Round-up: The Supreme Court's weak slapdown. Tesla crony capitalism. Trump's new gulag. And more.

Analysis of the week's events

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The judicial review that wasn’t

My phone lit up this week when Chief Justice John Roberts issued what most news outlets insisted on calling a “rare rebuke” of Trump for suggesting that federal judges who were ruling against his administration ought to be impeached. Following Trump’s open defiance of several court orders, which arguably have plunged the country into a slow-burning constitutional crisis, the statement was welcomed by some as a sign that the Supreme Court would begin to push back.

Sadly, I’m not buying it.

As Elie Mystal wrote, the only thing that Roberts told Trump not to do was to impeach a federal judge - something that Trump has no power to do anyway. Roberts notably did not insist that the orders of lower courts actually be followed by the administration, and he did not call out Trump for pushing the country to the brink of lawlessness.

Mystal’s judgement tracks with mine from earlier this week - Roberts just wants to appear to be upholding the autonomy of the courts, when in reality he will likely concede the substance of these cases to Trump in the end. Why? Because if he doesn’t, Trump will probably ignore the rulings anyway, potentially destroying the power of the Supreme Court for ever.

I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at Roberts’ statement for another reason. Under John Roberts, the Supreme Court has had ample opportunity to defend itself from the existential crisis it now finds itself in. It could have ruled that Trump was an insurrectionist who was ineligible to run for office, which it declined to do in Trump v. Anderson. It could have hemmed in presidential power in ways which made it much easier to hold presidents to account for illegal or unconstitutional behavior, rather than doing the opposite in Trump v. United States. Instead, it enabled Trump at every turn.

In that respect, Roberts reminds me of Mitch McConnell. The former Senate majority leader thought that Trump was finished after January 6th but never actually had the spine to make sure his impeachment ended in conviction, which would have barred him from running for another term. Both McConnell and Roberts passed the buck, hoping someone else would do their dirty work for them. Now they - and everyone else - have to pay the price.

Crony capitalism for Tesla

It can’t have been easy to be a Tesla shareholder since Donald Trump took office. As the company faces rising competition from Chinese electric vehicles and missed targets, it has a part-time CEO. Even worse, Elon Musk isn’t just off vacationing. Instead he’s in Washington, D.C. trashing his own image among the sort of left-leaning consumer that used to be most open to his product. The company’s stock is in freefall.

Don’t worry; into the breach has stepped Donald J. Trump, surely just the sort of non-polarizing figure that can revive Tesla’s brand. In a series of events and statements which are head-spinning in their disregard for conflicts of interest, the Trump administration has begun to put the weight of the U.S. government behind Tesla. It’s an effort reminiscent of the relationship between Vladimir Putin and some Russian oligarch, not the president of the United States and an American businessman.

First there was a car show at the White House which saw Trump declare “I love the product!” as he inspected Tesla’s Cybertrucks (nearly all of which have just been recalled over safety hazards). Right-wing influencers have got in the game too, with Sean Hannity declaring Teslas to be “the greatest car ever invented” and running a competition to let his listeners win one.

So far so comical. But things took a turn for the sinister when Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the federal government would be making a special effort to prosecute people who protested at Tesla dealerships and said that vandalizing Teslas was “nothing short of domestic terrorism”. (If you’re keeping score on the Trump administration, that means that storming the U.S. Capitol and causing the deaths of police officers is not “terrorism”, but damaging a car is).

I doubt that this is going to end well for Tesla. Swapping mass appeal for a niche base of MAGA consumers ultimately means settling for being a much smaller player in the electric vehicle market. And Musk’s political activities are compounded by the other pressures the company is facing, pressures that he seems to be doing nothing to alleviate.

But it’s a disturbing story of how power works in Trump’s Washington. Musk is Trump’s biggest funder. Even today, he is channeling money to Republican congresspeople who support Trump’s dictatorial call to impeach judges who rule against him. In return, it seems the federal government has been placed at Musk’s disposal - the parts he hasn’t destroyed yet, anyway.

This is also a strange tale of how culture trumps economics in American politics today. Musk’s natural allies should be on the left - the people who support the electric vehicle industry not in return for donations, but because they earnestly want to tackle climate change. Instead, Musk had his brain rotted by too much MAGA Twitter and sought an alliance with people who care not a jot for his industry, except when he’s writing them checks. Some businessman he turned out to be.

Trump’s new gulag archipelago

During the course of this week, we found out new information about the 261 Venezuelans recently deported from the United States to El Salvador.

The Trump administration says that most of them are members of the Tren de Aragua criminal gang, which it recently designated a terrorist entity. But for most of them, there’s no evidence that this is actually the case.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some gang members in the mix. But for the majority of the Venezuelans, absolutely no due process or adversarial court procedure has been carried out to give them a chance to prove their innocence. According to the White House, “many” of them have no criminal convictions in the United States. And family members say that many of them are not gang members at all.

Yet purely on the basis of a charge levelled by the administration, these people have now been spirited away into a foreign prison system in which torture is routine, inmates are held incommunicado, and due process rights don’t exist either. By outsourcing the detention of migrants to a foreign state notorious for human rights abuses, the administration is setting a chilling precedent. The fact that it did so in the face of a court order clearly ordering it not to only deepens the crisis. If it can send these Venezuelans, what is to stop it sending anyone else - including Americans?