Since he was indicted last year for his role on Jan. 6, 2021, and his attempt to overturn a presidential election, Donald Trump had his lawyers make up an idea that presidents have total legal immunity to do whatever they want. This was a stalling tactic so that he wouldn’t have to stand trial prior to the presidential election and could then dismiss the charges if he won. A lower court dismissed this argument as dumb. An appeals court then upheld the ruling, agreeing that the argument was dumb. Then—oh reader, then—our good friends at the Roberts Court decided to take up the case themselves. Going by their posturing in oral arguments on Thursday, the court’s conservative majority listened to Trump’s case that presidents are above the law and thought, hmm, interesting. They were truly all over the place. Brett Kavanaugh babbled about how he didn’t like the lapsed independent counsel statute. Samuel Alito stroked his chinny chin chin and suggested that not granting presidential immunity would encourage outgoing presidents to try to cling to power. Trump’s lawyer was asked whether the president could be immune for assassinating a political rival, and replied, eh, who’s to say? It appears that SCOTUS will neither grant Trump’s “absolute immunity” argument nor dismiss it out of hand. Instead, there might be a John Roberts Special on hand. SCOTUS will write “a rule for the ages,” as an audibly psyched Neil Gorsuch put it, drawing some lines on the matters. Then lower courts and appeals courts could have to rehear Trump’s arguments under the new test, delaying the criminal trial months or years further. Which raises the question: What criminal trial? You think there’s actually going to be a trial?

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has taken a well-earned victory lap in the media this week for his role in ushering the security assistance bill through Congress, a lengthy process that cost him a significant chunk of political capital. The interviews and press availabilities have been unusual by McConnell’s standards, though, in how freewheeling he’s been in taking questions and how openly he’s been dishing. At a press conference on Tuesday, McConnell—who typically takes exactly three questions per week—would talk to anyone who’d listen. He specifically name-dropped Tucker Carlson’s anti-Ukraine monologues as a setback for his party, because he “had an enormous audience, which convinced a lot of rank-and-file Republicans that maybe this was a mistake.” (He added, for good measure, that Carlson “ended up where he should have been all along, which is interviewing Vladimir Putin.”) McConnell conceded in another interview that the difficulty in continuing to support Ukraine was “obviously” a “Republican problem,” and that “for most of this time, I sort of felt like I was the only Reagan Republican left.” This is something of a soft launch of post-leadership McConnell, who said that he’ll have more “latitude” in the final two years of his Senate term to speak his mind. He even indicated that he might break from his habit of completely ignoring—to the point that you can’t even tell if he knows you’re there—reporters who try to walk-and-talk with him in the hallways. “I may start hanging around in the hall out here,” he told Politico. “You never can tell.” Mothers, hide your daughters—Mitch McConnell is stepping out.

Just a week ago, the House speaker was taking an overwhelming amount of incoming flak from the right flank of both his conference and the Republican base at large after putting Ukraine aid up for a vote. His speakership didn’t seem long for this world. When Congress returns to work next week, that saga could resume. But how much have you heard about Johnson’s precarious employment in the past few days? Very little, because the true enemies of the people have once again reared their ugly heads: leftist college students. Across the country, students have set up encampments in the center of their universities to protest the government’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war and their schools’ investments in Israel. There is nothing, nothing, that either broadcast media or the Republican Party loves more than students attending $90K-per-year universities complaining about anything, and it’s sucked all of the attention out of the room. It’s been a timely political gift to Johnson, not only for presenting a useful shift in media focus but for the way he’s been able to lean into it and win back favor from the right. Johnson and other Republicans visited the Columbia University encampment this week to protest the protesters, who heckled him throughout his remarks, precisely as he’d hoped they would. No one will be more upset at the end of the semester than Mike Johnson.

As trips to Mar-a-Lago to kiss the ring go, few have had a better return on investment than Mike Johnson’s recent visit. Johnson visited Trump a couple of weeks ago for a joint event on “election integrity.” The real purpose, however, was to cozy up to Trump as Johnson prepared to risk his job on the Ukraine assistance vote. This worked out swimmingly. Johnson, one way or another, convinced Trump to stay neutral over the Ukraine vote rather than to actively come out swinging against it. (Turning a portion of the assistance into a “loan,” while mostly a gimmick, and then crediting Trump with the idea, was useful here.) But the visit also convinced Trump to back Johnson himself, too, against the calls for revolution coming from Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. “Well, look, we have a majority of one, OK?” Trump said of Johnson in a radio interview this week. “It’s not like he can go and do whatever he wants to do. I think he’s a very good person. You know, he stood very strongly with me on NATO when I said NATO has to pay up … I think he’s trying very hard.” This enduring loyalty Trump has shown Johnson will last all the way until the instant Johnson says anything that can be construed as unflattering to Donald Trump.

The South Dakota governor, vice presidential hopeful, and Texas dental care evangelist has a new book coming out with the A.I.-ass title No Going Back: The Truth on What’s Wrong With Politics and How We Move America Forward. According to one poor soul who was forced to read this book for journalism reasons, it includes a story about how Noem once went on a shooting spree of her own animals. She describes an unruly former—hard emphasis on former—dog she owned named Cricket. Cricket, only 14 months old, was a handful. She not only bit Noem, but once attacked her friend’s family’s chickens, “grabb[ing] one chicken at a time, crunching it to death with one bite, then dropping it to attack another.” So she led Cricket to a “gravel pit” and shot her. She goes on to describe how she then “dragged” a “nasty and mean” male goat she owned to the same gravel pit, shot him, and then shot him again to finish the job. “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” she writes. When the story came out, Noem tweeted that she’d recently put down another three horses. Should a few detectives maybe check out this gravel pit?

Trump’s former attorney general, who has strongly denounced his former boss as an unhinged “horror show” whose return to power could sow “chaos,” and has warned of what a terrifying threat Trump is to the world and democracy—you know where this is going, don’t you?—has said he will vote for Donald Trump for president. “Trump may be playing Russian roulette,” Barr said last Thursday, “but a continuation of the Biden administration is national suicide in my opinion.” It’s hard to argue with that; continued implementation of the infrastructure law would mark the end of the American experiment. Barr’s announcement earned an appropriate response from Trump. “Wow! Former A.G. Bill Barr, who let a lot of great people down by not investigating Voter Fraud in our Country, has just Endorsed me for President despite the fact that I called him ‘Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy’ (New York Post!),” Trump posted on social media. “Based on the fact that I greatly appreciate his wholehearted Endorsement, I am removing the word ‘Lethargic’ from my statement. Thank you Bill. MAGA2024!” Missed this one while it was happening? Don’t worry! Bill Barr will always come back for more.

Regular readers will know that the Surge’s position on the Protecting Americans From Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act, aka the “TikTok ban,” is that it’s soft and mushy. Rather than doing what it should do—banning TikTok immediately, and requiring mass hypnosis on entrepreneurs to ensure that no similar app ever comes along again—it gives TikTok’s Chinese parent company 270 days to sell the app. Cowards! But the Surge is feeling a little bit better about the bill’s potential since President Joe Biden signed it into law on Wednesday. The parent company, ByteDance, has said it has no plans sell TikTok, and the Chinese government has said it won’t approve a sale of TikTok’s algorithm, from which much of the app’s value is derived. These pronouncements should be taken with a grain of salt for now—this process is in its very early stages, and a long court battle will likely intervene—but is there hope for a TikTok ban, rather than a sale, after all? The dream is not dead …