Against the Bully-in-Chief

Besides control over the Supreme Court, in this battle, the future of Donald Trump is on the line

This is the climax of the battle. The moment when its outcome is on the line. This battle is not a trivial one. It may even be critical in the civil war between social conservatism and progressivism that is taking place in the United States. And what is at stake is the hegemony over the Supreme Court—the institution that arbitrates and interprets the Constitution—for an entire generation. If Trump wins and succeeds in placing his 53-year-old candidate, Brett Kavanaugh, as one of the nine justices with lifetime tenure, the entirety of progressive legislation dating back 50 years, starting with abortion rights, will be in danger.

Kavanaugh guarantees not only a reactionary clamping down on constitutional jurisprudence, but, in the event that he achieves that position, he will also act as Trump’s legal shield, beleaguered as Trump is by suspicions of colluding with Russian intelligence in order to wreck Hillary Clinton’s campaign and of obstructing the course of justice, especially by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, appointed by the Department of Justice to investigate the case.

Trump’s candidate to occupy the vacancy in the Supreme Court has experience as Kenneth Starr’s adviser – the special prosecutor that investigated Bill Clinton on account of his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. Kavanaugh was responsible for the most lurid questions about physical contact between the president and the intern, although Trump is also interested in his legal standards about the impossibility of prosecuting a president while he occupies the White House, just as he advocated in a memo drafted in the wake of the Lewinsky case. If Mueller were to try to incriminate Trump, he would at least be sure that his prosecution would be postponed until the end of his presidency.

Things will get complicated for the president if he is unable to appoint his candidate before the midterm election on November 6, in which the Republicans will surely lose the House of Representatives and may lose their majority in the Senate. Hence the dramatic tension reached in the Senate on Thursday, before the testimonies of Christine Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh, her alleged sexual assailant—it was the high point of the frontal collision between the #MeToo feminist movement and those symbolizing the masculine, white and conservative domains.

Besides control over the Supreme Court, in this battle, the future of Donald Trump—the bully-in-chief—is also on the line.