THE AMERICAN POSEIDON ADVENTURE

Maureen Dowd’s opinion piece says it better than I could. I’ve watched the Supreme Court become an anachronistic appendage, an addled actor pretending to be our third independent branch of government. At times I have defended their decisions because it appeared they were trying to ‘call balls and strikes’ making decisions that were independent of whether the goose or the gander is in office. The majority claims to be conservative textualists interpreting the Constitution according to the original meaning, according to the texts. Yet they have been very quick to abridge precedent or the concept of ‘stare decisis’ and often appear to make decisions in support of the president quickly, but with others take their time. The consequence being the behavior at issue continues until the impact of the court’s action is simply moot or meaningless. Take the ballroom for example! Now we are looking at the Arc d’Trump a gaudy piece of ludicrous, unnecessary construction that will desecrate the connectedness of Arlington Cemetery to the current historical and honored environment. All because Old Bone Spurs, who refused to serve America, now wants America to honor him -for what?

Trump, under the tutelage of Roy Cohn, has made a mockery of the Supreme Court. Unfortunately, Chief Justice Roberts is a weak and ineffectual intellectual who leads a majority of disconnected and often conflicted jurists. He undermines the logic and reality-based decisions of the lower courts who actually have their feet on the ground. Roberts is the ‘Zeus’ who cannot see the ground through the clouds of intellectual dust. I understand a textualist’s perspective, and respect their rights to opine, but it seems any philosophy must be tempered with a realistic vision if their work is intended to support and defend reality and ultimately justice. 

Trump has picked the pocket of the Supreme Court and the MAGA right to the extent that America is now at risk. At risk because reason and facts seem to have no connection to the behavior of the Supreme Court or Constitutional law. We need to put some reality back into the mix. The real people with boots on the ground who are hurting, threatened, and revulsed by this egotistical dance among theorists, social terrorists and crooks are the ones who can prick this balloon of suicidal social insanity.

VOTE!!!

RESIST!!! & EDUCATE!!!

Not So Supreme, Mr. Roberts

Sept. 5, 2026, 

It’s crazy to think about Donald Trump outrunning anything.

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.

Trump is an outlaw. And our system was not built for an outlaw in the Oval.

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.

“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,” said the Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “And for Trump, it’s like red meat. This idea that Trump’s mentor was Roy Cohn was profoundly wrong. Donald Trump’s mentor was Fred from day one. His father showed him how to exploit the government system, the legal system and business. 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.”

After running a court that has been complicit in Trump’s defiling our institutions and razing our hallowed spaces, Chief Justice John Roberts seems belatedly alarmed.

“That construction is likely unlawful,” Roberts wrote in his dissent on Monday from his fellow Republican justices’ ruling that the president’s ballroom behemoth — with taxpayers on the hook for over $300 million — can slouch toward completion. Noting that the president was “likely” infringing on Congress, Roberts added, “Today’s decision is no victory for the separation of powers.”

The White House is the People’s House. Chief executives are transient tenants. Its “stately simplicity,” President Teddy Roosevelt once said, “is an expression of the character of the period in which it was built, and is in accord with the purposes it was designed to serve.” Safeguarding it, he said, gave us continuity with our past.

Roberts used that quote in his dissent, as well as a line from Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.”

Trump was a builder, but he is such an egotist he can only view buildings — and reflecting pools — as reflections of himself. When he built Trump Tower, he tore down the Art Deco friezes on Bonwit Teller despite promising them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Just so, he bulldozed the East Wing and tore up both of Jackie Kennedy’s gardens before Congress or historic preservationists had a chance to weigh in.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson calls this a “catch me if you can” approach.

The Supreme Court protects 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? Trump ludicrously blasted the preservationists fighting to stop the ballroom as “TREASONISTS.”

As he casually divides and undermines America, he obsesses on using Krazy Glue to affix gold crap to the walls of the Oval Office or plotting to plant 47 maple trees in Lafayette Park to honor himself. He got us into a war he has no clue how to get out of, yet spends his time mulling redecorating projects, gold gewgaws, his new helipad and his replacement of the asphalt driveway at the White House with granite.

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.

Now Trump is breaking ground for his solipsistic, Napoleonic Triumphal Arch — never mind 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. Roberts issued the ruling in 2024 giving Trump near-total criminal immunity, and that makes him complicit in Trump’s egregious behavior.

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.”