Since 1982, in a case dating back to Richard Nixon’s presidency, presidents have been deemed immune from civil lawsuits based on their officials acts, Wofford explained, and Trump sought to expand that immunity protection. But it was a big ask, Wofford wrote:

“Protecting the president from the hassles of civil litigation is one thing; permitting the president, charged in Article 2 of the Constitution with faithful execution of the laws, to be able to break those same laws with impunity is quite another.”

Indeed, U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan wrote in December 2023 that Trump did not have the “divine right of kings to evade criminal accountability.” And a federal appeals court agreed in February 2024. That’s the ruling Trump appealed to the Supreme Court.

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Trump’s claim faced an uphill battle. Stefanie Lindquist, a scholar of constitutional law at Arizona State University, observed:

“In several of the lawsuits he filed challenging election results in the wake of the 2020 election, Trump himself said he was acting ‘in his personal capacity as a candidate,’ as distinct from his official capacity as president.

"Now, though, Trump claims that whether or not he was acting as a candidate on Jan. 6, his comments on ‘matters of public concern’ fall within the scope of his presidential duties.”

That inconsistency, as well as the general principle in the Constitution that no person could be above the law, made Trump’s position a difficult one to argue.

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Wofford, a constitutional law scholar at the College of Charleston, observed before the Supreme Court’s July ruling that there was public concern about the time it took the court to reach a decision, but she said that delay was much more likely in service of democracy than it was a partisan play:

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