Take Trump’s Plan to Jail the Supreme Court’s Critics Seriously

There is, as they say, a lot going on here—even setting aside a major-party presidential candidate pondering a First Amendment exemption for speech that hurts Brett Kavanaugh’s feelings. For one thing, like most Democratic politicians, Harris has not come out in favor of Supreme Court expansion. Although she said she was “open to” the idea of adding justices during the 2020 primary, she has not gone further since. Her endorsement of expansion as the Democratic nominee exists only in Donald Trump’s feverish imagination, and now, presumably, in the heads of Trump devotees—for whom there exists a strong correlation between how frightening the things he says about Democrats are and how true they must therefore be.

For another thing, the most commonly discussed Supreme Court expansion proposal would add four justices to the court; a few days after Trump’s Pennsylvania rally, Oregon Senator Ron Wyden introduced a bill that would add six justices over a 12-year period. None of this explains how Trump arrived at a grand total of 25 justices, other than a vague understanding that any number he throws out should be (1) odd and (2) greater than nine. He’d floated something similar at a North Carolina event several days earlier—“They didn’t like the number 13, so instead of going to 15, they went to 25,” he said—but not in a way that revealed any useful clues about its origins. As ever, trying to trace how the garbled bits of information that Trump absorbs evolve into the words he says in public is like trying to play a game of telephone with a hamster, and it is best not to spend too much time or energy doing it.

In any event, the integers rattling around in Trump’s head are far less important than his suggestion for dealing with the court’s critics. (As The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake notes, Trump has previously suggested imposing “very serious fines” on those who’d dare speak their discouraging words aloud; perhaps he decided it would be easier to remember one proposed sentence instead of two.) Although Trump has long called for the imprisonment of his political opponents, to date, he has done so mostly in response to circumstances that, if they had any basis in reality and were not deranged conspiracy theories, might be expected to entail legal consequences: local government officials for ostensibly robbing him of the 2020 election, or Mark Zuckerberg for possibly meddling in the 2024 election, or Liz Cheney for purportedly destroying evidence that would exonerate Trump for his role in January 6, and so on.