Elevating the American Presidency to almost kingly rank and power, a bitterly divided Supreme Court ruled Monday that ex-President Donald Trump has nearly unchallengeable immunity to criminal prosecution for any action he took that can be defined as official.

For any act that qualifies as official, the majority ruled, his legal immunity will be “absolute,” and no criminal charges may be made for those acts.  What is official must be sorted out even before any trial can begin, under the ruling.  The breadth that five of the Justices gave to that concept was so sweeping that it caused Justice Amy Coney Barrett, usually a full ally of those five, to argue that they went too far; she did not dissent from much of the ruling, including some of its key points, however.

The three liberal Justices wrote or joined searing dissenting opinions, lamenting that the ruling poses a profound threat to the future of democracy itself.  Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in one of the dissents, said the majority had given Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”  She also expressed “fear for our democracy.”  In the other dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she saw “potential for great harm to American institutions and to Americans themselves.”

The Court’s conservative majority left it to lower courts to be the first to define the degree of immunity that Trump will be given for actions he is accused of taking as he tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat.  Any lower court rulings on that, though, would be subject to future appeals – likely, to the Supreme Court, too.

For well over two centuries, America has debated how strong it will allow its Presidents to be.  Within the 119 pages of opinions released Monday in the case of Trump v. United States, there are strong indications that presidential power has never been as strong as it now will be and never has been less legally accountable that it now is.

What is left, constitutionally and legally, to hold a rogue President in check is not much more than Congress’s power to impeach a Chief Executive for serious misconduct – a remedy that twice failed to remove Trump from the Presidency.

Because the decision is based entirely on the Constitution and a constitutional notion of a truly robust Chief Executive, it will apply to all three remaining criminal cases against Trump – in Washington, D.C., in Florida and in Georgia.

It might even affect Trump’s single conviction so far, in a New York state court verdict on 34 counts – a case now being appealed.  Some parts of the actions at issue in that case did occur after Trump was in the White House, although much of the evidence involved events before his election in 2016.  Trump’s defense team surely will attempt to use the new ruling in that case, too.

If Trump’s actions have immunity to prosecution on federal criminal charges, they definitely would have the same protection against charges under state law – as in the pending case in Atlanta, GA, now moving on a slow track.

The ruling was an enormous political gift to Trump as he seeks this year to win a new term in the White House.  It means, almost certainly, that the nation’s voters will not see him facing criminal trial in any other case until after the November 5 election.  He might avoid trial altogether in other cases, if he were to be elected.

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith’s two prosecutions of Trump very likely have been seriously hampered, because he and his staff will have to convince not only the trial judges in any of his cases, but also two layers of appeals courts, that Trump acted outside of the now-widened protected zone in the events leading up to the January 6, 2021, violent assault on the U.S. Capitol and that he also did so in his handling of national-security documents after leaving the Presidency – the Mar-a-Lago case now moving slowly in a federal trial court in Florida.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts wrote the lead opinion.  It was joined in full by fellow conservative Justices Samuel A. Alito, Neil M. Gorsuch, Brett M. Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas.  Justice Thomas also wrote a separate opinion, questioning the constitutionality of Jack Smith’s appointment as Special Prosecutor.  Thomas argued that was an issue that must be settled before any trial by Smith’s team begins.  No other Justice supported that argument, but that does not mean that Thomas would not pick up support if the issue were to arise formally.  Trump’s legal team is using that argument as they continue to defend him in the courts.

Justice Barrett’s separate opinion was another example of a fairly junior member of the Court beginning to find her own judicial voice.  She has on several occasions lately sought to separate herself from her previous routine alliance with the Court’s conservative bloc.  On Monday, she outlined differences with the majority for expanding the immunity doctrine, regarding how lower courts should apply the new decision.

Among the dissenters, Justice Sotomayor’s opinion was supported in full by Justice Jackson and by Justice Elena Kagan.  Jackson also wrote a separate opinion for herself.

The majority opinion was made up of a deep exploration of the constitutional history of the Presidency, a detailed examination of the arguments made by the Special Prosecutor in Trump’s case, and a point-by-point discussion of what is to come next.

Here are the key points that the majority made on the immunity question:

• It rejected Trump’s argument that everything he did that forms a part of the charges was official and thus none of the charges can be pursued, and it rejected the prosecutors’ argument that none of his acts, even if official, were immune.
• It ruled explicitly that, if Trump’s acts that were charged as criminal were not official in nature, he has no immunity to those charges and they can be tried.
• It told the trial court in the January 6 case to apply the Justices’ ruling last week, in a separate case, that narrowed the scope of a federal criminal law used to prosecute rioters in the January 6 case. Two of the four charges against Trump could be cast aside under that ruling.
• It said neither of the lower courts that had ruled on the immunity question had decided what actions charged in the January 6 case were official or not-official, so they must now do that before the trial of that case can begin.
• It fashioned two levels of immunity for ex-Presidents. The broadest of those is absolute, for acts that clearly were “official” in nature because they involve powers “exclusively” assigned to the President by the Constitution.  The second level, which the Court stressed it was applying only tentatively, without it being actually binding, that would apply to official use of powers that a President shares with Congress.  It said it wanted to see how this second level worked out in the lower courts before it embraced it fully.

When the majority then applied the two levels of immunity, these were the results as it affected the January 6 case:

• It ruled that Trump is absolutely immune, and thus cannot be prosecuted, for any attempts he made to get his Justice Department to do sham investigations in order to show that the 2020 election was conducted illegally – the “big lie” that Trump and his allies have pressed since that election and that got him in legal trouble. Those dealings with the Justice Department were the only ones ruled by the Court to be totally protected from prosecution.
• It decided that Trump has a tentative form of “presumed” immunity (which prosecutors can try to overcome) by attempting in January 2021 to persuade his Vice President, Mike Pence, to stop the counting of Electoral College votes that made Joe Biden the winner of the Presidency.
• It ordered lower courts to decide, before any trial, whether Trump’s whole campaign to portray the election of 2020 as a fraud had some elements of official action that could be immune. It did the same with the Trump campaign’s effort to get the states to appoint fake electors who would be pledged to Trump in sufficient numbers to make him the winner.  And it did the same with his actions on January 6, 2021, that led a mob to go to the Capitol to try to stop the counting of the vote that would make Biden the President.

On each of the points where it assigned new review in the lower courts, the majority found evidence both favorable and unfavorable to Trump.

Under normal practice, the Court would put its ruling into effect in a formal way after waiting 25 days from Monday.  That is a rule that allows any necessary technical edits or revisions.  However, Special Prosecutor Smith is expected to ask the Court to put the decision into effect “forthwith.”  The Court is likely to agree to do so.

The case would technically go back first to a federal appeals court, but is likely to be returned swiftly to the trial court of U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan in Washington.  She thus will be the first federal court to try to develop a procedure for sorting out the difference between official and unofficial acts.  She apparently cannot make any other preparations for trial until that is sorted out.  The prospects for extended delay thus are very real.

Judge Chutkan got a bit of guidance from the Court opinion on how to plan such a review.  The Court, in a somewhat circular remark, said that an action by Trump will be treated as official if it is within “the outer perimeter” of a President’s official duties, which it said means “actions that are not manifestly or palpably beyond that authority.”

On the kinds of criminal prosecutions that the immunity doctrine will prohibit, the Court explained, those would be charges that interfere with the functioning of the office of the Presidency or would make the President be “unduly cautious” in the use of official powers.

But, in going through that review process, the Court stressed, judges and prosecutors cannot examine a President’s motives and cannot allow a prosecution to go forward just by claiming that some law was violated, if the action qualified as official.