Scathing NYT critique exposes John Roberts's fatal mistake

With the shape of a 6-foot-2 potato, President Donald Trump looks nothing like an athlete, says conservative columnist Maureen Dowd.

“But in legal terms, the president is an Olympic-class sprinter. He breaks the law so fast that the law is left in his orange dust,” she added.

Trump is an outlaw, she said, and the U.S. system was not built for an open outlaw and a felon in the Oval Office.

“He zeros in on loopholes in the law and the system that are based on trust and the assumption that our leaders — and their families — will be not be voracious scam artists,” said Dowd, who then quotes Trump biographer Tim O’Brian saying “The Constitution was built on this idea that the president would have enough decency and morality that they just wouldn’t run around exploiting the gaps. And for Trump, it’s like red meat. … His whole worldview is built around the idea that you exploit systems for personal gain, and there’s nothing wrong with doing that because the world’s populated by sharks and you just have to be the biggest shark.”

But amid the rampage, of Trump’s defiling institutions and “razing our hallowed spaces,” Dowd complained that Chief Justice John Roberts seems “belatedly alarmed” after proclaiming in a Monday dissent that the president’s $300 million taxpayer-funded ballroom can be completed.

Noting that the president was “likely” infringing on Congress, Roberts said, “Today’s decision is no victory for the separation of powers.”

But Trump bulldozed the East Wing and tore up both of Jackie Kennedy’s gardens before Congress or historic preservationists had a chance to weigh in, said Dowd. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called this a “catch me if you can” approach to razing the White House, and Dowd accused the Supreme Court of protecting the “outlandish outlaw by palavering about whether the architectural historian who brought the case has ‘standing’ to do so. Yet shouldn’t any American have standing to challenge Trump’s desecrations?”

“There are so many pathetic scenes of the Supreme Court and Republicans in Congress caving in to Trump — on his war in Iran that he calls ‘small potatoes’ and that JD Vance risibly claims is not a war; on his attempts to disenfranchise voters; on trying to hijack the Postal Service to obstruct those voting by mail; on plotting to sell of a chunk of Yosemite to a private developer; on allowing the killing of endangered wolves and the secret slaughter of wild horses; on trying to slap his name back on the Kennedy Center; on his petty, vindictive renaming of Lake Ontario as ‘Lake America,’ in the midst of the U.S.-Canadian trade war, even though it’s not even named for the Canadian province,” said Dowd, launching into a rant.

Now Trump is forging ahead with his Napoleonic Triumphal Arch, despite the fact that it lacks federal approval and that the gold angel on top might endanger planes flying in and out of Reagan National Airport.

O’Brien thinks the most tragic thing is that the Supreme Court now has a conservative majority “that believes in the unitary executive and is getting roadblocks out of the way to give the president more latitude, at the very moment we get a Caligula who desperately needs roadblocks,” said Dowd. “Roberts gave Trump the runway, and now he’s objecting. But it’s too late.”

“And that’s the lesson of everybody who doesn’t understand who Donald Trump is,” O’Brien said. “He’s simply there to pick your pocket.”