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Item one: The associate justice’s logic on display at the Trump immunity hearing was beyond belief. He’s at the center of one of the darkest days in Supreme Court history.

On the day Donald Trump took office in January 2017, pondering what he might do to the country’s democratic norms and institutions, I wrote these words: "Trump will destroy them, if keeping Trump on top requires it. Or try to. He might not succeed. And that is where we rest our hope—on conservative judges who will choose our institutions over Trump. Mark my words: It will come to this."

That hope seemed not misplaced back in 2020 and 2021, when a number of liberal and conservative judges, some of the latter appointed by Trump himself, handed Trump 60 or so legal defeats as he attempted to unlawfully overturn the election results. But after Thursday at the Supreme Court? That hope is dead. The conservative judges, or at least most of them, on the highest court in the land are very clearly choosing Trump over our institutions. And none more belligerently than Samuel Alito.

His line of questioning to Michael Dreeben, the attorney arguing the special counsel’s case, was from some perverse Lewis Carroll universe:

Now if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?

Let’s look to something I’d have thought lawyers and judges took seriously: historical evidence. American democracy has existed for nigh on 250 years, and power has been transferred from a president to his successor a grand total of 40 times (not counting deaths in office). On 11 occasions, a challenger has defeated a sitting incumbent—that is, a situation that creates the potential for some particularly bitter and messy post-election shenanigans.

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Now, if Alito’s question really spoke to a malign condition that had hobbled American democracy throughout history and that loomed as a real problem that we had to take very seriously, it would stand to reason that our history suggested that these power transfers had had a wobbly history—that maybe, say, 12 of 40, and four or five of the 11, had been characterized by violence and unusual threats of retribution against the exiting executive.

But what does the record show? It shows, of course, that there is only one case out of the overall 40, and one case out of the more narrowly defined 11, in all of U.S. history where anything abnormal and non-peaceful happened. That, of course, was 2020.

And there was a lot of bad blood in previous transfers of power. You think John Adams loved the idea of handing power to Thomas Jefferson? John Quincy Adams was popping champagne to turn things over to Andrew Jackson? Grover Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison, who traded wins, weren’t bitter in defeat? These people couldn’t stand each other. But they did what custom required—a custom never questioned by anyone until Trump came along.

So in other words: Alito throws all that democratic history out the window and treats Trump as the new normal, assuming that the American future is ineluctably strewn with a series of lawless Trumps. Alas, with respect to the Republican Party, there’s a chance time will prove him right about that (but only a chance; my cynicism about the depths to which this GOP will sink is almost limitless, but even I think that Trump is most likely sui generis in this respect, and that your average Republican, even the neofascist ones like Tom Cotton, should we be cursed with a Cotton presidency someday, would probably yield power peacefully if he lost).

But think about what it says about both where Trump has delivered this country, and about Alito’s assumptions about democracy. On the former point: Have we now reached a place where challenges to election results are going to be the norm? Where an opposition party can be counted on to find some legal technicality on which to prosecute a former president, rather than leaving him or her in peace as we have throughout our history?

This is another twisting of reality. Trump, his defenders would protest, is the one former president who has not been left in peace. Well, that is true, I confess. But maybe there’s a reason for it! Actually, there are two. Trump has not been left in peace because a) it was always obvious he was not retired, and b) he’s the only ex-president who tried to foment a coup against the United States of America and who declassified sensitive national security documents with his beautiful brain.

And on the latter point: When George W. Bush named him to the court in 2005, experts told us—of course—that Alito was conservative, yes, but not an extremist (interestingly, Maryanne Trump Barry, Donald’s sister under whom Alito had worked as a prosecutor, was among those recommending Alito’s nomination). As The New Yorker reported in a 2022 profile, Alito was asked in 2014 to name a character trait that hadn’t served him well. His answer? A tendency to hold his tongue. Well, that problem’s been solved, eh? As writer Margaret Talbot noted of the justice, who ignored Chief Justice John Roberts’s importunings to strike a balance in the Dobbs decision, which he wrote: "He’s holding his tongue no longer. Indeed, Alito now seems to be saying whatever he wants in public, often with a snide pugnaciousness that suggests his past decorum was suppressing considerable resentment."

And this week, he told us, in essence, that in his view democracy depends on allowing presidents to commit federal crimes, because if ex-presidents were to be prosecuted for such things, the United States would become a banana republic. That’s a Supreme Court justice saying that. And while Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and even Clarence Thomas didn’t go that far Thursday, it was obvious that the court’s conservatives are maneuvering to make sure that the insurrection trial doesn’t see the light of day before the election—in other words, that a sitting president who very clearly wanted Congress to overturn a constitutionally certified election result (about this there is zero dispute) should pay no price for those actions.

When I wrote seven years ago that we rested our hope on conservative judges who will choose our institutions over Trump, trust me, I wasn’t saying I was confident that they would. I was terrified that that day would eventually come. It came yesterday. The conservative jurists chose Trump. It will stand as one of the blackest days in Supreme Court history.

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Item two: Better news from lower Manhattan, but …

The news has been decidedly better from the lower Manhattan courthouse where star prosecution witness David Pecker has been shredding Trump’s defense and public position in the Stormy Daniels case. He has clearly described the "catch and kill" system that benefited Trump for years. He gave the details on how his tabloid handled the Karen McDougal case, buying her story of her affair with Trump to bury it so that no other place could run it. He talked about all the totally false stories he ran about Hillary Clinton being at death’s door and Ben Carson leaving a sponge inside a surgical patient’s body. He even opened an interesting little window on how an executive of a sleazy publishing enterprise thinks, and where even he is forced to draw a line—no, he told Michael Cohen, I won’t get involved with a story about a porn star, because Walmart (his biggest distributor) wouldn’t like that.

The one thing he hasn’t done, and probably can’t do, is put Trump in the room with respect to the payment to Daniels. That will fall to Cohen, so, as damaging to Trump as Pecker’s testimony is, the real coup de grace will have to be delivered by Cohen. Which means that his credibility is going to be key here. He’s going to have to appear sincere as he says to the jury, in essence: Yes, I lied. I lied a lot, for that man (pointing to Trump). But I decided to stop and tell the truth. I decided the money wasn’t worth it. I decided I needed the love of my wife and respect of my children more than the money. That’s why I pleaded guilty back in 2018 and served my time. I’ve told the truth ever since, and I’m telling the truth today.

There will be other key witnesses, notably Hope Hicks, who are expected to have interesting things to say. But emotionally, it’s mostly going to come down to Cohen—and then, to the 12 citizens who hold so much fate in their hands. It will be interesting indeed if 12 random citizens get closer to the idea of truth and decency than the United States Supreme Court does. We’ll see. But to invert the famous old William F. Buckley quote, I think I’d very much rather have the law of the land set by the first nine people in the Manhattan phone book than by the current Supreme Court.

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Quiz time!

Last week’s quiz: "Looks like another perfect day …" I’m in Los Angeles for the weekend, so let’s talk Tinsel Town.

1. Los Angeles was growing in the early twentieth century, but it didn’t have the water to serve its population. The Los Angeles Aqueduct was completed in 1913 under the supervision of whom?

A. Winston Chandler

B. William Mulholland

C. James Pico

D. Carlton Beverly

Answer: B, William Mulholland. Short bio here. The Chandlers of course were the Los Angeles Times family. There was probably a famous Pico and Beverly, but I don’t know them.

2. Two of the world’s most famous bowls, the Hollywood Bowl and the Rose Bowl, opened the same year. What year was it?

A. 1922

B. 1928

C. 1932

D. 1939

Answer: A, 1922. I see the Hollywood Bowl hosted a big Jimmy Buffett Tribute the week before I went out there. I was never a huge Buffett-head, or whatever they’re called, but that probably would have been a fun night.

3. Who has the most stars—five, one for every category of achievement recognized—on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?

A. Bing Crosby

B. Tom Hanks

C. Judy Garland

D. Gene Autry

Answer: D, Gene Autry. In radio, television, recordings, movies, and live performance. In fact, I brought back photographic evidence:

4. Match the celebrity to the place they died:

Answer: Monroe, Brentwood; Belushi, Chateau Marmont; Dean, Cholame; Notorious, Cedars-Sinai. The only one I really remember is Belushi’s. Sad, but alas not that surprising.

5. Which is the largest art museum in Los Angeles?

A. The Getty

B. LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

C. MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art)

D. The Broad

Answer: B, LACMA. I bet most people think the Getty. I checked out the Norton Simon in Pasadena. Small, manageable, totally solid nineteenth- and twentieth-century collections, even a Rembrandt.

6. What was the median household income in Beverly Hills in 2022?

A. $116,771

B. $189,903

C. $277,118

D. $401,008

Answer: A, $116,771. I swear to God, so says the gummint, right here. How can that be? It’s not even in the Top 20. Not close to the Top 20.

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This week’s quiz: Carnival Eats. A quiz about carnival food, in honor of the weirdly charming TV show Carnival Eats, on which last night I saw a guy make a sandwich that consisted of two grilled cheese sandwiches (serving as the buns, you see), two quarter-pound burgers, 10 slices of cheese, bacon, and more.

1. Which immigrant group is generally credited with introducing the corn dog (although not on a stick—that came later)?

A. Swedish immigrants in Minnesota

B. German immigrants in Texas

C. Irish immigrants in Pennsylvania

D. Italian immigrants in New Jersey

2. Likewise, who is generally credited with giving us funnel cake?

A. Scottish immigrants in upstate New York

B. Jewish immigrants in New York City

C. English immigrants in Virginia

D. The Pennsylvania Dutch

3. When was cotton candy first introduced to an eager public?

A. The 1894 Chicago World’s Fair

B. The 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair

C. On Coney Island in 1911

D. At the Louisiana State Fair in 1920

4. Abel Gonzales Jr., also known as "Fried Jesus," introduced what delicacy at the Texas State Fair in 2009?

A. Deep-fried ice cream

B. Deep-fried bull testicles

C. Deep-fried butter

D. Deep-fried Crisco

5. What won the People’s Choice Best New Food at the 2023 Iowa State Fair?

A. Deep-fried Bacon Biscuit Mac-n-Cheese Grilled Cheese

B. Deep-fried deep dish meatlovers’ pizza

C. The "Iowa Twinkie" with bacon-wrapped jalapeno, pulled pork, corn, cream cheese, and ranch seasoning

D. The "Super Elvis": a deep-fried bacon, peanut butter, and banana sandwich with horseradish

6. This popular cookie, deep-fried, has become a state and county fair staple in the last 20 years:

A. Oreo

B. Chips Ahoy

C. Nutter Butter

D. Fig Newtons

Carnival Eats is a pretty fascinating show, sociologically, and host Noah Cappe always seems to have this look on his face like, "I can’t believe this is my job." Answers next week. Feedback to [email protected].

—Michael Tomasky, editor

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