Trump’s new Supreme Court gambit doesn’t even try to hide that it’s a delaying tactic

Donald Trump’s filing to the Supreme Court over his claim for sweeping presidential immunity begins with a quote from Yogi Berra.

“This application is déjà vu all over again,” the former president’s lawyers write, noting that special counsel Jack Smith had tried and failed to get the nine justices to decide the question on a fast-track basis in December.

But another of the late and revered New York Yankees catcher’s phrases offers a better summation of Trump’s interminable delay-at-all-costs legal strategy designed to defer a reckoning until after November’s election — “It ain’t over till it’s over.”

The ex-president asked the Supreme Court on Monday to step in to temporarily block a US Court of Appeals decision that last week eviscerated his claims that a president is effectively above the law while in office and shielded from prosecution afterwards.

The filing is Trumpian in its audacity.

In essence, it argues that it would be unfair to millions of voters if the ex-President cannot get his message out in the 2024 election because he is on trial over his attempt to overturn the 2020 election. The former president was less concerned about the rights of voters when he sought to thwart their choice to eject him from office in 2020. After an unprecedented effort by Trump to interrupt the cherished tradition of peaceful transfers of power three years ago, Trump’s attorneys nevertheless insist the real “stunning breach of precedent and historical norms” is that the lower court ruled that presidential immunity for official acts does not exist at all. While Trump argues he was using presidential power in a legitimate effort to bring to light electoral fraud, there is nothing in the Constitution that gives the