#THE MONSTER WILL COME FOR US ALL

[mariacallous]

John Roberts and his fellow Republican Supreme Court justices not only paved the way for Donald Trump to retake the White House, but encouraged him to seize dictatorial powers upon his return. Now, the Trump Court’s rightwing ideologues appear poised to green light many of his authoritarian actions, thereby enabling him to further destroy the foundations of our democracy.

But Roberts and his extremist compatriots on the Court face one serious problem: Trump also wants the justices to endorse his campaign against the authority and independence of the judiciary, potentially rendering the Court into a shameless stooge. As a result, the cost of the Supreme Court continuing to do Trump’s bidding may be to undermine the judicial power and authority that Republicans devoted so much effort to obtain.

Roberts prepares a throne

After voting against convicting Trump for his January 6 coup attempt, Mitch McConnell said there was no need for Congress to act because "we have a criminal justice system in this country. We have civil litigation. And former presidents are not immune from being held accountable by either one."

But Trump escaped such accountability — with the crucial help of John Roberts.

While much has been made of the delays in prosecuting Trump under Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland, the players that actually ensured Trump would not be held accountable for his assault on the nation’s democracy were the rightwing jurists on the nation’s highest court who effectively crippled Jack Smith’s prosecution through a combination of calculated delay and a ruling that undermined the rule of law.

First, the Court delayed its immunity ruling for months, and thereby held the Trump prosecution in abeyance. Trump’s initial assertion of immunity in October 2023 was rejected by the trial court in December of that year; but proceedings in the case remained entirely stayed until Trump’s immunity claim was heard and decided by higher courts, a process the Supreme Court chose to drag out, despite a plea from the prosecutor for expedited review. As a result of this likely calculated delay, the Supreme Court did not issue its decision on Trump’s immunity claim until July 2024.

Second, when the ruling belatedly arrived, it was an early Christmas gift for The Donald. Authored by Roberts, the decision not only made it a practical impossibility for Trump to be tried before the election, but also granted him a far broader ambit of immunity than his lawyers had initially even thought of asking for.

Roberts declared that a president enjoys “absolute” or “qualified” immunity from criminal prosecution for any action taken in his “official” capacity. That means that Trump actually could well avoid criminal consequences for using SEAL Team Six to murder opponents — a hypothetical that an appellate judge had used as a darkly humorous hypothetical to demonstrate the absurdity of Trump’s immunity claims.

Roberts’s immunity ruling not only gutted much of Smith’s case against Trump, it also sent a clear message: If Trump won the election, he could freely engage in even more egregious crimes, secure in the assurance that he would never face criminal accountability. As Justice Sotomayor put it in her dissent, the Court made the president into a “king above the law.”

As later events would demonstrate, Trump and his cronies got the message loud and clear.

I never thought leopards would eat my face

After Roberts and company cleared the way and Trump won last November, the new president took up the Supreme Court’s invitation by embarking on a brazenly illegal attempt to take autocratic power and void fundamental rights.

Despite the fact that Trump enjoys majorities of Republican yes people in both chambers of Congress, he has devoted little effort to passing legislation during his first months in office. Instead, Trump has followed the model of dictators and ruled by decree, issuing barrages of “executive orders” in which he has asserted the right to run roughshod not only over fundamental rights, but also to violate to separation of powers.

With help from Elon Musk’s DOGE team, Trump is crippling institutions and programs whose existence is legally mandated and funded by Congress, like USAID and the Social Security Administration. Musk’s backpack-wearing thugs have even used force and the threat of prosecution to seize the buildings of statutorily independent government agencies that the president has no legal authority to directly control. Trump is also using extortionate threats to force private persons, institutions (including universities and law firms), and states and localities to bend to his will.

Because Republican congressional “leaders” are completely in Trump’s thrall and unwilling to challenge him even when he’s harming their constituents, it has fallen nearly entirely on the shoulders of the lower federal courts to place breaks on Trump’s illegal seizures of power. According to Steve Vladeck, to date, 39 different judges, appointed by presidents of both parties, have blocked illegal Trump actions.

Calling their bluff

Having entered office armed with Roberts’s grant of kinglike immunity, Trump and his cronies have responded to those judges’ enforcement of the law with expressions of anger and increasingly ominous threats.

As soon as judges began issuing rulings limiting Trump’s assaults on the Constitution, he and his cronies began threatening to impeach judges for ruling against Trump.

In response, Roberts released a statement solemnly declaring that "for more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision."

This was not the first time Roberts responded to Trump’s dismissals of judicial authority and legitimacy. In 2019, Roberts rebuked Trump’s attack on an “Obama judge” for enforcing the nation’s asylum laws by stating, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.”

But Roberts’s 2025 statement has already proven to be as ineffective as his 2019 one was. Rather than signaling any intention to back down, Trump shot back by declaring, "If Justice Roberts and the United States Supreme Court do not fix this toxic and unprecedented situation IMMEDIATELY, our Country is in very serious trouble!"

It’s clear Trump expects Roberts to follow up his defense of judicial independence by kowtowing to Trump, and repudiating the lower court judges who have been enforcing the nation’s laws. Trump’s confidence that Roberts and company will bend to his will is probably merited — even if stakes for the Court have never been higher.

A Trumpian dilemma

As Trumpers have racked up losses in the lower courts, they’ve begun demanding that Roberts and company immediately step in to give Trump license to continue forward with his power grab.

For example, the Court is now considering an “emergency” Trump challenge to a ruling staying his illegal effort to cancel millions of education grants because they are purportedly infected with “DEI” (that is, civil rights). Trump has also sought immediate Supreme Court review of whether trial judges properly issued nationwide injunctions against his patently illegal effort to erase birthright citizenship from the Constitution. And he just asked the Court to allow him to continue to send Venezuelans to a notorious Salvadoran prison without due process, on the dubious pretext they are wartime enemies.

While it’s unclear what the Court will do in those cases, Trump has good reason to believe a majority of justices will be sympathetic to his dictatorial cause.

Roberts and his fellow rightwing jurists have long signaled their partiality to the so-called “unitary executive” theory. This autocratic theory holds that the president has sole authority over the operation of every executive branch entity, including statutorily independent agencies. MAGA leaders have justified Trump’s actions on this theory, contending that any statutory limits on his authority to control each and every non-legislative and non-judicial component of the federal government is unconstitutional, and therefore void.

If this theory is taken seriously — and it is by rightwing ideologues like those on the Supreme Court — then a majority of the Court may end up ruling that Trump is not only free to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and Federal Trade Commission (as he has already done), but he could also take over direct control of the Federal Reserve Board and personally set interest rates.

Yet there is one obvious problem with the prospect of the Supreme Court allowing Trump to move forward with his authoritarian project: The justices themselves could pay the high price of discarding what is left of their own already impaired legitimacy.

In recent decades, the Court’s rightwing justices have assumed ever greater power for themselves, including by drastically constraining Democratic presidents and legislators and hobbling landmark legislation such as central provisions of the Voting Rights Act. Indeed, McConnell and GOP donors devoted decades and millions of dollars to stacking all levels of the judiciary precisely in order to stifle Democratic elected officials and advance the Republican agenda.

Yet the Court’s own hard-fought seizure of power from the elected branches of government could well be out the window if Roberts and his colleagues accede to Trump’s current demands and give up any pretense of judicial adherence to the rule of law.

After all, how can the rightwing justices who control the Supreme Court expect a future president — particularly a Democratic one — to accept rulings limiting the exercise of their power from a Court that served as the judicial stooge of an aspiring dictator?

[protoctist]

i know ryoko kui is a real one because she wrote 97+ chapters of a manga about fantasy ecosystems and food chains and not once did she write the phrase "survival of the fittest" (it's a bad phrase) (it's a social darwinist phrase even) (hated amongst biologists) (doesn't make sense) (darwin didn't use it) (coined by an business major) (one of the worst phrases in pop science) (no good)

[reichurine]

"but you won't be there, damn gambler."

👊after 'rota fortunae'

[hana-bobo-finch]

everything about the wasps in bug fables is horrific if you think about it for more than a second. I mean there were probably dozens if not more wasp fatalities from the wasp king treating them so horribly but. those wasp’s loved ones might not even be able to tell or care until they weren’t under the crown’s control. am I making sense probably not but hear me OUT imagine you’re just a lil wasp fella and one day you just kinda start losing control of your thoughts and feelings, maybe you don’t have any idea of what happened during that time, and then all of a sudden you snap out of it and next thing you know everyone is Fucking Dead

[yashley]

[i-dreamed-i-had-a-son]

I love how Epic is a story about how sometimes, you change in ways you can't undo. Sometimes it's a choice, and sometimes it's something that happens to you; often, it's both. And in some ways, you may be made worse. You may make mistakes. You may become someone you don't recognize, and you may not like who you now see in the mirror. You might lose your old self in the process of surviving.

But when you do, the people who love you will still be there. Not because of who you used to be, or how you might heal or become better, or out of ignorance of who you now are. Just because they love you, and you do not need to be perfect to be loved. You just need to be there.

And they'll be waiting for you.

[ninadove]

Hello there.

[Slides elegantly into the tags]

Do you ever think about Emotion?

Of course you do. How could you not. But do you ever think about this exchange specifically:

“You’re not Adrien!”

Because Adrien is sweet, and forgiving, and kind. In fact, kindness is his defining quality — Marinette herself made sure of it:

“I’ll never tell another boy I love him before I know everything about him! Whether he’s kind or not, thoughtful, what he does outside of school and with who… I’ll know everything.”

But.

Do you ever think about Adrien’s development in S4 and especially S5?

Overtime, he has grown resentful of a system that exploits him relentlessly.

Of the people he gave countless chances to, only to be let down over and over again.

Of the web of lies and half-truths he constantly finds himself tangled into. A web that is only growing bigger, stickier, and trickier to escape.

And the Senticousins. Do you ever think about them?

Do you ever think about how they are each other’s reflection, identical and opposites all at once?

“When you bring a living being into this world, you have a responsibility towards them. Your duty is to protect them, love them, help them discover the true meaning of their existence. To deprive them of that… is monstruous.”

“To have a child is to help them blossom, to grow, to find themselves and to be free!”

Do you ever think about their opposite character arcs in S5 — one learning mercy and trust, the other developing a rage so strong it could destroy the world?

Do you ever think that if Felix can now have this exchange with his mum, and mean it:

“They’re all monsters!”

“Not all of them.”

Then there’s nothing stopping Adrien from saying this:

“Look closer, Marinette. They’re the monsters.”

[mariacallous]

In short, whenever there’s a danger that the Trump administration might face real consequences for defying a court order, the conservative majority leaps on the grenade to make sure it never happens.

Judicial appeasement

It’s possible that Chief Justice Roberts believes he is protecting the judiciary by forestalling the day when the Trump administration tells a federal judge “no.” Maybe he fears that the third branch won’t survive a head-on confrontation with a deranged demagogue and his millions of armed followers. Or it could be that he’s just weak.

Whatever the reason, this strategy of allowing the government to flout trial judges’ orders on the assumption that a higher court will bail him out is only making the problem worse. Just yesterday, Lawfare reported that the government is reaching out to government contractors to find out whether they are represented by the law firms targeted in Trump’s executive orders — something which has been explicitly prohibited by three federal judges.

Feeding this beast will not keep it quiet, and it certainly won’t protect the judiciary. As lawyer David Lurie wrote in these pages last week, “John Roberts created a monster. It's about to eat him.”

John Roberts will save the judiciary if he has to burn it down

[erinwantstowrite]

Bruce Wayne would have never let this happen

in the absence of our media characters being able to save us, we have to take up our own mantles...

[cherry-treelane]

There's something so poetic about how El is the centre of all the chaos, wanted by the government and military and Mike is her strong calm that doesn't hesitate to get sucked into her storm and stand by her side in the face of any conflict. Like guys. This little boy did not hesitate to protect her and stand off in the face of the government to defend her, going against all the typical patriotic rule-following norms of an American Suburbanite Middle class nuclear family. He comes from pure safe normalcy but doesn't hesitate to run in the other direction heading towards chaos and danger if it means she's there... because he feels safest with her and is driven by the instinct to protect her. 😭🩷 There's something so beautiful and inspiring about someone as hurt and troubled and chaotic as El being loved in such a simple, unconditional way. Mike doesn't see her for the chaos she represents which surrounds her, he sees her for the innocent goodness that she actually is— her calm, gentle demeanour and the warmth it makes him feel. He understands that all the danger that comes with being with her is through no fault of her own, and actively works to help combat all the forces against her. He knows that despite being the centre of the chaos she's not the cause of it, she's the remedy for the effect of it and that is an undeserved, exhausting punishment yet a burden she bears regardless without complaint— a sign of her innate goodness which Mike recognises and loves her for all the more. Even moreso, he works to share that burden with her and criticise it because he sees how innocent and undeserving she is of the responsibility infringed upon her. His willingness to take all of this on is so wholesome and exactly the kind of sweet effort-full love that a character like El deserves, which is so gratifying for the audience to see.

[anemonet]

hey rememberthe reverse iterators au. are you ever going to post about that again because i think it was pretty cool!

pebbles when he didnt even get to try

[More of my reverse iterator au if anyone is wondering what is going on!]

[freaky-flawless]

Alright, I can't get this out of my mind, and I feel compelled to figure this out.

Monster High Months. I have a few figured out, but I'm drawing blanks on others. Some suggestions would be greatly appreciated, even alternatives to the ones I came up with.

January- Fanguary or Janu-scary

February- Febooary or Febu-scary

March- Lurch...?

April- Gravepril or A-shrill

May- Maim

June- Gloom

July- Ghoul-ly or Goo-ly

August- Ughhhgust (Like Zombie speak)

September- Hextember

October- Spooktober (I think this works so much better than "fangtober")

November- Bonevember (Not fond of this one) or Novemboo

December- Dismember

Edit: Added some of the suggestions!

[deathandnonexistentialdread]

Now that the Battle City Arc has officially ended, huge shoutout to Anzu for absolutely serving in this outfits for this arc

[seaofreverie]

One year ago I made this lil comic about being aromantic, based on the lyrics of Eaten By The Monster Of Love! I meant to post it on the anniversary of me making it but I missed the day, oops... so today felt like a fitting alternative :3

Happy Valentine's Day!! Whether you were eaten by the monster of love or not, I hope you have a fun day today!

[lilaccatholic]

I am once again thinking about the reluctant ruler whose arc justly and correctly includes assuming the throne and taking responsibility for the people set before them

[mariacallous]

I don’t know that there is much of a needle to thread. I know that no one likes the nationwide court orders but there’s not much of a way to limit them without rendering any protection ineffective.

And we’re at the point where we need to ask what can be done if Trump fully defies the Court on something as broad as this. The answer is not especially edifying.

And if they continue to give him wins in other areas it won’t matter what they do here.