“It is far from obvious that President Trump, proceeding in his individual capacity, carries the mantle of the Office of the President in this case,” Judge Tatel wrote. He added that the House committee’s request “implicates no material subject to a recognized legal privilege or an asserted property interest.”

Indeed, while asserting what his lawyers call “temporary absolute president immunity,” President Trump is not raising a claim of executive privilege in any of the cases. That’s not to say his argument is not a far-reaching one. The “question presented” in Trump v. Vance, the case in which he is seeking to quash the Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance’s subpoena to the Mazars accounting firm, shows how the president is reaching for the moon in a case that Chief Judge Robert Katzmann of the Second Circuit anchored solidly to the ground, as explained below.

As Supreme Court practitioners know, the “question presented,” which appears by itself on the first page of any Supreme Court petition, is perhaps the most important part of the petition. It sets the tone, frames the argument and contains the first words the justices and their law clerks will read.

This is the “question presented” offered by the president’s lawyers in their petition in Trump v. Vance: “Whether this subpoena violates Article II and the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.” (The Constitution’s Article II establishes the presidency, while the Supremacy Clause in Article VI gives federal law precedence over state law where the two conflict.)

By contrast — a contrast as extreme as any I can recall — this is how the district attorney presents the question in his brief opposing Supreme Court review: “Whether presidential immunity bars the enforcement of a state grand jury subpoena directing a third party to produce material which pertains to the president’s unofficial and nonprivileged conduct.”

That careful framing, rather than the president’s, reflects what Chief Judge Katzmann actually wrote:

“We have no occasion to decide today the precise contours and limitations of presidential immunity from prosecution, and we express no opinion on the applicability of any such immunity under circumstances not presented here. Instead, after reviewing historical and legal precedent, we conclude only that presidential immunity does not bar the enforcement of a state grand jury subpoena directing a third party to produce nonprivileged material, even when the subject matter under investigation pertains to the president.”

And this is the opinion that the president’s Supreme Court petition calls “irreconcilable with our constitutional design.”

I’ve quoted from each of the three opinions for a reason: As the weeks go by, the country will be subjected to gaslighting from the White House so intense that it won’t be easy even for those who have actually read the full opinions to hold on to the knowledge of how carefully circumscribed they are. The president’s petitions are just the opening salvo in a battle for the justices’ votes, of course, but also for the public’s understanding of both how little and how much is at stake. (A taste of things to come is this hyperbolic sentence from the president’s petition in the D.C. Circuit’s Mazars case: “At its core, this controversy is about whether — and to what degree — Congress can exercise dominion and control over the Office of the President.”)