Noah Feldman, Columnist

Emperor Trump? Supreme Court Just Expanded the Imperial Presidency

The conservative justices set aside their judicial principles in a ruling that would horrify America’s founders.

July 2, 2024 at 9:00 AM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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Photographer: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

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In a sweeping decision that constitutionalizes the modern reality of the imperial presidency, the US Supreme Court has established near-total criminal immunity for Donald Trump’s official acts while he was president. It’s an outcome that would have astonished the nation’s founders, who feared precisely that if the chief executive amassed too much power, the republic would turn into an empire.

The conservative majority in the 6-3 decision left a little bit of room to prosecute Trump for unofficial or private acts committed while in office. But it defined such acts narrowly and said lower courts couldn’t examine Trump’s motives when determining whether a given act was official or not. The result will mean that most, maybe all the federal criminal charges against Trump for conduct related to Jan. 6 will get dismissed. And none has any realistic chance of going to trial before the presidential election in November.