Man sits in chair, world trembles.
President Donald Trump briefly attended the session of the Supreme Court on Wednesday in which the justices considered the administration’s efforts to limit the meaning of birthright citizenship. Explaining the moment with their usual calm and good sense, legacy media explained that Trump was more or less performing the teamwork scene from The Untouchables.
At MS Now’s Maddowblog, Rachel Maddow producer Steve Benen explained that Trump sitting in a chair was “part of a ham-fisted intimidation campaign: By literally showing up in person, it’s possible that Trump, who appointed a third of the court’s justices, thought he could apply extra pressure to those who will decide the case’s fate.”
Not explained: What is the pressure? What can Trump do to the Supreme Court, and to justices who have lifetime appointments? What, precisely, was the nature of the threat being made by the use of a chair? Overturn birthright citizenship or else (fill in blank). If you can’t fill in the blank, the argument is not an argument.
Benen fatally stabs his own panicked argument in the course of making the stupid thing, quickly adding that “justices don’t want to be seen as obedient White House loyalists, and it’s easy to imagine Trump’s stunt backfiring.” If you can come up with that kind of deep insight, there’s a career waiting for you in Rachel Maddow’s office.
The intimidation theme, vague and unexplained as it is, keeps limping onto the stage today.
But no one can ever say how. What is the mechanism of the threat?
Writing that Trump’s brief and silent presence in a chair was “a previously unheard of flex of presidential power and prerogative,” PBS News adds this important detail:
His attendance added a heightened sense of theater to the otherwise staid setting. The actor Robert DeNiro, a strident Trump critic, was also in the courtroom, seated in the justices’ guest box reserved for friends and family.
The two did not speak.
Was DeNiro also attempting to be intimidating? Sources are silent on this important question. In the movie version, Al Pacino plays all nine justices.
Pumping industrial-strength FUD, The New York Times offers this sensible subhed, pulled from the text of the story: “President Trump’s presence in the court puts him face to face with justices whom he has tried to bully and intimidate.” The Times adds that Trump “has long attacked judges who defy him,” but they don’t describe the attack. He … said that he disagreed with them? Is that what it means?
The star of The Apprentice knows how to draw attention, and today he did just that. He signaled that he wants people to look at something. He drew some eyeballs. He probably didn’t terrify the justices of the Supreme Court, eight functioning adults plus Ketanji Brown Jackson, into submission. Let’s all just calm down, already.
If you want to see what it looks like when some braindead idiot of an elected official tries to threaten the Supreme Court, by the way, we actually have a pretty good real example.
Not that Schumer could have actually done much to the court, either. If only he had realized that the real way to terrify and intimidate the Supreme Court was to sit silently in a chair for a few minutes.
