A firebrand politician named Donald is about to stand trial. Just a few days before jury selection, he goes on TV to slam the charges as baseless and biased.
“The FBI and the Justice Department,” he insists, have “targeted” their political opponents in a burst of partisan persecution.
The rhetoric sounds familiar, but this is not a story about Donald Trump. It’s about a man named Don Hill, a former Dallas City Council member who was facing bribery charges 15 years ago.
The telltale clue that this isn’t about Trump is what happened next: The judge, upset by the attempt to taint the jury pool, slapped the politician-turned-defendant with criminal contempt and ultimately sentenced him to 30 days in jail for violating a gag order.
Today, Trump routinely spouts invective far more inflammatory than anything Hill said. He denigrates prosecutors. He lies about his cases. He vilifies the judges overseeing them — and then vilifies their wives and daughters, too. Yet Trump has never faced the swift repercussions that were imposed on Hill — and are routinely imposed on other defendants in America.
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In February, the high court effectively stalled Trump’s federal election subversion trial for at least several months so that the justices can weigh Trump’s claim that he has “presidential immunity” from the charges. Every lower-court judge to consider Trump’s immunity theory — that he can’t be charged with essentially any crime for actions he took in office — has rejected it. And many legal scholars have described the claim as so unserious that even the very conservative Supreme Court, typically receptive to robust claims of executive power, is unlikely to adopt it.
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As University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq has shown, the Supreme Court’s conduct here is all the more confounding because it contradicts the court’s usual approach in criminal cases. Defendants routinely ask the high court for additional judicial review in the hopes of delaying or avoiding criminal punishment, and the court is rarely receptive to the arguments of those defendants — at least the ones not named Trump.
