The obscene corruption of the Trump regime was attested by the financial report required by law and published this week. During 2025, Trump and his family made at least $2.2 billion, of which half was in cryptocurrency, where they made a killing on Trump-denominated coins that rapidly lost their value. So the First Family cleaned up while millions of suckers lost big bucks. Politicians getting rich is not news: LBJ started poor and ended rich when all he ever did for a living was serve in elective office. But this is out of all proportion from what came before. Holding the presidency is clearly, for Trump, a racket.
The Supreme Court (SCOTUS) is his cover, his way to gain the appearance of legitimacy for the racket. That court’s decision to allow the administration to end the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians and Syrians shows that our immigration system is completely broken.
That decision also displays the blatant partisanship of the SCOTUS 6-3 Republican majority. Justice Alito went out of his way to deny that race played any role in the decision to deport these Haitians, notwithstanding the very public denunciations of them by the president for abuses that were demonstrably untrue.
The court has not always supported Trump: most notably, it denied his attempt to end birthright citizenship. But the court has backed Trump in about two thirds of cases since his inauguration in 2025.
Two of the current justices owe their positions to foul play by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. When Antonin Scalia died while Barack Obama was president, McConnell flatly denied a hearing to Obama’s nominee, thereby allowing Trump to fill the position with Neil Gorsuch. And when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died after Trump’s second election, McConnell again refused to allow Biden to fill the slot, holding it open for Trump to nominate Amy Coney Barrett.
If the Democrats win control of Congress this year, and the presidency in 2028, they would thus be justified in increasing the size of the court to rectify this blatant injustice. Legal analysts generally agree that the authority to set the size of the court is implied in its charge to pass laws “necessary and proper” to the working of the Constitution. They had to set the size at the beginning, and in fact changed it several times before 1869, when it was set at nine. FDR considered it in 1936 when he faced a hostile court, but never got enough congressional support to do it. In any case, the court’s own members either retired or changed votes to allow FDR’s programs to prevail. This is really the only way to change the court without a constitutional amendment.
In any case, if the Democrats control the Senate, they should deny Trump the chance to fill another vacancy, just as McConnell did to Obama and Biden.
Another recent SCOTUS decision allowed the president to dismiss members of autonomous agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission or the Federal Communications Commission. Congress created these agencies to be relatively independent of partisan control, but the court majority subscribes to the idea of a “unitary executive” who has control over the whole executive branch. A Democratic Congress could counter this by creating agencies that are explicitly arms of Congress (like the Congressional Budget Office) charged with issuing rules and regulations to put legislation into practice.
I am sometimes asked, in light of the corruption and evident authoritarian intentions of this regime, “Where is the outrage?” There is surely plenty of outrage: you may feel it. But rioting in the streets is just what the regime wants, to justify the repression they are itching to practice. That’s what they’re trying to provoke with all the ICE excesses.
I believe that democracy will survive this siege. It is a sign of our vitality as a political community that we can keep standing up to this incipient tyranny, without giving way to the violence that the regime is waiting for. We will vote them out and begin the long reconstruction.
John Peeler is a retired political science professor at Bucknell University. He recently moved to Amherst.