Trump Granted Historic Workplace Accommodations

Supreme Court agrees Trump's impairments require special assistance

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Donald Trump’s Nov. 26, 2015, mockery of a reporter’s physical disabilities was one of many clearly visible signs of his own ethical impairment. (Screengrab / NBC video.)

In a historic ruling Monday, the Supreme Court declared former Pres. Donald Trump so debilitated by his impaired sense of right and wrong that he must be permitted special accommodations for his past and future work in the White House.

Trump is the first president ever to declare their inability to perform basic Constitutional duties without the assistance of special accommodations.

Early this year, Trump admitted that he was unable to function properly as president, due to his impairments. “A president of the United States must have full immunity, without which it would be impossible for him/her to properly function,” he said.

Poor motor skills, he said, rendered him unable to navigate simple ethical and legal obstacles. “Even events that ‘cross the line’ must fall under total immunity,” he said in his request for special treatment.

The court’s six Republican-appointed judges agreed and said the accommodations they were granting Trump would be available for all presidents to use.

Despite standing an alleged 6’3” tall, Trump claimed that the ethical bars in the White House are too high for him to reach. The six judges agreed and ordered that ethical bars be lowered throughout the facility and removed entirely in some areas.

The court also ordered the installation of a downward ethical spiral ergonomically engineered to have no bottom.

Ironically, the accommodations were granted as TV people debated whether Pres. Joe Biden can do the job that he is literally already doing without accommodations. While he’s also running a presidential campaign.

Despite Biden’s own impairments — he has struggled with a long-time stutter and both he and his brain are old — he has managed to pass landmark legislation. He guided the U.S. economy to a virtually unrivaled COVID recovery without the aid of a service animal.

Some argue that Biden, too, has been unable to do presidential work without breaking the law, such as arming a nation credibly accused of war crimes, but most presidents commit similar or worse crimes. None, however, have ever faced serious threat of getting caught.

That fear led Trump to become the first White House occupant to file an official application arguing that he is entitled to special accommodations for his many disabilities.

In Monday’s historic ruling, the Supreme Court affirmed that presidential duties can be so taxing that Trump cannot perform them without committing crimes and, unlike other criminal presidents, getting prosecuted for it.

There is considerable evidence to support Trump’s claim of ethical weakness. In 2021, for instance, he appeared unable to perform simple tasks such as handing over the presidency. Prior to Trump, every other president possessed the requisite upper body strength for the traditional handoff.

Ordinary mental feats also appear beyond Trump’s capabilities. He is unable to respond to simple questions. He has openly displayed such poor mathematical and reasoning skills that he could not recognize correct answers even when they were supplied for him in easy problems such as adding votes.

Although Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt — who spent much of his presidency in a wheelchair — at one point sought to hire additional Supreme Court justices to help him out, even he never sought the special accommodations Trump won on Monday.

Similarly, despite debilitating chronic back pain, Pres. John F. Kennedy reportedly managed to complete marathons with multiple women. Trump, by contrast, admitted struggling to complete even low-exertion sexual activity, such as kissing, while carrying the weight of the need for consent.

Trump came to the court with a lifetime of evidence of poor moral fitness and need for special consideration. He was unable to function as a real-estate developer without violating housing law. His hands often failed to grip pens for writing checks to his contractors. Just paying taxes was too taxing. 

The business world proved so crushing to Trump’s fragile state that on several occasions he was forced to seek protection in the shelter of Chapter 11. Working on the set of his television program, he repeatedly dropped things. Like the n-word.

Even after leaving the White House, Trump has appeared to lose consciousness while doing nothing more strenuous than sitting in a courtroom.

The Supreme Court appeared sympathetic to Trump’s struggles, as six of the justices are also impaired, lacking the requisite reading comprehension to understand the Constitution.

Okay, We Get It

Well, I beat that one into the ground. Now let’s do TFN’s patented Strangely Encouraging Facts™!

Newsfuckers, this ruling was terrible. In the best of ways.

It doesn’t make much sense to point to the majority opinion as proof of Supreme badness. I don’t have to tell you the court is bad. Everybody knows the court is bad.¹ But that badness is worth addressing in a narrow but important-for-the-future sense.

We tend to think of Supreme Court justices as solons, the modern equivalent of sages dwelling on mountaintops. Even Justice Antonin Scalia enjoyed a reputation as sort of a mad genius, albeit petty and infantile. (And also not a genius.)

Past evil rulings from past courts at least garnered respect for the evil genius behind them, the twisted logic, the muscle to escape the bonds of precedent and logic. Monday’s ruling, however, was lazy and slipshod and embarrassing, even to any surviving connoisseurs of creative judicial evil. Where have you gone, Chief Justice William Rehnquist?!?

So it’s difficult and disheartening to contemplate the possibility fact that a number of the current justices are not evil but banal; not genius, but fatuous boobs. Bozos without the fun makeup or afternoon kids show. 

As disconcerting as it is to see that the mostly men behind the curtain spend most of their time hate-masturbating, flinging their feces, and watching Netflix, this is good news, for a few reasons.

If an un-American court is going to try to codify monarchy into the law, you want them to be bad at it. They didn’t make presidential immunity ironclad. Or even define it well. And their reasoning was worth less than the Federalist Society paid for it. Which makes it poorly respected, which makes it rife for overturning, or legislative codifying, or, please Elvis, a Constitutional amendment explaining for judicial morons that the Constitution holds people in public office to a higher standard not a lower one.

This is a fundamental element of all law everywhere north, south, east, and west of North Korea. Justice Department guidelines, for instance, make it harder to get pardons for betraying the public trust, not easier. Funny how that principle didn’t come up, while made-up Justice Department presidential immunity did.

In a case like this, you’d rather go up against Justice Fatuous Boob than Justice Evil Genius. Fatuous Boob’s verdicts are much more vulnerable to (a) public disregard and (b) future shitcanning.

There’s too much judicial malpractice in the majority opinion to conduct an exhaustive inventory, so we’ll just cherrypick some worth newsfucking.

For one thing, presidential immunity does not appear in the Constitution. As Chris Hayes pointed out, the ban on insurrectionists holding office does. So do presidential crimes.

The Constitution expressly contemplates officials committing “Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.” That clearly addresses official acts. Treason is betraying your office. Bribery is selling it.

And as TFN is gonna chime in, the Constitution delegates specific powers to the government. The founders said that if they didn’t give you that power — e.fucking.g., the power of immunity — then you don’t have it. “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

Then there are the incompetencies that weaken the ruling’s impact. The six lazy justices didn’t even finish their homework assignment of properly removing all White House ethical barriers. Instead, they:

• Magically created absolute immunity for the exercise of “core” presidential powers, creating a new, still-fictional Constitutional distinction without defining said core. 

• Created “presumptive immunity” (like the presumption of innocence, except bullshit) for non-core presidential functions, without defining them.

• Denied immunity for private actions, except when they’re not private, which we can’t determine because the court also didn’t define those.

This tri-terribleness is a gift because it means presidents won’t be able to assume immunity. The court’s vagueness leaves the door open for a creative prosecutor to argue — and a courageous judge to agree — that no, assassinating political rivals is not an official act.

There was more Supreme Court incompetence. As Twitter master Asha Rangappa pointed out, the Impeachment Clause of the Constitution allows for criminal prosecution of impeachable offenses, which include official acts. Why? Because obviously the founders were more interested in protecting the nation from a president’s misuse of office than in protecting Ye Olde Head Shoppe from presidents shoplifting bongs for Camp David.

Which means now Judge Juan Merchan and the inevitable appeals courts get to fill in some of the blanks left by the six judges who presumably blame their six dogs (or five dogs and one spouse) for eating their homework. 

The ruling was so bad that it openly relied on magical thinking. “[T]he nature of Presidential power requires that a former President have some immunity.” Nature? What the hell is that? It’s what you say when you can’t identify a thing your argument needs to be real.

According to Chief Justice John Roberts, this ineffable, intrinsic “nature” of presidential power is what gives even former presidents immunity. Why? Obviously, because nature itself was invented by pre-natal Jesus.

Despite exalting presidential power as magically conferring immunity, the court’s majority — let’s call them the January Six — also said that presidents are so weak that they must be protected from the law. How come? Because of the risks to the entire government “when the President’s energies are diverted” by getting their criminal ass sued or indicted.

Here’s the thing about presidenting, though. Presidents don’t have to be diverted by anything they don’t wanna be diverted by. Especially not legal shit. Why? They literally have an entire White House Counsel’s office. An already existing special accommodation that no one else gets.

You, without power or money or allies, get one (1) public defender after you’re arrested. The president, with power and money and allies, gets multiple (a lot) of lawyers on call from jump.

And history shows us that presidents have plenty of time for diversions. Most of you probably just saw Monica Lewinsky’s face flash before your eyes, but there are others. 

If the Supreme Court really wanted to protect presidential time-management, they could have outlawed diversions like, say, Watergate. Or election-stealing. Or illegal-war starting. Don’t divert none, there won’t be none.

Not only does the ruling not render presidents kings, “this ruling is not a death knell” for the case it was about: Special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecution of Trump for trying to January 6 us. That’s the assessment of former House Judiciary impeachment counsel Norm Eisen. 

Eisen concedes we won’t get a trial by Election Day, but he says District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan does have time to hold the hearing the Supreme Court directed, what Eisen calls a “mini-trial” to determine how the ruling’s guidance applies to the facts of Trump’s January 6ing.

Yes, Trump telling the Justice Department to crime the election is off the table, because the January Six ruled that talking about a private act with an official is an official act. Because they’re smart.

But Chutkan still has latitude to decide whether other shit is still on the table. Does Trump enjoy immunity for his public communications, or for telling Vice President Mike Pence to play ball or lose one of his? Up to Chutkan! 

Same thing goes for all of Trump’s interactions with people not under the protective but gross Trump penumbra. That includes private individuals and state officials, e.g., unindicted and indicted co-conspirators.

Civil rights attorney Andrew C. Laufer goes further than Eisen. The court, Laufer Tweets, “has not expanded presidential immunity, it has further clarified it. POTUS has always had immunity for official acts.”

The majority ruling does not say that all Trump’s actions enjoy immunity, it kicks the question back to Chutkan. And look, for instance, at what Justice Amy Coney Barrett said about official acts:

“Sorting private from official conduct sometimes will be difficult — but not always. Take the President’s alleged attempt to organize alternative slates of electors. In my view, that conduct is private and therefore not entitled to protection… while Congress has a limited role in that process, the President has none. In short, a President has no legal authority — and thus no official capacity — to influence how the States appoint their electors. I see no plausible argument for barring prosecution of that alleged conduct.”

In other words, she’s defining official acts as deriving from legal authority. If the president doesn’t have the legal authority to do X, X can’t be considered an official act. 

Is it circular reasoning to argue that only legal acts are immune from prosecution? A lot! Are there messy caveats that confuse all of this? There are! How come? The ruling’s unclear. Why’s that? Because morons.

Trump took advantage of the ruling’s ambiguity almost as quickly as he took advantage of Stormy Daniels. Unable to delay gratification, he almost immediately let loose a filing asking Merchan to set aside his conviction for falsifying business records to deceive voters.

In other words, Trump immediately beclowned the six berobed clowns by asserting that their definition of “core” presidential functions was so half-of-six-assed that it plausibly includes his campaign coverup of said sad sex with Daniels.

So, how did we get such a shitty bench? Get your smelling salts, my delicate Newsfucking flowers: Republicans cheated. Not just Trump. Three of the justices were appointed by the same non-Trump GOP of yesteryear that some Democrats still pine for through rose-colored glasses.

One of those judicial appointers, Bush the Younger, stole the presidency, despite losing the popular vote to then-Vice President Al Gore, abetted by his own Supreme Court accomplices, who were appointed by previous Republicans.

In other words, Jan. 6, was just the most blatant, visible attempt at nation theft in a decades-long project of gradual nation embezzlement. Gerrymandered state and congressional districts. The incremental gnawing away at media restrictions, antitrust enforcement, voting rights, and campaign-finance laws.

So the legitimacy of this court was already under water before yesterday’s tsunami. In a great thread on just how radical, undemocratic, and impeachment-ready these judges are, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow Michael Podhorzer laid out the stats.

Five of the six judges who hallucinated seeing presidential immunity in the Constitution were confirmed by senators representing less than a majority of the country.

So that leaves us with Supreme Court wrongness and illegitimacy, but also some hope the damage isn’t total or irreversible. Which raises an important question.

Now What?

Had your loyal TFN read all the hot takes yesterday, I would have concluded that (a) democracy is dead and (b) the only way to save it is to do exactly what whoever I was reading at the time said to do.

Biden obviously must stay in and/or drop out. Also pack and/or assassinate the court. Cancel the election and/or refuse to leave on Jan. 20 if Trump wins. Democrats must support and/or challenge Biden. Et/or cetera.

The prescriptions didn’t really matter. What matters is certitude. And maximal alarmism.

In an age of fracturing media and valorized instinct, certitude wins, because that’s what appeals to unmediated instinct. Alarmism, too, helps drive the eyeballs that bring the money.

But TFN, as the kids say, don’t play that. 

For one thing, there’s a real danger in alarmism and exaggeration. Should we take seriously the alarms sounded by the dissenting justices? Absolutely.

But they’re warning of possible outcomes based on this ruling, not on what this ruling itself accomplishes. By extrapolating to only the worst end, we risk cementing in the public mind the idea that all “official” acts are now exempt from the law. We risk clearing the path of public opinion for Trump administration criming.

And that would be badderer than the actual ruling. Which is at best unclear. As Laufer argues, it’s not game-changing as much as codifying. 

So, let’s address the ostensible end of American democracy yesterday, after a long and painful illness due to both inadequate preventive care and inadequate remedial care.

Yes, we’re in newly charted territory when it comes to official presidential criming. But only in the fact that it’s now in writing. In reality, presidents have been criminals for much of our history, enjoying impunity for decades. I don’t remember enough Zinn to go all the way back, but y’know who else treated presidents like kings? Democrats!

Democrats let stand the Justice Department fairy tale that sitting presidents can’t be prosecuted.

And if presidents weren’t already kings before yesterday, how did they open their own dungeon … on a rented island … complete with torture chamber … for warehousing the Men in the Islam Masks they had kidnapped from around the world? That’s king shit, my Newsfuckers!

Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon waged a secret war on Cambodia.

That’s not just a crime, that’s a felony in most states! No charges filed. Nixon and his CREEP cronies committed a Corleone family’s worth of crimes against Democrats, which were hilarified as “dirty tricks,” and pardoned by unindicted co-conspirator President Gerald Ford. Which lots of Democrats lauded as magnanimous, unifying, and forward-thinking. Watergate under the bridge. As if there can be unity or a path forward in a lawless nation.

The administration of Ronald Reagan sold weapons to terrorists in Iran in order to raise cash for terrorists in Nicaragua. Misdemeanor at least.

And, of course, President Jimmy Carter installed solar panels on the White House, which Reagan quickly reversed. But, again, no prosecution.

After killing one targeted American citizen — and three other citizens, including a 16-year-old for being near a terrorism suspect — Pres. Barack Obama didn’t even get a ticket.

American presidents routinely committed crimes in other countries. Calendars around the globe are filled with Enero 6es that America made happen somewhere that wasn’t here.

And they’ve committed crimes against the people. The Justice Department was politically weaponized to crime against the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and even John Lennon, who was bigger than ¼ of Jesus.

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney defrauded the nation into buying a defective war that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and some 4,500 U.S. soldiers. Democrats decided not to prosecute them. In the name of unity, the most toxic fable we have not counting white nationalist Jesus.

I say this not to both-sides the issue, nor to beat up on Democrats or depress anyone into thinking things are hopeless. This is actually a hopeful allegory. With two morals.

• Moral One: We are reminded that we literally already survived a hellish eight-year monarchy. And emerged. And course-corrected.

• Moral Two: We’ve now learned our lesson about not prosecuting presidential criminals. We’ve learned it so well that for the first time ever we actually started doing it. Late, but still! Democrats stepped up! Is the Supreme Court putting their billionaire-bling-wearing thumb on the scale? They are! They’re not even recusing those thumbs! But for the first time ever it’s actually a fight, not a surrender. 

So what real changes are we looking at here?

The most immediate impact is the delay of Trump’s trial on federal charges of insurrectile dysfunction. That…may not be a bad thing.

If Trump were convicted before Election Day, that might galvanize Republicans. It might lead Democrats to conclude their work is done.

With a verdict still pending, Democrats will recognize Election Day as the essential instrument for accountability, and iffy Republicans won’t know whether their vote will empower a guilty person to escape accountability.

If Trump wins before the trial, justice hits the pause button. That’s because of the entirely made-up Justice Department conceit that sitting presidents can’t be prosecuted. As I mentioned, Democrats have honored this conceit for years.

Trump’s cases have been delayed. Not stopped. No matter how bad things seem at the moment, structurally speaking, we’re actually better off than we’ve ever been.

The reason I (upside-down) flagged the ruling’s incompetencies was because they make the ruling’s long-term survival less likely. If we do the work.

And, no, the work is not just re-elect Joe Biden. The work is dropping the infantilism poisoning our politics.

• Stop seeking unity; start fighting for people.

• Make the right enemies.

• Punch up.

• Reject theocratic religiosity.

• Champion intellectualism.

• Reject relativism; not all opinions deserve respect.

• Reject essentialism; “evil” doesn’t explain human behavior.

• Revive shame; apply liberally.

• Turn off the fucking TV.

• Also turn off confirmation bias.

• Subordinate feelings to calculation.

• Listen.

• Listen when it’s uncomfortable.

• Don’t judge; be curious.²

• Admit shortcomings and errors.

• Assume good faith.

• Do the right thing

…

Actually, fuck it, that’s a lot. Let’s Go Brandon!

Now What, But For Real?

In remarks from the White House last night, Biden said he can’t do anything about the fact that presidents can now do anything.³

‘The office will no longer be constrained by the law,’ Biden said, weirdly using the future tense for a present-tense thing, in a way that might have led listeners to forget he’s equally unconstrained by the law as the hypothetical re-President Trump would be. 

The ruling “almost certainly means that there are virtually no limits on what a president can do,” Biden said, explaining that there are virtual limits on what he can do about it.

Envisioned as one of three equal branches, the presidency has drifted and/or been pushed to embiggen for a very long time. Historically, Democrats have done little to stop it, and little to exploit it when they were somehow allowed to control the White House.

So Biden said it’s on the voters. “The American people must decide,” Biden said, disregarding, as the court did, that the 14th Amendment already decided that insurrectionists are disqualified from holding office, implying that someone in power should enforce that.

Impeachment hero Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) also warned that the “The Court gives the president absolute power,” except the power to change that.

“Our only remedy is the ballot box,” Schiff argued, because a new Congress and Supreme Court are required since it’s not enough that Democrats hold the office that now has absolute power.

And though I’m giving them shit for the paradoxical powerful/lessness, Democrats have a point. It is on us. If Democrats are feckless and feeble by choice, that’s on us, too. It’s always on us. Always has been. 

Fuckin’ representative democracy, amirite?

That said, we’re not alone! There’s a lotta Democrats out there who don’t buy into the helplessness. Some fecklessness ≠ total fecklessness. It doesn’t mean no one in power is doing anything. In fact, wait…

Look, up in the Bronx, it’s an activist, it’s a bartender, it’s…

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) responded to yesterday’s ruling by saying she’ll file articles of impeachment.

On what grounds? Yesterday, clips went viral of Roberts in his confirmation hearings, with perjury spilling out of his face.

“I believe that no one is above the law, under our system, and that includes the president,” Roberts lied after swearing to God that he would not. “The president is fully bound by the law, the Constitution, and statutes.”

And, yeah, the impeachment effort will fail. Obvi. Doesn’t matter. It’ll accomplish other things. And winning in Congress means failing first 38 times. Ask Roe v. Wade.

But if we assume there are no avenues for pushback, we won’t demand pushback by public officials. There are avenues for pushback and accountability. We must insist public officials identify and utilize them.

What else can we do? It’s worth reminding Democrats that the worst appointments were those meant to placate face-eating leopards that zoology tells us are only placated by eating faces.. The appeasement appointment of Merrick Garland, the “what in the metastasizing fuck were you thinking?” appointment of Jerome Powell.

Our worst problems, like this one, have their origins in bipartisan consensus. Imagine if Democrats chestbursted norms the way Republicans do…but for universal basic income. Free K-12 education. Free health care.

Instead they’ve developed Stockholm Syndrome after being held captive by the media for so long that they believe the American people give one microscopic, biodegradable, tardigrade shit about, I don’t know, the filibuster, stare decisis.

Instead, when Republicans abuse the power that Democratic concessions let them take, Democrats jeopardize the public trust by crying maximal wolf instead of face-eating leopard, every time.

They did it before Trump was elected. But most of us survived and many Americans couldn’t even tell the difference. Instead of litigating Trump’s badness, Democrats need to elevate and educate what are the norms at stake. Instead of fighting for unity, which is an argument for surrender.

They need to revive the fuck-you-itude of Roosevelt (Franklin) and Johnson (Lyndon) and make clear that fighting is not just noble it’s essential to our democracy. 

And TFN will not be telling you what to think about the Supreme Court ruling in the case of Donald J. Fuckbag vs. The United States, Motherhood, and Apple Pie. The raison d’newsfucking of TFN is not to tell you what to think, nor to counsel panic, but to aid in your own, personal, more-than-capable thinking, and assist in overwhelming whatever panicking your instincts currently advise.

But I will tell you this: The system can handle combative Democrats. That’s the genius and strength of it. Hell, look what they’ve won without fighting all-out. Despite decades of cheating, GOP lawyers and billionaires and filibusters and tech bros and corporate overlords and racists and theocrats, despite Democrats insisting nobly but oh so fucking annoyingly on playing not just by the rules but by the Platonic ideals of the rules — despite all of that and more, Democrats control the White House and the Senate.

That’s how powerful we the system are. So, y’know, revel in that. Even with the Supreme Court majority, they couldn’t pull it off. Which means there’s work to do. Which means there’s hope.

1. Network reference!

2. Ted Lasso reference!

3. See: Omnipotence paradox