President Donald Trump is at war with the rule of law in the United States. His assault is already the most hostile and sustained political attack on America’s legal and law-enforcement institutions since the Civil War. It is a war he declared before he began his first term, and one he pursued with tenacity once in office. It even had its own call to arms on January 6, 2021, or so many of his supporters believed. Exiled temporarily from the White House, Trump spent four years vowing to continue this war if he were reelected, and he has made good on that promise, targeting the foundations of almost every institution of law and justice within his reach as the chief executive.
As the former federal judge J. Michael Luttig, a well-known conservative jurist, said recently, Trump has “launched a full-frontal assault on the Constitution, the rule of law, our system of justice, and the entire legal profession.”
Trump has made great progress in this offensive in only a matter of weeks. Day by day, he has shown Americans what unraveling the rule of law actually looks like: He has issued trollish and almost certainly unconstitutional executive orders, unleashed verbal fusillades against jurists (as well as various law-enforcement officials and prosecutors), and forced government lawyers to stand tongue-tied as they struggled to answer simple questions from judges. He has sent his minions, including the vice president of the United States, out in public to argue that a president has the right to ignore court orders, making an eventual showdown with the federal bench practically inevitable.
Worse, Trump supporters have stepped up physical threats and various other forms of harassment against judges and their families. As The New York Times editorialized this weekend, the president is encouraging “a campaign of menace” against jurists, leading his allies to “then try to dehumanize the judges with whom they disagree and make them fear for their safety.”
Trump has used this authoritarian approach, undergirded by his legendary shamelessness, to break through every line of constitutional and moral defense—impeachment, elections, even the humiliation of arrest and conviction—that would otherwise restrain a rogue president (or, for that matter, any ordinary American felon). The center is not holding, and the flanks are collapsing. Congress is fleeing the field. The voters, many of whom long ago became inured to warnings about Trump’s contempt for the law, may be anxious about his behavior, but millions are sticking with him.
The president and his lieutenants still face one more set of defenses obstructing their march: the courts. If he can overcome the federal judicial system, then America’s worst modern constitutional confrontation will be over and Trump will be its victor.
Trump’s intentions in this barrage against the rule of law are clear, especially after he decided to go to the Great Hall of the Department of Justice earlier this month and shout them triumphantly from behind the presidential seal. He celebrated his pardons of insurrectionists and seditionists. He gloated about stripping loyal citizens of their security clearances. He reeled through the names of Americans whom he called “thugs” and “bad people, really bad people,” who “tried to turn America into a corrupt Communist and Third World country.” He unloaded a series of stories and accusations, several of them exaggerations or outright lies. Trump, for example, referred to the “Biden crime family” and said that Joe Biden was not prosecuted because he was mentally incompetent; he claimed that the previous administration intentionally “imported” murderers and other criminals to America; he referred (yet again) to the duly convicted January 6 insurrectionists as “hostages” and claimed that the FBI had sent SWAT teams in after harmless grandmothers.
But the president, who railed on for an hour, wasn’t content merely to criticize his opponents and tear up their clearance paperwork. Instead, he left no doubt in his belief that the machinery of government is now his to be used against his enemies:
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. It’s going to be legendary. It’s going to also be legendary for the people that are able to seek it out and bring justice. We will restore the scales of justice in America, and we will ensure that such abuses never happen again in our country.
This was not a policy statement or even a political speech. It was Trump’s plan of attack against the rights of his fellow Americans and the rule of law itself.
Trump telegraphed these moves far in advance. The president has long loathed any institution that threatens him or his interests, and since entering politics, he has engaged in constant public harangues against the judicial system and individual judges. These propagandistic assaults are a way of acclimating the public to the idea that judges are robed political saboteurs and their decisions and orders are little more than partisan blather—and that therefore their rulings may be ignored or defied at will.
To understand the breadth of Trump’s attack, consider the groundwork he and his supporters have laid down for years that have led to this perilous moment.
In the lead-up to the 2016 elections, for example, Trump claimed that the federal judge Gonzalo Curiel, who was presiding over a civil case involving the now-defunct Trump University, could not be impartial because he was of Mexican extraction. (Curiel was born in Indiana, but to Trump, apparently, Mexican heritage means “Mexican.”) Trump, however, wasn’t merely venting some of his habitual racism. The president was a poor businessman, but he is an excellent marketer, and he was expertly selling the idea to the American public that judges, particularly those from minority communities, cannot possibly be impartial, especially when the defendant is one Donald J. Trump.
Years later, Trump would do the same to Judge Juan Merchan, who was overseeing Trump’s felony trial in New York City. This time, however, Trump expanded his attacks to the judge’s family, claiming in 2024 that Merchan’s daughter was a “Rabid Trump Hater” and therefore Merchan was clearly biased. One of Trump’s former White House lawyers, Ty Cobb, explained Trump’s aims in going after Merchan and his family. “It’s clearly strategic,” he told Politico. “His attacks are designed around his traditional approach to delegitimizing the proceedings.” (After Trump’s speech at DOJ’s Great Hall, Cobb said the president “danced on the grave” of the department’s independence.)
Trump has also sought to impugn entire courts, particularly the venues where he’s lost cases. He has a special animus for the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most liberal federal courts. When he lost a case there in 2018 over his immigration policies, Trump reportedly turned to Kirstjen Nielsen, then his secretary of Homeland Security, and said, referring to the court: “Let’s just cancel it.” According to a book by the journalists Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, he told Nielsen to write a bill, if necessary, to “get rid of the fucking judges” and send it off to the then-GOP-controlled Congress.
Last week, Trump set his sights on another federal judge, James Boasberg. When Boasberg ordered a halt to some of the administration’s deportation flights, Trump called him “a Radical Left Lunatic”—one of his favorite insults—and “a troublemaker and agitator who was sadly appointed by Barack Hussein Obama.” (Although Obama elevated Boasberg to the federal district court, the judge was first appointed to the D.C. superior court by George W. Bush.) Trump soon called for Boasberg to be impeached, prompting an unusual public comment from Chief Justice John Roberts, who said that “impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.”
When asked about Roberts’s rebuke, Trump responded with the non sequitur that Roberts did not mention Trump by name, as if that rendered the chief justice’s concerns irrelevant.
In his first term, Trump had to content himself with barking at judges and adjusting to the losses in court. But he and the people around him seem to have learned important lessons from their previous years in the White House. Within days of the election, the incoming administration began planning to seize the institutions capable of exercising legal and physical force against citizens—the Russians call them “the power ministries”—such as the Defense Department, the national-intelligence agencies, the Justice Department, and the FBI.
Presidents, of course, have every right to their Cabinet nominees, but Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel are not typical appointees. All of them, despite some careful circumlocutions and evasions during their confirmation hearings, obviously see their first duty as loyalty to Trump, not to the Constitution.
The FBI is an especially worrisome case. Kash Patel, the new director, is not only a conspiracy theorist but, as my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro wrote last year, even some of his colleagues in Trump’s orbit consider him dangerous precisely because he appears to have no core political beliefs beyond pleasing the president. Patel, of course, affirmed at his hearing that he would preserve the independence of the FBI. Instead, as The Wall Street Journal reported, Patel immediately “cleared out all civil-service staff in the leadership suites and replaced them with political associates,” and relocated 1,500 FBI employees out of Washington without money to pay for their moves. He also promised to appoint a deputy from the FBI’s experienced ranks; within days of this vow, however, he welcomed as his new deputy director Dan Bongino, a rant-prone podcaster (and fellow conspiracy theorist) with no FBI experience. Patel called Bongino a “cop’s cop.”
Bondi, for her part, is presiding over an ongoing purge of the Justice Department. Many of these firings, a senior career Justice Department official told NBC News anonymously because of fear of retaliation, “seem designed to make room for someone who is a political loyalist, someone who will do the White House’s bidding, in an effort to reshape the department into something that it has never been before.” She has also engaged in openly partisan appearances in the media, continuing the tradition among Trump appointees of thumbing their noses at the Hatch Act, the law that prohibits government employees from using their office for political activity.
And as if to underscore the administration’s militant, almost martial sense of defiance, a Trump adviser recently raised the previously unthinkable possibility that Trump could just defy the courts and then dare them to see who has more power. Trump’s leverage, the unnamed adviser told Rolling Stone, rests in his command of the armed forces: “Are they”—meaning federal judges—“going to come and arrest him?”
The dismantling of America’s constitutional government is under way. The United States in 2025 no longer has an independently led national law-enforcement organization. It no longer has a Department of Justice whose leadership is following the mission to serve the American nation and its Constitution. The immense power of the Defense Department is in the hands of a talk-show culture warrior who intends to purge the officer corps of generals and admirals suspected of ideological unreliability. The Congress is dominated by men and women who either agree with this authoritarian project or are too scared to oppose it. The judges now stand alone—but their courage may not be enough to stop Trump.
