High on his own supply
By 
This is good in-depth piece of reporting from the NYT about how John Roberts “steered” the SCOTUS to one of the very worst opinions in the often sordid history of that institution, Trump v. United States.
The bottom line appears to be that Roberts somehow managed to convince himself that intervening in the case had nothing to do with Donald Trump per se, but was all about crafting some Principles of Constitutional Integritude, that Would Stand the Test of Time in their Principled Balls and Strikes Principledness.
I just taught the opinion in a class I’m doing on the crises of legal, judicial, and political legitimacy that are happening at the moment in the American institutional structure, and it’s hard to overstate what a fundamentally empty piece of nonsense Roberts’s opinion is. It’s about 2000 pages long, as per the style of the times, but can be reduced to the following proposition: It would be good if Donald Trump isn’t tried for his attempted autogolpe before the November election, so we will invent out of almost literally nothing a rule of Constitutional Law immunizing ex-presidents named Donald Trump from criminal prosecution from pretty much anything ex-presidents (named Donald Trump) did while in office.
The interesting thing is that, per the Times’s reporting, Roberts has somehow managed to convince himself that he’s doing the exact opposite of what he’s actually doing, which — breaking news — illustrates that the human capacity for rationalization is essentially infinite.
On a related point, when I was putting together this class I sent an email to the upper level law students at CU describing its content for people who might be interested, and somebody who got it decided to contact Ben Shapiro’s Daily Caller operation to complain about how a left wing cultural Marxist professor was going to say hurtful things in a class (not a required class needless to say), and the Daily Caller duly wrote a story about this, which was so over the top that Above the Law did a followup story about this is an example of right wing censorship attempts in law school.
The good news is that this kerfuffle produced exactly two emails in my in-box from Outraged Patriots, when 20 years ago a similar attack from the Scream Machine would have produced many dozens if not hundreds, as I know from experience. So glass half full I guess.