Rule and divide: Donald Trump is judged immune

This episode discusses a controversial Supreme Court decision granting Donald Trump immunity for actions taken while in office, potentially reshaping future presidential powers.

1. The Supreme Court granted Donald Trump partial immunity from prosecution, affecting future presidents.
2. The ruling emphasizes a strong executive branch, as envisioned by the framers of the Constitution.
3. Dissenting justices argue the decision could undermine judicial checks on presidential power.
4. The episode raises concerns about the implications for legal accountability of U.S. presidents.
5. It also discusses broader impacts on the separation of powers and future governance.

1. Introduction

Hosts introduce the episode's focus on a significant Supreme Court decision.
Rosie Blore: "First up, though it's been a busy session for the American Supreme Court..."

2. Main Discussion

Details of the Supreme Court's decision and its implications are discussed.
Stephen Mazie: "The long and short of it is that Donald Trump does have immunity..."

3. Implications for Future Governance

Discussion on how the decision reshapes the power dynamics within the federal government.
Rosie Blore: "What do you think it does mean for future US presidents."

4. Concluding Thoughts

Reflections on the episode's topics and a teaser for further analysis in upcoming shows.
Rosie Blore: "If you want to hear more about the Supreme Court's latest rulings..."

1. Stay informed about Supreme Court decisions as they can have broad implications.
2. Understand the constitutional arguments behind judicial decisions to better comprehend their impact.
3. Engage in civic discussions to voice opinions on judicial rulings and their effects on governance.
4. Follow legal analyses and expert opinions to gain deeper insights into complex legal matters.
5. Encourage transparency and accountability in government to safeguard democratic principles.

The US Supreme Court has granted the former President immunity from prosecution for official acts committed while in office. We ask what that means for future Presidents and the 2024 American election. Humanity is standing by while sea levels rise. Now scientists want to geo-engineer polar ice to stem the flow (10:45). And why a hot sauce beloved by many suddenly disappeared from our shelves (19:45).

People

Donald Trump, Stephen Mazie, Sonia Sotomayor, Neil Gorsuch

Companies

None

Books

None

Guest Name(s):

Stephen Mazie

Content Warnings:

None

Blue Nile
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The Economist
The Economist.

Rosie Blore
Hello and welcome to the intelligence from the Economist. I'm Rosie Blore. And I'm Jason Palmer. Every weekday, we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

Humanity is doing so badly at curbing climate change that some scientists are trying to come up with technological solutions. But geoengineering the environment to slow the melting of ice at the poles sounds like the stuff of fantasy. And im sure youll agree that the single best condiment for scrambled eggs is Sriracha, a spicy, sweet garlicky sauce. Mostly. Ive had the bright red Huiphong brand, but that seems to have disappeared from store shelves.

The Economist
We ask why.

Rosie Blore
First up, though it's been a busy session for the American Supreme Court in recent weeks, the nine justices have given rulings on hot button issues, including gun crime and abortion. But its decision yesterday may stand as the most controversial and consequential. On the final day of its term, the Supreme Court handed down a blockbuster. Ruling affecting not only Donald Trump, but possibly all former and future presidents. The court ruled this morning that former.

President Donald Trump can claim immunity for some of his conduct as president in his federal election. In a freelance case. In a six three split along ideological lines, the court granted Donald Trump partial immunity from criminal prosecution for actions taken while in office. That verdict stands as a clear and practical victory for the former president, who was indicted for conspiring to overturn the 2020 presidential election and for his alleged role in the January 6 Capitol riots.

The Supreme Court ruling has also given sweeping new powers to all american leaders, to the consternation of the current one. And it's a dangerous precedent because the power of the office will no longer be constrained by the law, even including the Supreme Court of the United States. The only limits will be self imposed by the president alone. And there was another key part of Monday's decision that went in Mister Trump's favor, the timing. In their final act of this Supreme Court term, the justices made a decision in the case of US versus Trump with extremely high stakes for Donald Trump for the country, for the future of the us presidency.

Stephen Mazie writes about the Supreme Court. For the economist and basically determined that the most serious legal charges against Donald Trump, his election subversion charges, will be very difficult to prosecute before the presidential election this fall. Before we talk about the momentous decision, can you just remind me of the details of the case that the court was considering here? This case stems from a federal case that was brought by special counsel Jack Smith concerning Donald Trump's alleged attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. There were a number of arguments that Trump's lawyers used to try to get the case thrown out.

Stephen Mazie
One of them is this claim that when a president does anything in office, those actions are not prosecutable after they leave office. Ok, Steve, let's get into some details here. What was in that Supreme Court decision? The long and short of it is that Donald Trump does have immunity for many of the acts, if not all of the acts that he took while he was president. He's completely immune from prosecution for anything that is official and acts that might be official.

He still might be immune to prosecution for. The majority opinion basically lopped off a large portion of the indictment that Jack Smith brought last August and said, none of this can be prosecuted. There are a few things which might be prosecuted, but the presumption is in Donald Trump's favor. And it's the district court that needs to sort out whether, for instance, Donald Trump's pressure on Mike Pence to not certify the electoral votes counts as official. Or not, which bits of the case were actually lopped off.

Rosie Blore
What is now not going to be tried at all? One part of Jack Smith's indictment, which the Supreme Court was clear, you cannot prosecute Trump or any president for this type of action, are his discussions with advisors and other officials in the Justice Department. Part of the indictment said that Trump attempted to strong arm his own attorney general to investigate electoral fraud when the attorney general knew that there wasn't any, and he refused and tried to get his attorney general to send letters to several states, including Georgia, to allege electoral fraud in those states. So even though Trump's alleged objective with those conversations was to thwart the results of the election with untruths, because he was talking to someone in the executive branch that is absolutely protected and cannot. Be charged, I'm interested in what you think the court's reasoning was behind this decision.

Stephen Mazie
I think the basic premise behind the court's decision is a concern that presidents need to have a wide berthe there needs to be, as the founders envisioned, an energetic executive headed by a single president who is not worried that certain actions that he takes, ones that might be controversial, will subject him to criminal prosecution, potentially when they leave office. The majority opinion is based on a very muscular, very assertive vision of what the presidency is and a worry that if it is cabined in any meaningful way, that the separation of powers that the constitution lays out could be compromised. Its interesting, isnt it? Because the kind of muscular, assertive power given to the president, for me anyway, seemed always to be partly about the separation of powers. You can give those powers because youve got this separation of powers.

Rosie Blore
We can call the president to account. Where does it leave that idea? There is a lot of disagreement between the six justice conservative majority and the three liberal justices in dissent about that very question. Both sides think the other is misunderstanding of what the constitutional separation of powers means. In her dissent, one of the liberal justices, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, has some very strong words that the majority is inventing this immunity doctrine, that there's no immunity clause in the constitution.

Stephen Mazie
And she says that the decision reshapes the institution of the presidency and makes a mockery of the principle foundational to her constitution and system of government, that no man is above the law. I think another point of disagreement between the majority and the dissenters is where they're looking. The majority are looking to the future. They are writing an opinion. As Justice Neil Gorsuch said during the oral argument for the ages.

The dissenters, I think, are looking at the future and the present and saying, well, if we let someone who allegedly orchestrated a plan to subvert the electoral results that he didn't like because he didn't win, what are we as a court empowering future presidents after Donald Trump to do? Are they going to be feeling so empowered that they feel a sense of impunity and a sense that they could, as Donald Trump said some years ago, stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue in Manhattan and shoot someone, that might not rise to the level of official act, but if he had someone in the military do that, then that would be an official act. The court also said that it's impermissible to look at a president's motives when he does any official act. So to instruct a Navy SEAL team to kill your potential political rival, is that prosecutable after this? I don't think so.

Rosie Blore
It's incredible. It's incredible, sweeping interpretation of the sort of legal privilege that presidents have. And looking to the future, as you say, what do you think it does mean for future us presidents. I think the most enduring decisions that are coming out of the Supreme Court term are about reallocating power among various actors in the federal government. Last week, it issued a ruling that made the federal bureaucracy less powerful and arrogated some of that power to judges.

Stephen Mazie
And now with this Trump versus us ruling, the same six justice majority have elevated the president, his powers and his prerogative and impunity to new heights. And allowing presidents to escape criminal prosecution for basically anything they do could bring us, as Justice Sochi mayor said in her dissent, maybe an executive that looks more like a king than a president. And Steve, how will this ruling affect the presidential race? Some on Biden's side, I think, have been hoping that this election subversion case would be the magic bullet that would get Donald Trump convicted of more serious crimes and maybe even land him in prison. After this ruling, it's really difficult to see how that happens, and even if the charges brought by Jack Smith are going to be tried in court at all.

Rosie Blore
Thank you so much for your time. Thank you, Rosie. Great to be here.

If you want to hear more about the Supreme Court's latest rulings, we'll be analyzing them in depth on this week's checks and balance, our weekly show on american politics.

Blue Nile
Jewelry can say many things on your wedding day. As a wedding band, it can say this is a forever symbol of our forever love. As a gift to your wedding party, it can say, thanks for standing up there with us. Blue Nile can help you find the piece that says it all and says it beautifully with expert guidance and a wide assortment of jewelry of the highest quality. Quality at the best price.

Go to blue nile.com and experience the convenience of shopping Blue Nile, the original online jeweler since 1999. That's bluenile.com dot.

Rosie Blore
People have come up with many ways to avoid a climate catastrophe, including cutting emissions, green energy and carbon capture schemes. But in many coastal communities, the disaster has already arrived. It is the threat to life in south Florida as we know it. Sea level rise can anything be done. To save some of our country's most beautiful beaches?

Stephen Mazie
Encroaching saltwater is quickly disrupting the lives and livelihoods of many farmers. From the state of Florida to the island of Tuvalu, rising sea levels are becoming an existential threat, and extreme problems sometimes call for extreme solutions. Geoengineering is the term for deliberately meddling with the earth's climate to try and make it cooler. So far, attention has focused on the sun, with ideas like spraying sulfur into the stratosphere to reflect solar rays. Now scientists are turning to the poles, asking if it's possible to slow down the melting of ice to mitigate rising sea levels.

Rosie Blore
Some of the proposed solutions are so outlandish, they sound like a joke. But the disaster they're trying to avert is far from funny. Proponents of geoengineering feel that reducing emissions is essential as a measure to fight climate change. But progress on reducing emissions is just not fast enough. Other solutions are needed.

Katrine Brieg is the Economist's environment editor. Solar geoengineering, basically about cooling air temperatures, has divided the scientific community for decades. Those who are in favor say that they will buy time to decarbonize. Critics say that they're too risky. What's interesting now is that essentially the same argument is sliding over onto the ice.

Katrine Brieg
Polar geoengineering is about slowing the rate of sea level rise. Just paint a picture of that first. Then, what does slowing sea level rise entail? So far? Until now, most of the sea level rise that we've seen has come from the fact that warmer water physically takes more room than cooler water.

But increasingly, a key driver of sea level rise is the physical addition of more water molecules to the oceans. What you need to think of here are basically those massive ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica sliding into the oceans and actually transferring a mass of water from land into the sea. How do you slow that process down? How do you try and stop polar ice melting? So there's lots of ideas.

One that has been discussed quite a lot recently involves vast underwater curtains. The idea here centers on these things that are known as outlet glaciers. So you need to think of enormous frozen rivers that transfer water down a riverbed and into the ocean. That, as you can imagine, is normally a very, very slow process. But that process is accelerating in a lot of outlet glaciers.

So, for instance, the Thwaites glacier in Antarctica is a real focus for glaciologists here. The ice loss from Thwaites has doubled in the last 30 years. In the case of Thwaites specifically, the reason that the glacier is accelerating is because warm water is actually sort of inserting itself underneath the tongue of the outlast glacier, and it's kind of melting it from below. And so the ideas that people are coming up with basically involve keeping that warm water away from the fringes of the outlet glacier, where the ice meets the water. And so why not just put a curtain up 80 km long in some of the roughest seas on the planet, and maybe that'll stop it getting warm and maybe that'll stop the ice melts, and maybe that'll stop the flow of the ice into the oceans.

Rosie Blore
That's mind blowing stuff. Is there any way in which it could actually work? Honestly, that's really hard to say right now, and that is an idea that was suggested by science fiction writers. Some glaciologists are now actively looking at whether and how it could work. Some engineers are getting involved, but it's really, really early days, and I think anybody in this field, or anybody who has any interest in it would admit that right now, it's just exploring the how the what, and what the consequences of it would be.

Katrine Brieg
Because, of course, these kinds of really large scale engineering projects in what is ultimately utterly pristine environments need to be assessed and understood, not just on the costs, not just on the feasibility, but also on the environmental impact front. Very carefully, before anybody starts stuff like that. Okay, so, a way to go on making our underwater curtains here. What other kind of proposals are on the table? Another reason that some of these glaciers are accelerating has to do with basically lubrication at the base of the ice sheet or at the base of the glacier.

These ice sheets are extremely thick, and so there's a huge mass, and right at the bottom, where the ice meets the rock, the physics of huge amounts of pressure between those two surfaces liquefies a bit of the ice. And so you get this really thin film of water between solid ice and solid rock, and that creates some lubrication. And so, again, why not? Could you physically remove that liquid film of water, create more friction between the ice and the rock, and therefore slow the flow of ice into the water? So that's one other idea.

Big, massive boreholes down to the bed of the ice, that would suck the water out and slow the flow of the ice towards the oceans. Amazing stuff. You said that geoengineering is incredibly divisive in the scientific community. What's the disagreement about whether you suck the water or whether you draw the curtains? The disagreement is actually whether you do any of this to begin with.

I think the people who argue in favor of considering these ideas are fully aware of the fact that they're completely outlandish, that nothing like this has ever been attempted before. But the argument is that the stakes are extremely high, that the seas are, are rising very quickly. Fast swathes of territory risk going underwater, with all of the consequences that that entails for the populations. And so, given the slow pace of action on reducing emissions, proponents of geoengineering argue that we should be considering all options on the flip side, you get a lot of people saying it's just too risky. That massive engineering, without really paying attention to the consequences is what got us into this problem in the first place.

And therefore reverse engineering or further engineering could potentially land us into unforeseen problems. Another big counterargument is that it detracts from the hard work of mitigation, it detracts from the hard work of decarbonization. There's a lot of disagreement over whether or not that's true. And finally, the sort of con side argues that there's a slippery slope. So if you start to investigate these things, even if from the outset, you've very clear that it's just research, that once it's on the table, there's always a risk that you will in fact go ahead despite the risks, despite the possible unforeseen consequences, and deploy these kinds of methods.

Rosie Blore
Okay, so the argument is, is it too risky to do it or too risky not to do it? Where do you think we're going to come out on this? Are we going to see some kind of underwater curtain in the Arctic or something of that? Ilka it's often framed as which of those positions has more of a moral backing. Is the stronger moral argument to attempt or explore all possible solutions, or be very wary of unintended consequences?

Katrine Brieg
That's an argument that I don't think is going to be resolved at any point anytime soon. I actually think that solar geoengineering is very, very different to polar geoengineering in particular, in the sense that solar is cheap. Easy. Polar geoengineering is really not cheap. I mean, these are some of the harshest conditions on earth, some of the most complicated and difficult and destructive conditions to go in with a major engineering project.

So it's not cheap and it is not easy. And for that reason, I think that polar geoengineering is probably dead in the water. Kat, thank you so much for your time. Rosie, thank you. Always a pleasure.

The Economist
I am a big fan of hot sauce, not like on everything, but on a lot of things. And I'm not alone. I got hot sauce in my bag, squash.

Beyonce likes it enough to sing about it. Hillary Clinton says shes never without it. Whats something that you always carry with you? Hot sauce. Really?

Stephen Mazie
Yeah, yeah, really. For a long while there, everyone who loved hot sauce, loved one kind in particular sriracha, and there was overwhelming love for one particular brand, a bright red sauce in a clear bottle with a green lid on top and a rooster on the front. So where'd it go? Hoi Fang's Sriracha was brought to America by a vietnamese refugee called David Chan in the 1980s. Nicole Fan writes for 1843.

Unknown
Our sister magazine, Asian Eateries, were the first to pick it up. Then it took off within foodie culture and went mainstream. By 2020, Huiphong was worth $1 billion and had a 20,000 square meter factory. So it was the brand that sparked this sriracha craze. But then things went wrong.

The Economist
Oh, that sounds ominous. Things took a dark turn. What went wrong? So Huiphong has been having a bit of a meltdown since the early 2020s. It started with customers complaining about the sauce losing its distinctive red color and its peppery flavour, and then the bottles started disappearing from the shelves, so enthusiasts started hoarding the sauce, and resale prices on eBay went as high as $150 for a single bottle.

Unknown
Now, there's been a halt in production until at least this September. I find this really troubling. I'm a big fan of the sauce, but I gotta say, I would never pay $150 for it. How did this happen? What's been going on here?

While many hot sauces use dried chilies, hoifong uses fresh red jalapenos. So it's really tough crop to grow at scale. Which is why Tron relied on one californian farm called Underwood ranches. For 28 years, Underwood ranches rapidly expanded to meet Hoifong's growing supply needs, and they produced close to 45,000 tons of fresh chilies per year. The farmer, Craig Underwood and Chan even became friends.

But then in 2017, they had a falling out over financial terms, and then they stopped working with each other completely. It had been really difficult to put together their supply chain, and Huifeng scrambled to find other reliable sources. But they didn't have much success. So when its reserves ran out in 2020, so did its winning streak. So is that it?

The Economist
Are we going to stop seeing Hui Feng on shelves forever? Well, it's quite uncertain what their future would be, whether it's going to be forever or not. But as of right now, the prospects just don't look very promising because they've had shortages every year and fans are getting quite frustrated as well. And that's why they've been turning to alternatives. Okay, so if I can't get my fix, what are my alternatives?

Unknown
Competitors have really stepped up to fill in the gap, so you're in luck. Tabasco made their own version of Sriracha, which was a bestseller in the US last year, and other brands like Skyval and Yellow Bird have also had a boost. Even Underwood ranchers started its own source, and it's gained a bit of a following since some Sriracha fans started taking sides and supporting Hoifong's former supplier. So it's a real shame that Hoifong has gotten burned so badly because it had all the ingredients for success. But for now, its legacy has been stunted and a lot of other brands are swooping in.

The Economist
Nicole, thanks very much for joining us. Thanks so much.

That's all for this episode of the intelligence. Let us know what you think of the show. Get in touch@podcastseconomist.com. we'll see you back here tomorrow.