President Donald Trump has repeatedly secured the Supreme Court's capitulation — whether by letting him construct his ballroom, allowing him to fire previously protected federal officeholders, or permitting him to gut the Voting Rights Act. Those rulings have come from a Court with a 6-3 conservative majority that includes the three justices Trump appointed in his first term — Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. Now a former Republican presidential adviser — one who served President George W. Bush — is warning that the Supreme Court is destroying the Constitution by repeatedly taking the knee to Trump.

"The American Constitution is made of paper," Steve Schmidt — a veteran GOP operative who served as a senior strategist on John McCain's 2008 presidential campaign and later co-founded the anti-Trump Lincoln Project — wrote on Substack on Sunday. "That is among the most important things James Madison ever tried to teach us. The Constitution has no army. It cannot arrest anyone. It cannot compel a senator to show courage, a judge to exercise independence, a president to exercise restraint, or a citizen to care."

"It is words," he continued. "The American republic has endured not because words enforce themselves, but because generations of citizens and officials have made them real by insisting that no one — not a president, judge, billionaire, or political faction — stands above the law. That is the rule of law."

After tracing The Federalist Papers and the guardrails they established to prevent the corruption of power, Schmidt argued that Chief Justice John Roberts has led the betrayal of the Constitution's promises.

"At his 2005 confirmation hearing, John Roberts described representing a private client against the United States," Schmidt wrote. "If the law favored his client, he said, 'all that power and might would recede in deference to the rule of law.'"

That, Roberts explained, was what Americans meant by a government of laws rather than men, Schmidt noted. The same hearing is remembered for Roberts's comparison of judges to baseball umpires who call balls and strikes rather than make the rules. Roberts then stated the central principle: "without the rule of law, any rights are meaningless." He also invoked Ronald Reagan's observation that the Soviet Constitution promised wonderful rights but made them "empty promises," because the Soviet system lacked an independent judiciary capable of enforcing them. "A right written on paper is not liberty unless institutions and citizens can make it binding," Schmidt wrote.

Schmidt went on to describe how the Roberts Court has overturned many of those precedents, particularly those that kept the president from viewing himself as above the law in a range of contexts — most prominently in Trump v. United States, the July 2024 decision in which the Court, with Roberts writing for the 6-3 majority, recognized constitutional immunity from criminal prosecution for a former president's official acts. That case arose from the federal election-interference prosecution of Trump, which was dismissed after his 2024 election victory as prosecutors cited Justice Department policy against indicting a sitting president.

"The normative criticism is narrower and more consequential: by expanding the sphere of presidential conduct insulated from criminal accountability, the decision may weaken the practical rule of law — especially when Congress and other institutions fail to provide effective checks," Schmidt wrote.

"That concern does not mean the Court held that presidents possess unlimited power or general immunity," he added. "It means that constitutional limits become less meaningful if the institutions responsible for enforcing them do not compensate for the limits placed on criminal prosecution."

Schmidt closed by pointing to the contrast between Roberts's confirmation testimony and his record on the bench. "In 2005, Roberts described the rule of law through the image of governmental 'power and might' receding when law required it," Schmidt wrote. "In 2024, he joined a decision holding that criminal prosecution must yield, in defined circumstances, to constitutional immunity for presidential official acts. The tension is clear: if presidential immunity is broad and other institutions do not resist abuse, legal limits may exist formally, while becoming difficult to enforce in practice."