We’re Well Past Alarm Bells
The Trump administration is mocking court orders, laying the groundwork for political retribution, and declaring open war on the rule of law.
The wannabe autocrats don’t take a weekend off, huh? Let’s get into it. Happy Monday.
The Slippery Slope of Lawlessness
by William Kristol
This past Saturday afternoon I should have been outside enjoying a nice spring day here in the D.C area. I could even have been getting some exercise—though on that front I increasingly have Churchill’s view: “Whenever I feel the need to take some exercise, I lie down until the feeling goes away.”
In any case, I was inside, at my desk, listening on my computer to an emergency hearing presided over by the chief judge of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia, Jeb Boasberg. Plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, were seeking a temporary restraining order halting the deportation of alleged Venezuelan gang members already in custody in the United States who were being sent to a prison in El Salvador with no opportunity for a hearing or any requirement that evidence be presented.
The lawyer for the government defended its actions. He cited the Alien Enemies Act, which President Trump had just invoked for only the fourth time in U.S. history, and for the first time when we were not at war. He claimed the president has something like an uncheckable and unreviewable “war power” under Article II of the Constitution. He also argued that being sent to an El Salvadoran prison wouldn’t constitute “irreparable harm,” the standard a temporary restraining order has to meet.
Judge Boasberg found for the plaintiffs and imposed a temporary restraining order on the government.
This, I thought as I listened, was the rule of law in practice. The hearing was sober and orderly and deliberate, with little in the way of emotion or soaring rhetoric. I found it not merely impressive but oddly moving. I felt a sense of pride and gratitude that we live in a country with a well-established rule of law—something rare in human history.
It was a reminder of why the rule of law—why our rule of law, the edifice we’ve built up over two and a half centuries—is something to be respected, something to be honored. I’d even go so far as to say that it’s something to be cherished.
In Federalist No. 51, defending the separation of powers and its pitting of ambition against ambition and its connecting the interest of office-holders with the constitutional rights of the place, James Madison explained:
It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
We’re not angels. And rule by angels isn’t available to us. To avoid anarchy, we need a government that can control our potentially violent passions. And we need the rule of law and its institutional buttresses like the separation of powers to enable us to live in freedom, not despotism.
This fundamental feature of a free government is what the Trump administration is challenging. One sees this when Attorney General Pam Bondi, speaking at the Department of Justice, pledges fealty to the president, saying Justice Department lawyers should be proud “to work at the personal direction of Donald Trump,” and that “we will never stop fighting for him.” And of course one sees the challenge in a host of actions by the Trump administration, in areas ranging from immigration to abrogating legal protections for civil servants to trampling on Congress’s power to appropriate funds and to direct their spending.
The day before Judge Boasberg’s hearing, Vice President JD Vance was interviewed by Laura Ingraham on Fox News. Vance was discoursing on Germany, a country about which he has strong opinions, as evidenced by his endorsement of the extremist Alternative für Deutschland before last month’s German elections.
In the interview, Vance claimed that “Europe is on the brink of civilizational suicide,” in large part because of its failure to control its borders. “If Germany takes in millions more incompatible migrants, it’ll destroy itself. America can’t save it.”
Of course, Germany did destroy itself almost a century ago. It almost destroyed civilization itself until America stepped in to help save it. That didn’t happen because Germany took in too many migrants. It happened because the German people fell for arguments uncomfortably close to Vance’s. Those were arguments that derided the very concept of the rule of law, a derision that was defended in part by warnings about immigrants and foreign blood.
The Trump White House did not abide by Boasberg’s order to turn the planes around. It claims the planes were over international waters and, incorrectly, thus no longer subject to his jurisdiction. But even if there was no direct violation of the rule of law, the next day featured several vocal demonstrations of contempt of it. The Trump administration seems aggrieved by the idea they’d be restricted in any way by any judge. It feels like a matter of time before they simply, brazenly, refuse to be.
One trusts that the United States isn’t going to go the way of Germany in the last century. But the slope toward lawlessness is a slippery one, and we have an administration that is eagerly leading us down it. There are still footholds we can grab onto in order to arrest the precipitous decline that lies ahead. But we are already partway down the hill, and the pace of decline is accelerating.
Trump Declares Biden Pardons Void
by Andrew Egger
Used to be you’d see Highly Serious People arguing that Donald Trump was simply too goofy, undisciplined, and unserious to present any true authoritarian threat to the nation. Unfortunately, as we’ve had plenty of cause to learn by now, fascism is fascism, even in clown paint.
Early this morning, Donald Trump declared that Joe Biden’s preemptive pardons of Trump’s political enemies, especially the members of the former House January 6th Committee, are “VOID, VACANT, AND OF NO FURTHER FORCE OR EFFECT,” because, he argued, they had been signed with an autopen:
In other words, Joe Biden did not sign them but, more importantly, he did not know anything about them! The necessary Pardoning Documents were not explained to, or approved by, Biden. He knew nothing about them, and the people that did may have committed a crime. Therefore, those on the Unselect Committee, who destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained during their two year Witch Hunt of me, and many other innocent people, should fully understand that they are subject to Investigation at the highest level. The fact is, they were probably responsible for the Documents that were signed on their behalf without the knowledge or consent of the Worst President in the History of our Country, Crooked Joe Biden!
The declaration was impressive in its spectacular absurdity, wedging together blithering nonsense so tightly it could function as performance art—a turducken of lunatic conspiracy theories.
Occasional use of autopen for official presidential acts is a longstanding practice, even for signing legislation; decades-old Justice Department guidance states that the president “need not personally perform the physical act of affixing his signature” to a bill, but may direct an aide to “affix the President’s signature” to a bill, “for example by autopen.” The pardons of Liz Cheney, Bennie Thompson, Anthony Fauci, and others were major national news; the idea they could have been carried out behind Biden’s back and without his knowledge is asinine. The idea that the January 6th Committee destroyed evidence—let alone “destroyed and deleted ALL evidence obtained”—has long been proven a ridiculous canard. The pièce de résistance is the cuckoo claim that those pardoned had probably deviously furnished the documents for their own phony pardons.
It’s as silly a thing, in other words, as Trump has ever written. It’s also a naked, frontal assault on the rule of law.
Two days before his post, Trump visited the Department of Justice to deliver a speech promising a “far-reaching investigation” into “the corruption of our system.” “We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government, we will expose—and very much expose—their egregious crimes and severe misconduct, of which was, levels, you’ve never seen anything like it.” He declared himself the nation’s “chief law enforcement officer”—a title traditionally given to the attorney general—and said he would “insist upon and demand full accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred.”
On the heels of that speech, today’s Truth Social outburst was a declaration of war. Trump may want to turn federal law enforcement into his personal weapon to wield against his enemies however he likes. But even that wouldn’t scratch the itch if certain hated enemies—Liz Cheney and Bennie Thompson in particular—remained beyond his grasp. Better to annihilate the Constitution than to let even one notable Trump foe fail to pay.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Trump Said He Was Targeting Criminals in Migrant Sweeps . . . But that’s not what’s happening. American Immigration Council Senior Fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick joins Bill Kristol for Bulwark on Sunday to discuss the first 60 days of Trump’s immigration policy.
Chuck Schumer Is Facing a Biden Moment . . . Lauren Egan, in The Opposition, on Chuck Schumer’s pitchfork challenge: The problem wasn’t just the sellout, it was the sense that he lacked vigor.
Putin’s Phantom Peace . . . Cathy Young asks: Will Trump help him bully Ukraine into surrender?
Trump’s Divisive Edict . . . In pushing English as the official language, the president rejects our nation’s multilingual birthright for a mess of nativist pottage, argues Nancy Clair.
Quick Hits
BOMBS AWAY: It was a weekend of major escalation in Yemen. The United States on Saturday launched a series of airstrikes against the Houthis, the Iran-backed rebel group that since 2023 has been periodically firing on U.S. military vessels and commercial ships in the Red Sea. And the Trump administration warned: There’s a lot more coming.
“To all Houthi terrorists, YOUR TIME IS UP, AND YOUR ATTACKS MUST STOP, STARTING TODAY,” Trump warned. “IF THEY DON’T, HELL WILL RAIN DOWN UPON YOU LIKE NOTHING YOU HAVE EVER SEEN BEFORE!”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio echoed the same sentiment—somewhat more diplomatically—in a Sunday CBS interview: “We’re not going to have these people controlling which ships can go through and which ones cannot.”
Islamist sects famously like being told what to do. On Sunday, the Houthis claimed to have launched an attack on the aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman in the Red Sea, although that attack had not been independently confirmed.
ONE MAN’S OPINION: Treasury Secretary Steve Bessent must have drawn the short straw this weekend, because after a week of cratering stocks, remarkable trade-war whipsawing, and sagging approval for Trump’s handling of the economy, he was the mouthpiece the administration trotted out for NBC News’s Meet the Press. His take: No worries, gang! It’s all fine!
That sinking consumer confidence? Biden’s fault: “Obviously, they are traumatized from what’s happened with this affordability crisis that was brought on by the previous administration.”
Those crashing markets? Actually healthy: “What’s not healthy,” in fact, “is straight-up, that is, euphoric markets. That’s how you get a financial crisis.”
Those rising prices? What are you, some kind of cheap consumerist? “What I’m saying is the American dream is not, ‘Let them eat flat screens.’”
Everything will be peachy, Bessent insisted, as soon as Trump succeeds in reining in America’s gigantic budget deficits. “It would have been very easy for us to come in, run these reckless policies that have been happening before,” he said. “We’ve got these large government deficits, 6.7 percent of GDP. . . . We are bringing those down in a responsible way.”
Quick reminder: The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget estimated last year that Trump’s campaign promises would add between $1.6 trillion and $15.5 trillion in additional debt over baseline to the national debt over the next decade. Oddly, Bessent did not discuss this.
THE DEMOCRATS’ CIVIL WAR IN ONE PICTURE:
Cheap Shots
Has anyone close to Tucker Carlson checked in on him recently?
Others may disagree with me on this, but there is no way in Hell that I will ever forgive the 49.8% of the electorate that chose this course. They were repeatedly warned about what Trump 2.0 would be like, and they pulled the trigger for it anyway. Never Trump may have lost the election, but that doesn't mean we were wrong.
"...fascism is fascism, even in clown paint.." GREATEST LINE even, Andrew. I love it.