The Trumpers have already “won” the immunity case:
Donald Trump‘s inner circle doesn’t expect the Supreme Court to go along with his extreme arguments about executive power in the immunity case before the justices. But what the high court does now is almost beside the point: Trump already won.
Three people with direct knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone that many of the former president’s lawyers and political advisers have already accepted that the justices will likely rule against him, and reject his claims to expansive presidential immunity in perpetuity. Bringing the case before the court — after a federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., shut down their arguments on executive power — was a delaying tactic designed to push Trump’s criminal election subversion trial past Election Day this fall. The strategy paid off so much more than MAGAworld anticipated.
“We already pulled off the heist,” says a source close to Trump, noting it doesn’t matter to them what the Supreme Court decides now.
Trump’s lawyers and other confidants had widely expected — and had told the former president as much — that the court maneuver would delay the election subversion trial, but perhaps only to around the summer. For months, Trump attorneys were actively preparing themselves and their client to face a trial, over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his role in the violent Jan. 6 assault at the U.S. Capitol, right around the time of the Republican Party’s nominating convention, the sources add.
If the federal trial were to proceed during this election year, much of Team Trump had predicted it would be significantly more damaging politically to the presumptive Republican presidential nominee than, for instance, his ongoing criminal hush-money trial in Manhattan.
“We planned for that exhausting schedule and split screen,” says a person involved with the planning.
But the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, which Trump built as president, came through for him in a way that many Trump advisers didn’t believe was probable. When news broke in late February that the court would take up Trump’s claims of vast immunity, Trumpland was so elated that a lawyer close to Trump told Rolling Stone they were “literally popping champagne.”
They are banking everything on his winning in November. I hate to tell them but if this unfolds the way they think, if he loses this case will go forward and he is going to be tried. They won’t be popping champagne when that happens.
It’s going to be up to the American people to beat him at the polls to hold him accountable. After that, the legal system should carry on and hold him accountable for his crimes.