That sort of instability is so damaging beyond the boundaries of his term. Hopefully this restores a bit of confidence.
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If we look at how often the justices voted in favour of each administration in emergency applications when the government was the filer, we get Sotomayor and Jackson favouring Biden with a 77-point margin (88 to 11 percent and 77 to 0 percent, respectively), Alito favouring Trump with a 77-point margin (95 to 18%), and Kavanaugh, Barrett and Roberts with 48, 26 and 21-point margins [1].
On the whole, Trump has been successful 84% of the time against Biden's 53%. But my point is that the partisan fracture of our court--on the level of individual justices--has been happening for a while. (The fact that we have (a) Alito, who's a hack and (b) a decadelong conservative majority is more explanatory than e.g. Barrett or Roberts having gone to the dark side.)
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/us/politics/supreme-court...
Obviously it is impossible to answer this without projecting some bias. But I don't think that makes it unanswerable.
I'm not American so I try not to wade into it too much. I think Americans and everybody is entitled to a basic human right of self-determination, holding, and voting for diverse political beliefs. They have a bunch of shit to sort out and are pretty divided sadly, but so is my country and many others.
Now something that America has been known for is extraordinary renditions, extrajudicial executions, foreign "interventions", and that kind of thing. Again I don't say America is unique or even the worst at this by a long shot. Hell, France carried out a state sponsored terrorist action and murder against a civilians in a friendly democracy (New Zealand) within living memory. But America, being the biggest, most influential, and "leader of the free world" gets most of the focus.
With those disclaimers out of the way, the presidential immunity ruling did not come as any shock to those outside America and slightly removed from the propaganda war. We've seen W start questionable wars and the whole CIA renditions, Obama's love of drones and his ordering extra-judicial execution of US citizens, their destruction of Syria and Libya and Iraq, etc.
Presidential immunity was the defacto operating principle and most legal experts outside the fringe really agreed that an action like the killing of an American citizen abroad by the executive branch could not be prosecuted, despite it otherwise meeting all elements of the criminal statute for murder.
I'm no legal expert, but the presidential immunity ruling from SCOTUS as far as I could see affirmed existing practice and understanding. If anything it actually restricted presidential immunity because it explicitly limited it to official actions and created some guidelines for how courts could decide how to make that classification.
But the reaction online was literally that it made Trump a dictator and it meant he could go personally shooting opposing politicians, judges, and bureaucrats with no consequences! People who believed that of course will categorize that decision as extreme. But the reality seems to be the opposite, extreme (not as a value judgement but in terms of distance from status quo of both sides of mainstream politics) would have been to rule the other way and permit the prosecution of presidents for executive actions, because presumably then the DOJ would have begun cases against Obama, W, as well for their criminal and now prosecutable actions in office.
Good thing that you prefaced with that you're not an American and you try not to wade into it too much. Your have a good excuse for ignorance of drone strikes and are a great example of how manufactured consent works. "Obama" + "drones" eventually leads to "both sides" enlightened centrism without understanding policy nuances. Just one such example - https://www.jstor.org/stable/23526906?seq=8.
> It's not unanswerable, but it is impossible to have a reasoned discussion about it even with otherwise reasonable people, sadly.
You're right about that one.
Not sure what you're getting at here or how it addresses the substance of my point. Seems like a pathetic attempt to strawman by attempting to nitpick a tiny irrelevant aspect of my comment, and even that failed badly for you because I never claimed other sides did not also use drones or that both sides were as good or bad as one another. Come on, pull yourself together, if you can't cope with talking about this like a normal person, just refrain from commenting.
Do you deny that Obama ordered extrajudicial execution of a US citizen and relied on and was widely believed to be shielded by presidential immunity for that action? Or that it was not a controversial mainstream legal opinion before Trump that presidents operated the executive branch under presidential immunity?
> You're right about that one.
I know.