On: Supreme court nears the end of its term with cases about Donald Trump’s power to
June 30, 2026.
The air in the capital is thick with the anticipation of a verdict, but the drama of the courtroom is a diversion from the deeper architecture of the crisis. We are told to wait for the Supreme Court to define the limits of executive power, as if the law were a neutral discovery found beneath a stone rather than a structure built brick by brick to house the interests of a specific class.
The “common sense” being manufactured today is that the stability of the Republic rests upon the interpretation of a text by nine individuals. This is the ultimate triumph of hegemony: the transformation of a political struggle into a technical, legalistic ritual. By framing the survival of democracy as a question of “presidential immunity,” the ruling class’s organic intellectuals - the jurists, the pundits, the constitutional scholars - have successfully moved the battlefield away from the streets and the workplaces and into the quiet, marble halls where the public has no voice.
We are witnessing a morbid symptom of the interregnum. The old liberal consensus, which relied on the illusion of “checks and balances” to mask the raw exercise of power, is dying. Yet, the new order - a more nakedly Caesarist form of governance - is struggling to clothe itself in the robes of legitimacy. Trump is not the cause of this decay; he is the instrument through which the underlying rot becomes visible.
Who benefits from the idea that power is granted by a court rather than seized through the consent of the governed? The court does not protect the people; it protects the continuity of the state apparatus against the unpredictability of the masses. Whether they rule for or against the former president, the victory is already won: they have reaffirmed that the law is something that happens to the people, never by them. The war of position requires us to see through this marble facade. We must realize that the real constitution is not written on parchment, but in the cultural habits and economic dependencies that make us look to a bench of judges for our liberation.