By David Frum
Monday, August 25, 2025
After Donald Trump left the presidency in 2021, he was
indicted for retaining dozens of government documents, including some
containing nuclear
secrets. He was convicted
on 34 counts of falsifying business records. His company was convicted
of criminal tax fraud.
When Trump returned to the presidency this year, he
sought payback by accusing others of the crimes for which he’d been indicted or
convicted. The political ally Trump appointed to head federal housing
programs—Bill Pulte, heir to a large home-building fortune—has called
for a mortgage-fraud investigation of Letitia James, the New York attorney
general who won the 34 convictions against Trump. Pulte has also urged investigations
of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and legal actions
against Senator Adam Schiff and Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
On Friday, the FBI raided
the home and office of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, a
prominent Trump critic, reportedly in an investigation of improperly retaining
classified documents like those for which Trump was indicted.
Trump has denied advance knowledge of the raid on
Bolton’s home and office. Yet his denial included a smug
hint that maybe he knew more than he cared to admit: “I don’t want to know
about it,” he said, but later added, “I could know about it. I could be the one
starting it. I’m actually the chief law-enforcement officer.”
Trump has been demanding the jailing of
Bolton for half a decade. The president’s ultra-politicized law-enforcement
team—Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy
Director Dan Bongino—would not need a direct order to understand what Trump
wanted them to do. Patel in particular was mistrusted by colleagues in the
first Trump administration as someone willing
to do anything Trump wished, no matter how improper.
In this second Trump term, things keep happening that
would have seemed outrageous—impossible—just a few months before. Every day,
there’s a new movement away from the rule of law, toward arbitrary and corrupt
personal rule. Among the fearful questions pressing upon the country: How does
America ever turn back?
After the first Trump presidency, the Biden
administration and Democrats in Congress made a collective decision about what
to do next. Individuals who broke the law on January 6, 2021, would face prosecution
for their crimes. Congress would investigate
Trump’s role in those crimes and publicize the findings. Congress would also
revise the Electoral
Count Act to clarify beyond even bad-faith doubt: No, the incumbent vice
president cannot overturn a federal election, as Trump pressured Mike Pence to
attempt in 2021. Beyond that—and unlike after Watergate or Teapot Dome—Congress passed no
major reform legislation. It did not, for example, move to stop future
presidents from directing
Secret Service funds into their own pockets, or from ignoring
conflicts-of-interest laws.
After the discovery that Trump had retained government
records, the National Archives quietly negotiated
with him for 17 months before at last resorting to legal action in August 2022.
The federal government hesitated for nearly two years before commencing legal action
against Trump for the January 6 attack. He faced aggressive legal
actions from state governments and from wronged
private individuals, but the federal executive-branch response to his misdeeds
and crimes was slow and reluctant. The federal courts were more reluctant
still. The Supreme Court invented—more or less out of thin air—a new doctrine
of presidential criminal immunity to protect Trump against legal risk for his
January 6 actions.
There was a certain logic to this widespread loathness to
act. From the perspective of, say, 2022, Constitution-respecting Americans
could congratulate themselves that their system had withstood and overcome the
Trump test. Trump’s party lost control of the House of Representatives in 2018.
Trump was then himself ejected from office in 2020. When his abuses of his
authority came to court, federal judges—including those appointed by Trump’s
own party—struck
them down. Trump was dissuaded by his own appointees from dissolving
NAFTA and quitting
NATO. His scheme to overthrow the 2020 election failed. He sabotaged
the Biden transition every way he could, but he ultimately did exit office on
January 20, 2021.
Despite possessing only a thin Democratic majority in the
House and Senate, Joe Biden enacted
an impressive mass of programs and policies. Meanwhile, Republican donors
raised hundreds of millions of dollars to nominate Florida Governor Ron
DeSantis and put the Trump era behind them. Why look backward?
Those cheerful calculations look sadly wrong from the
perspective of 2025. Trump was reelected in 2024, this time as the unquestioned
leader of the Republican Party and with the support of aides and officials
ready to implement his most outrageous whims.
Here’s an example of the contrast between then and now:
In his first term, Trump attempted to retaliate against Bolton. Trump fired
Bolton in September 2018. Bolton then wrote a book that, among other things,
revealed details about Trump’s extortion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr
Zelensky. Over three months in early 2019, career officials reviewed Bolton’s
book for possible misuse of classified materials. Bolton edited his manuscript
as directed and scheduled publication for June 2019. At that point, Trump
political appointees ordered a second review to demand excision of hundreds of
pages to which the previous reviewers had not objected. Bolton refused to
comply with the second review. The Trump administration sued to block the book
altogether. It lost,
in a decision handed down by Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee
and one of the most conservative judges on the federal bench. Lamberth warned
Bolton and his publisher that if the book were later proven to contain
classified information, they might forfeit any profits from the book. Five
years later, no such showing has been made.
Bolton prevailed in 2019 because relevant parts of the
U.S. government were still staffed by nonpartisan officials who honored their
oath to the Constitution even when that conflicted with the president’s wishes.
But in Trump’s second term, the government is changing
fast. In his first half year as president, Trump has systematically purged
the federal law-enforcement apparatus of rule-obeying public servants. He is replacing
them as quickly as he is able with people chosen for their loyalty, without
regard for their other qualifications. At the FBI, Trump forced out his own
first-term appointees to replace them with absurdly unqualified loyalists
chosen for their record of complying
with any Trump wish, no matter how glaringly unlawful. Over at Immigrations and
Customs Enforcement, Trump is building an enormous paramilitary force staffed
by people hired
for pro-Trump zeal—and who may ignore written law. The administration has claimed
an emergency to collect hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue without the
approval of Congress. Post-Watergate ethics rules have collapsed beyond
recovery as Trump and his family collect
hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, gratuities, and payoffs.
Even if the House changes hands in 2026—even if a
president is elected in 2028 who possesses a healthy respect for the rule of
law—Trump’s second-term perversion of the government will not be easily undone.
Yes, of course the next president must immediately fire Patel from the FBI—but
will Trump supporters understand the difference between the firing of Patel for
the abuse of his office, and Trump’s firing of his own appointee Christopher
Wray for resisting the abuse of that same office? Trump is teaching his many
supporters that public office is just a game of revenge, that there’s no
difference between the government pleading with an ex-president for 17 months
to return stolen secret documents and a serving president using claims about
documents to target a critic for retaliation.
The American system depends upon public understanding
that law is bigger than politics, that right and wrong exist independent of who
screws whom. Trump’s life and career are based on discrediting the distinction
between right and wrong, and on convincing himself and others that the only
reality is who screws whom. As of right now, he’s winning that messaging
debate, regardless of what happens to him personally. After Teapot Dome, after
Watergate, the supporters of the implicated president accepted that he had done
wrong, that the guilty should be punished, and that these misdeeds should never
be repeated. Any aftermath of the Trump presidency seems more likely to
resemble the aftermath of the Civil War: The reactionary losers who tried to
overthrow the U.S. Constitution may acknowledge themselves beaten, but they
won’t acknowledge themselves wrong.
If they won’t acknowledge that, what confidence can
anyone feel that they won’t try again if they get the chance?
No comments:
Post a Comment