Calhoun and Bezos are just channeling the zeitgeist of the world’s current richest man, Elon Musk — so wealthy he could burn $44 billion to buy Twitter and own the libs by making it X, home for right-wing dudebros. Musk’s Twitter antics, along with a string of embarrassing accidents, allegations of racism, and other sins, have driven down the stock price of his flagship business Tesla — which didn’t stop Musk from ramming through a $46 billion (with a “b”) pay package.

Whaddaya gonna do about it?

Nothing, apparently. I’ve become fixated in recent days with the anti-fascism writer Timothy Snyder’s first warning on preventing dictatorship, which is, “Do not obey in advance.” And yet, you are seeing this every day — as everyday folks give up on the idea that an adjudicated rapist and fraudster felon can’t become our commander in chief, or that a corrupt Supreme Court will do anything about it, or that the new robber barons can’t rob us a little more.

Extreme right-wing government sends thousands of people out into the streets to protest — not here, but in war-torn Israel. Maybe it’s the heat dome of Trump-enabled climate change, but on Saturday, even liberal Philadelphia didn’t turn out in big numbers to protest a wannabe dictator. Much like Mussolini’s 1922 March on Rome, Christian nationalists who want to punctuate their Handmaid’s Tale with the Ten Commandments in every classroom are strolling toward the capital barely opposed.

A sense of complete powerlessness — spiked with cynicism and a wrongful belief that knowing the truth is impossible — is the essential precursor to dictatorship, and we are just about there. And the likes of Trump and Bezos and Musk are feeling it. The Sam Alitos of America don’t have to play the game anymore if they’ve already captured the flag.

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