The Trumpist justices on the Supreme Court had a very serious problem: They needed to keep their guy out of prison for trying to overthrow the government. The right-wing justices had to do this while still attempting to maintain at least a pretense of having ruled on the basis of the law and the Constitution rather than mere partisan instincts.

So they settled on what they thought was a very clever solution: They would grant the presidency the near-unlimited immunity Donald Trump was asking for, while writing the decision so as to keep the power to decide which presidential acts would be “official” and immune to criminal prosecution, and which would be “unofficial” and therefore not. The president is immune, but only when the justices say he is. The president might seem like a king, but the justices can withhold the crown.

The right-wing justices, in rewriting of the Constitution in Trump’s image, have clearly diverged from the intentions of the founders. In “Federalist No. 69,” Alexander Hamilton wrote that former presidents would “be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Expanding on his point, Hamilton wrote, “The person of the king of Great Britain is sacred and inviolable; there is no constitutional tribunal to which he is amenable; no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution.” The Roberts Court turned the office of the presidency the Founders made into the kind of monarchical office they rebelled against.

The justices, less independent arbiters than the shock troops of the conservative movement, wanted Trump to be immune to prosecution, and so they conjured a rationale for doing so, with a narrow window of legal accountability that only they have the right to determine. But that window might as well be barred from the inside: What Jackson’s story shows is that the feeble, arbitrary restraints the justices put into their own grant of royal immunity to Trump will not withstand any president with the capacity to violate them. Unfortunately, the day a rogue president shows the Supreme Court just how powerless it really is, it will not be the justices who suffer most for their folly.