When Donald Trump was sworn in as president in January, both John Roberts and Trump knew that the oath he was taking was meaningless — it had been rendered meaningless by the Roberts’ edict, Trump v. United States (2024), granting presidential immunity. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in dissent, “the President is now a king above the law.”

Commenting on the Supreme Court ruling that effectively turned the president into a monarch by granting unprecedented presidential immunity from criminal prosecution, Lisa Graves says:

That edict that John Roberts orchestrated with his fellow appointees asserted a sort of a presidential superexclusionary rule that not even his words could be used in court in other prosecutions or other cases based on this extraordinarily broad notion, this invention of immunity that I believe to be utterly counter-constitutional, in fact anti-constitutional. And when you add that to what happened this year, you have the swearing in of a president making an oath that they’re going to uphold the Constitution that the person swearing him in has basically said is not binding on him — that he can violate the Constitution with impunity, which emboldened, as we all know, an already aggressive sort of person who’s hostile to the notion of the rule of law, to being bound by laws, by rules in a variety of settings as we’ve seen over over Donald Trump’s history. But then you compound that [with] the fact that we have an oath now that the Supreme Court has rendered largely meaningless.