It’s not the least bit surprising that New York Times editorial board member Jesse Wegman hates, and I mean really hates, the presidential immunity decision of Trump v. US. Consequently, it’s not the least bit surprising that Jesse takes Chief Justice John Roberts to task for the line in the opinion dismissing the fears of the dissenters.

In his majority opinion in the case about presidential immunity, Chief Justice John Roberts mocked the three liberal dissenters for striking “a tone of chilling doom that is wholly disproportionate to what the court actually does today.” (Reality check: The immunity ruling — which gave presidents carte blanche to break most criminal laws when carrying out their official duties — is not grounded in any clause of the Constitution. It went far beyond what even the most pessimistic court observers expected; the dissenters, if anything, responded with restraint.)

Whether that criticism of the decision is warranted remains to be seen. That it’s the common view of progressive academics hardly establishes the “reality” Jesse is checking, even if many have criticized aspects of the decision (such as the preclusion of immune functions as evidence for non-immune crimes or consideration of malevolent intent) while recognizing that a president must have the ability to fulfill the functions of office without fear of prosecution by his opposition.

The gist of Jesse’s grievance is that by addressing the dissent’s fears, “mocking” as he calls it, the Court is “gaslighting” the public.

Behavior like this has a name: gaslighting, a form of psychological manipulation that involves making people doubt their own, accurate perception of reality. If the term has gotten a workout in recent years, that’s because a lot of people are engaging in it. The right-wing justices have become masters of the form, telling the American people again and again not to believe what they see with their own eyes.

And Jesse isn’t just saying this because he hates the decisions. He has a legal academic to back up his claim.

“The court is trying to distance itself from the monsters it created,” Mary Anne Franks, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of “The Cult of the Constitution,” told me. “They’re trying to say, ‘We don’t know where you got these crazy ideas from!’ But of course we do know where they got them from.”

Yes, the very same Mary Anne Franks who contends that nobody she despises deserves constitutional rights, and those who would defend the free speech of those whom Franks deems unworthy are constitutional “cultists.”

“People are going to die, and have died, because of their decisions,” Ms. Franks at George Washington University said. She offered a way of thinking about the latest Supreme Court term, which, in addition to some rulings in favor of Donald Trump, included a decision upholding an Oregon city’s ban on homeless people sleeping outdoors.

First of all, it’s not “Ms.,” Jesse. It’s “doctor,” as Franks demands of misogynistic men who fail to use the correct honorific to bolster her credentials. Check your privilege, Jesse. But what in the world does the Grants Pass camping ordinance decision have to do with presidential immunity?

“You could read this term with the framework of: Who seems vulnerable, who seems powerful?” she said. “Trump is vulnerable; homeless people are not. It’s this strange inverted world.”

Ms. Franks calls it “victim-claiming” — when privileged, powerful people take on the mantle of victimhood, displacing genuine victims, whether pregnant women without treatment or homeless people without a bed. The effect, she said, is to “replace actual victimhood with a fantasy of victimhood.”

While no rational academic would conflate decisions having utterly no substantive connection, there’s always Mary Anne Franks to come up with some cute phrase like “victim-claiming” to manufacture out of whole cloth some nefarious framework through which wholly unrelated things can be morphed into some evil conspiracy of replacing “actual victimhood with a fantasy of victimhood.” Or, you know, they are both subject to criticism in their own right, but otherwise have nothing to do with one another except in someone’s fertile if twisted imagination.

Jesse’s purpose is to condemn “gaslighting,” which isn’t a bad purpose as a general concept. The problem here, however, is who is gaslighting whom? He should have given some serious consideration as to why he was constrained to rely on someone as lacking in credibility as Mary Anne if he didn’t want to find himself staring in the mirror.