Is Rule Of Law Still All That Important To Americans... In the 21st Century?

You probably already know this— unless you’re a MAGAt here to spy on DWT— but the rule of law, as a concept and a practice, is the bedrock of any just and functioning society. Think about that for 10 seconds. It means that laws— not the whims of powerful individuals— govern a nation, and that those laws apply equally to everyone, no matter how rich, influential or connected they may be. You have probably already guessed from that description, that the U.S. is losing it. That's a damned shame because this principle is what stands between democracy and despotism. Without it, the powerful are free to bend the system to their will, to punish enemies and protect allies with impunity, the way the Republican Party is already allowing Trump to do. With rule of law, we have at least a fighting chance to hold the powerful accountable, to insist that our rights are not just suggestions but enforceable guarantees. 

Rule of law brings predictability and stability— citizens and businesses alike can plan their lives with the confidence that basic norms and legal protections won’t shift overnight. It builds public trust because it ensures that justice isn’t reserved for the highest bidder or the most well-connected operator. And crucially, it protects the very rights— speech, assembly, protest— that make resistance and reform possible. A society without rule of law is not just unjust; it’s unstable, dangerous, and ripe for tyranny. When the law is no longer a shield for the weak but a weapon wielded by the powerful, the door swings open to authoritarianism. That’s the real danger we face when we allow power to go unchecked, institutions to be weakened, or courts to be captured. Rule of law isn't some abstract ideal— it's the firewall between freedom and fascism.

And it wasn’t some afterthought or accidental feature of the American experiment— it was baked into the foundation from the start, because the founders knew exactly what it meant to live under arbitrary power. Many of them had watched, in real time, as the British monarchy wielded authority without accountability: imposing taxes without representation, quartering soldiers in private homes, arresting dissidents without fair trial. That experience of imperial overreach wasn’t just a political grievance— it was a lesson in what happens when law serves rulers instead of the people. Drawing on English legal traditions like the Magna Carta, the Enlightenment writings of Locke and Montesquieu and the white, male, propertied colonists’ own experience with some degree of local self-governance, the founders tried to design a system that would restrain power with law. They created a constitutional framework meant to limit government, divide authority, and place legal boundaries around every branch. Courts were established not to serve the executive, but to act as a check on it. Rights weren’t granted by the government— they were recognized as pre-existing, and made legally enforceable through the Bill of Rights. The entire American legal system, flawed as it has always been in practice, was at least aspirationally built on the idea that no one— not the president, not Congress, not the courts— is above the law. That principle is not just a legal technicality. It’s the skeletal structure of a free society.

What we’re seeing now is how the entire American project, flawed as it has always been, was built on the idea that law should restrain power— not serve it. That’s what makes the Trump era, and the movement that surrounds him, so profoundly dangerous. Trump isn’t just a garden variety corrupt politician or a narcissistic demagogue— he’s an open enemy of the rule of law. He has made it clear, time and again, that he sees laws as tools for punishing his enemies and protecting himself. Whether it’s calling for the prosecution of political opponents, defying court orders, or pressuring DOJ officials to overturn an election, Trump has consistently treated legal norms as inconveniences to be bulldozed. His rhetoric is authoritarian. His actions are authoritarian. He and his allies have talked openly about weaponizing the justice system, purging civil servants, pardoning insurrectionists and using the presidency as a shield from prosecution— and now they’re putting much of that into operation— a roadmap to autocracy. The rule of law was never guaranteed. It was built brick by brick, sometimes painfully and imperfectly, and it can be dismantled just as deliberately— and far more rapidly. Trump doesn’t just threaten our national policies. He threatens the legal foundation that holds this country together. And once that foundation cracks, history tells us how fast the collapse can come.

And that brings us right to eminent conservative jurist J. Michael Luttig’s essay for The Atlantic this week, The End Of Rule Of Law In America. He assumes Trump has forgotten what the Revolutionary War was all about. I doubt Trump ever had the slightest inkling what it was about. Securing their independence from the British monarchy may have been step one “but to establish a government of laws, not of men, so that they and future generations of Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king” is way too abstract for an ignoramus like Trump. Luttig’s premise is that Trump neither respects the rule of law nor seeks to even understand it.

Thus far, Trump’s presidency has been a reign of lawless aggression by a tyrannical wannabe king, a rampage of presidential lawlessness in which Trump has proudly wielded the powers of the office and the federal government to persecute his enemies, while at the same time pardoning, glorifying, and favoring his political allies and friends— among them those who attacked the U.S. Capitol during the insurrection that Trump fomented on January 6, 2021. The president’s utter contempt for the Constitution and laws of the United States has been on spectacular display since Inauguration Day.

For the almost 250 years since the founding of this nation, America has been the beacon of freedom to the world because of its democracy and rule of law. Our system of checks and balances has been strained before, but democracy— government by the people— and the rule of law have always won the day. Until now, that is. America will never again be that same beacon to the world, because the president of the United States has subverted America’s democracy and corrupted its rule of law.

Until Trump exits public life altogether, it cannot be said either that America is a thriving democracy or that it has a government “of laws, not of men.”

History has already documented Trump’s subversion of America’s democracy through his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election, his emphatic and steadfast repudiation of the fact that he tried to steal the presidency from the American people, and his perverted denial that January 6 was one of the darkest days in American history.

Now, in the first few months of his second administration, Trump has proved himself an existential threat to the rule of law in America.

When Trump again assumed the presidency in January, he— like every American president before him— swore an oath to faithfully execute the laws of this nation, as commanded by the Constitution. In the short time since, Trump hasn’t just refused to faithfully execute the laws; he has angrily defied the Constitution and laws of the United States. In America, where no man is above the law, Trump has shown the nation that he believes he is the law, even proclaiming on social media soon after assuming office that “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

From the moment he entered the White House on January 20, 2025, Trump has waged war against the rule of law. He not only instigated a worldwide economic crisis with his hotheaded, unlawful tariffs leveled against our global trading partners and our enemies alike; he deliberately provoked a constitutional crisis with his frontal assault on the federal judiciary, the third and co-equal branch of government and guardian of the rule of law— grabbing more and more power for nothing but power’s sake.

On his first day back, foreshadowing his all-out assault on the rule of law, Trump pardoned or commuted the sentences of 1,200 January 6 rioters. Soon, he began to persecute his political enemies— of whom there are now countless numbers— and to fire the prosecutors for the United States who attempted to hold him accountable for the grave crimes against the Constitution that he committed after losing the 2020 election.

Also within those first 100 days, the FBI arrested the Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan in her Milwaukee courthouse on federal criminal charges that she was “obstructing or impeding a proceeding before a department or agency of the United States” and “concealing an individual to prevent his discovery and arrest,” because she invited an undocumented immigrant appearing before her on misdemeanor charges to exit her courtroom by way of the jury door rather than the front door of the courtroom. The evidence, at least as revealed so far, does not come close to supporting these charges.

The arrest and prosecution of judges on such specious charges is where rule by law ends and tyranny begins. The independent judiciary is the only constraint of law on a president. It is the last obstacle to a president with designs on tyrannical rule.

Appearing on Fox News, the attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, defended the evidently unlawful arrest: “What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me,” she said. The judges “are deranged, is all I can think of. I think some of these judges think that they are beyond and above the law. They are not, and we are sending a very strong message today if you are harboring a fugitive … we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you.”

No, Ms. Bondi, our judges do not think they are above the law, and no, judges are not deranged. They are simply upholding their oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States— the same oath you took.

It is now entirely foreseeable that arrests of judges will occur in the federal courts across the country as well. To read the criminal complaint and related FBI affidavit that led to Judge Dugan’s arrest is to understand at once that neither the state courts nor the federal courts could ever hope to administer justice if the spectacle that took place in Judge Dugan’s courthouse on April 18 was to occur in state and federal courthouses across the country.

It’s impossible to imagine that the federal government could ever prove the charges against Judge Dugan. But that was not the point of the FBI’s arrest.

…The rule-of-law casualties of these presidentially provoked national crises are mounting by the day. America cannot withstand three-and-a-half more years of this president if his first few months are a harbinger of what lies ahead.

Trump has spoiled for this war against the federal judiciary, the Constitution, and the rule of law since January 6, 2021. He has repeatedly vowed to exact retribution against America’s justice system for what he falsely maintains was the partisan “weaponization” of the federal government against him.

No one other than Trump and his most sycophantic supporters believes that the government’s attempts to hold him and others accountable for their actions that day amount to “weaponization.” With the world as witness, Trump attempted to thwart the peaceful transfer of power— committing perhaps the gravest constitutional crime that a president could ever commit. The United States had no choice but to prosecute him for those crimes, lest he be allowed to make a mockery of the Constitution of the United States.

It is Trump who is actually weaponizing the federal government against both his political enemies and countless other American citizens today.

… As Trump continues to ravage and usurp the constitutional powers of the Congress of the United States, his adoring Republican Congress has predictably been conspicuously absent.

Only the Supreme Court is left now to rein in this president’s lawlessness, and although the Court is making some limited efforts in that direction, it is already apparent that not even that institution can stop Donald Trump. He will ignore even the Supreme Court whenever he wants.

As Trump turns the federal government of the United States against Americans and America itself, the bill of particulars against him is already longer than the Declaration of Independence’s bill of particulars against King George III and the British empire.

… Trump continues to lambast the federal courts for enforcing the Constitution, pronouncing that he should be able to deport all undocumented immigrants without any trial to determine whether their deportation would be in violation of the Constitution. “I hope we get cooperation from the courts, because you know we have thousands of people that are ready to go out, and you can’t have a trial for all of these people,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “It wasn’t meant. The system wasn’t meant. And we don’t think there’s anything that says that.”

“We’re getting them out, and a judge can’t say, ‘No, you have to have a trial. The trial is going to take two years,’” Trump went on. “We’re going to have a very dangerous country if we’re not allowed to do what we’re entitled to do.”

He couldn’t be more wrong. The system actually was “meant” to provide due process, and it is of course the Constitution of the United States that says so. It is for that reason that judges can indeed say, “You have to have a trial,” and presidents are supposed to listen. That’s what rule by law, not by men, means.

…Knowingly or not, Trump has staked much of his presidency on the so-called unitary executive theory, which would give him absolute control over these institutions and the entire federal government, including the independent departments and agencies… Consonant with this understanding that Trump’s executive order gutting much of the federal government is unconstitutional and otherwise in circumvention of the laws preventing a president from unilaterally reorganizing the federal government, last Friday a federal court ruled that Trump may broadly restructure the federal government in the way he wishes only if Congress authorizes him to do so.

The judge quoted from the earlier landmark case, Youngstown Sheet & Tube Company v. Sawyer: “In the framework of our Constitution, the President’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker. The Constitution limits his functions in the lawmaking process to the recommending of laws he thinks wise and the vetoing of laws he thinks bad. And the Constitution is neither silent nor equivocal about who shall make laws which the President is to execute.”

The court said that the plaintiffs challenging Trump’s executive order and the Office of Management and Budget and DOGE’s implementation of that order are likely to succeed on their claims that Trump’s executive order is beyond his powers and authority, as he “has neither constitutional nor, at this time, statutory authority to reorganize the executive branch,” and temporarily blocked implementation of Trump’s order until further proceedings.

Perhaps most worrying of all is Trump’s unlawful assertion of power over federal elections, power that is constitutionally committed to the states in the first instance and reserved to Congress in the second. Where he has no authority at all, Trump has claimed extraordinary unilateral authority to regulate federal elections, usurping the powers of not only the 50 states but also Congress. Trump’s March 25 executive order flips the constitutional structure on its head.

The federal courts will never allow this unconstitutional power grab. To give the president any power over federal elections would allow a president to change election rules to serve his self-interest and his party. Indeed, the very first federal court to address the matter temporarily blocked key parts of the order in an opinion that is destined to be upheld on appeal. “Our Constitution entrusts Congress and the States— not the President— with the authority to regulate federal elections,” the federal judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote. 

… The 47th president of the United States may wish he were a king. But in America, the law is king, not the president.

Donald Trump may wish he could dictate his unconscionable global tariffs; dispense with due process and deport whomever he pleases, citizen and not; and vanish away huge swaths of the federal government without check or rebuke. He may wish he did not have to contend with the First and Fourteenth Amendments, the free press, or the Constitution’s birthright-citizenship guarantee. He may wish he could ignore the Constitution’s elections clauses and run America’s elections from the White House. And he may wish he could intimidate the nation’s lawyers and law firms from challenging his abuse of power and commandeer them to do his personal bidding.

But it is these constitutional obstacles to a tyrannical president that have made America the greatest nation on Earth for almost 250 years, not the fallen America that Trump delusionally thinks he’s going to make great again tomorrow.

After these first three tyrannical, lawless months of this presidency, surely Americans can understand now that Donald Trump is going to continue to decimate America for the next three-plus years. He will continue his assault on America, its democracy, and rule of law until the American people finally rise up and say, “No more.”

From across the ages, Frederick Douglass is crying out that we Americans never forget: “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”