Alito, Trump and the Death of Plausible Deniability

According to the New York Times, Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito spoke directly with Donald Trump about a purported "job reference" just before Trump's lawyers filed a request to delay his sentencing. The timing wasn't subtle. The excuse wasn't believable. And most disturbingly, neither Alito nor Trump seemed to care.

This matters more than you might think. We're witnessing the final gasps of institutional integrity in real time, and the consequences will be devastating.

When Supreme Court Justices openly coordinate with litigants appearing before their court, we've moved beyond standard institutional decay into something far more dangerous: the death of even pretending to maintain democratic guardrails. This isn't just another scandal – it's a signal that we've entered the terminal phase of institutional collapse, where powerful actors no longer feel compelled to maintain even the thinnest veneer of propriety.

In the past, political and judicial figures maintained elaborate rituals of separation and independence. A Supreme Court Justice would never directly speak with a president whose cases they might hear. If communication was absolutely necessary, it would happen through layers of intermediaries, each providing a degree of plausible deniability. The point wasn't that people actually believed there was no coordination – it was that maintaining the fiction served as a crucial constraint on raw power.

Think of institutional guardrails like the speed limit. Everyone knows people sometimes drive faster than posted limits, but the existence of the limit still shapes behavior. Remove speed limits entirely, and you get chaos. Similarly, when institutional actors stop pretending to respect boundaries, you lose the constraining effect of those boundaries entirely.

This breakdown didn't happen overnight. We can trace a clear progression from the careful back-channel dealings of previous eras to today's brazen disregard for appearances:

In the 1970s, Nixon's "Saturday Night Massacre" required elaborate pretexts and ultimately led to his downfall. The violation of institutional norms carried real consequences. By the 1990s, Bill Clinton's tarmac meeting with AG Lynch sparked outrage and required extensive damage control – the norms were weakening but still had teeth. By the 2020s, Supreme Court Justices were openly socializing with political figures whose cases they judged, and the public largely shrugged. Now in 2025, we've reached the point where direct communication between a Justice and a litigant barely raises eyebrows.

The collapse of institutional constraints happened through three devastating mechanisms:

First, extreme polarization corroded the very concept of neutral institutions. When your side controls an institution, you want them to exercise maximum power. When the other side controls it, you view it as inherently illegitimate. This creates a death spiral where institutional constraints come to be seen as naive at best, actively harmful at worst.

Second, the internet eliminated the information asymmetry that made plausible deniability functional. In a world of limited information, elites could maintain different public and private faces. But when everything leaks eventually, the cost-benefit calculation of maintaining appearances shifts dramatically. Rather than adapt to the new reality with greater actual integrity, power players simply abandoned the pretense.

Third, and most destructively, elites discovered that openly flouting norms often produces less backlash than getting caught trying to hide it. This is the existential threat to democracy that Trump intuited: shamelessness is a superpower. When you deny obvious reality, you force observers to either engage in increasingly tortured reasoning to maintain institutional fictions, or admit the entire system is compromised. Most choose the former, but each cycle weakens faith in democracy further.

This pattern of institutional collapse is now repeating across every domain of American life. Silicon Valley CEOs openly admit to price fixing and market manipulation in public social media posts. Wall Street firms barely bother to hide insider trading anymore, knowing enforcement is impossible without institutional buy-in they can prevent. Academic credentials are openly bought and sold, with universities dropping even the pretense of merit-based admission. Media organizations abandon objectivity theater in favor of explicit ideological alignment.

Some argue this new "honest" corruption is preferable to the old hypocrisy. This is dangerously wrong. Institutional fictions serve as crucial coordination mechanisms for civilization. Think of paper money – its value depends entirely on collective belief in its value. If everyone wakes up tomorrow and decides dollars are worthless, they become worthless. No amount of federal reserve action can prevent this if belief fails catastrophically.

Similarly, institutional legitimacy requires collective investment in institutional fictions. Every time someone powerful openly flouts these fictions without consequence, it becomes harder for others to maintain their belief. This creates a cascade effect where the smart play becomes getting ahead of the collapse rather than trying to prevent it.

This is why the Alito-Trump call represents such a dangerous inflection point. It's not just about one Justice and one president-elect. It's a signal that we've crossed a threshold where maintaining democratic fictions no longer serves elite interests. The emperor is naked, everyone knows it, and increasingly, those in power flaunt their nakedness with impunity.

History shows where this leads, and it isn't pretty. When institutional constraints fail completely, raw power becomes the only arbiter. The remains of the Roman Republic preserved the forms of democratic institutions long after they'd been hollowed out – the Senate still met, consuls were still elected, the forms were maintained even as emperors wielded absolute power. We're watching the same process accelerate in real time.

Some suggest we might reach a new equilibrium – a kind of post-modern institutional arrangement where we maintain the forms of democratic governance while being openly cynical about power realities. This is magical thinking. Once institutional fictions collapse entirely, you can't maintain their beneficial functions through theatrical performance alone. The constraining effect is gone.

The death of plausible deniability might be inevitable in an age of radical transparency and tribal polarization. But we shouldn't celebrate this collapse or pretend it's a natural evolution. The Alito-Trump call exemplifies a conscious choice by those in power to abandon even the pretense of institutional integrity. They're betting that raw power will serve them better than maintained fictions.

The question isn't whether more such incidents will occur – they absolutely will. The question is whether democracy can survive their accumulating weight. Every time a powerful actor openly flouts institutional norms without consequence, we move closer to a system where power alone dictates outcomes. Unless we find a way to rebuild institutional integrity – not just its outward forms but its actual constraining function – we're watching the end of the American experiment in real time.

The tragedy is that by the time most people recognize what's been lost, it will be too late to recover. Institutional legitimacy, once shattered, can't be easily rebuilt. The Alito-Trump call isn't just a scandal – it's a harbinger of the chaos to come.