By Nick Catoggio
Monday, February 02, 2026
Exciting news broke this weekend on Twitter amid the
usual glut of white-nationalist
propaganda and AI-generated
revenge porn: The Justice Department is hiring.
When I was a law student, the DOJ didn’t need to
advertise job openings. Everyone who wasn’t already set on a lucrative career
in Big Law wanted to work there or was considering applying. It wasn’t just the
romance of getting to prosecute bad guys or the glamour of gaining courtroom
experience or the promise of elite professional connections that attracted
ambitious applicants. It was a prestige thing.
The Justice Department drew an exalted degree of
intellectual talent, operated (sometimes) according to an admirable ethical
code, and enjoyed a measure of independence from politics that most federal
agencies lacked. Even a conservative disposed by ideology to look down on
government employment couldn’t ignore the appeal of working there.
So imagine how I felt when I saw someone from the Trump
administration reduced to soliciting resumes on behalf of the DOJ from the
general public—in, of all places, Elon Musk’s virtual Nazi bordello. It was
like spotting Robert Mueller wearing a sandwich board and handing out “Apply
now!” fliers in a red-light district.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The solicitation itself,
posted by former Justice Department chief of staff Chad Mizelle,
read: “If you are a lawyer, are interested in being an AUSA [Assistant U.S.
Attorney], and support President Trump and anti-crime agenda, DM me.” Support
President Trump?
I don’t remember the DOJ of my youth rejecting talented
aspiring prosecutors because they voted the wrong way in the previous election,
let alone doing so in a manner as amateurish as “DM me.” Being smart,
dedicated, and willing to pursue criminals was enough. Nor was there any need
to affirm your support for an “anti-crime agenda.” If you’re signing up to work
for the Justice Department, you support that by definition, no?
Andy McCarthy and Ed Whelan worked for the DOJ before becoming legal analysts and were
mortified by Mizelle treating partisanship as a job requirement. “If support
for [the] incumbent … president is now a condition of enforcing federal law,
Congress should defund DOJ,” McCarthy declared dramatically. “DOJ should only
exist if it’s nonpartisan. Too dangerous to liberty otherwise. If AG [Merrick]
Garland’s office had posted this, MAGA & GOP would be calling for
impeachment.”
He’s correct on the ethical merits, needless to say, but
the pragmatist in me is left wondering how a Justice Department whose prestige
has been smashed to bits is supposed to fill its vacancies without appealing
to tribal loyalty. Why would any attorney of McCarthy’s or Whelan’s caliber
stoop to work for an agency that’s spent the past year being converted into Donald
Trump’s law firm, his personal Department of Retribution?
Any ethical person employed by the DOJ in 2026 runs a
real risk of being asked to do something unethical for the president that will
force them to choose between being
fired or having to resign. That’s what Mizelle meant when he referred to
supporting Trump’s “anti-crime agenda,” I assume—not that new hires should want
to prosecute crimes, which is a truism, but that they should be willing to
abuse criminal law to carry out personal vendettas and politicized
cover-ups.
The story of the second Trump administration is the story
of a White House systematically wrecking government institutions and then
scrambling to deal with the consequences when those institutions inevitably
hemorrhage prestige. Mizelle’s tweet is an example. Respectable people don’t
want to work for a DOJ that functions as consigliere in a mafia family
so cronies like him now have to slum it on Twitter to drum up public interest,
like a “tube man” blowing around outside a car dealership to attract attention.
Lowering recruiting standards is one way for an
institution to cope with shedding prestige from being mismanaged, and of
course, the
Justice Department isn’t the only example of that in
Trump’s government. But there are other ways. Sometimes the president does
something close to the opposite, papering over the grubbiness of the government
he’s created by manufacturing phony grandeur.
Ice cream and dog feces.
Take, for example, the Kennedy Center—or, if we must, the
“Trump
Kennedy Center.”
The artist boycott of the institution that picked up
after its name was changed in December has continued, with composer Stephen
Schwartz pulling out of an event he was supposed to
host for the Washington National Opera in May and composer Philip
Glass canceling the premiere of his new symphony (Lincoln)
in June. Increasingly it looked like Trump would spend the rest of his term
trying and failing to recruit elite musical talent to legitimize his vanity
project by performing there, guaranteeing a yearslong stream of bad press. The
writing was on the wall.
So he’s knocking the wall down. Last night the president announced that the center will close its doors on July 4 for “for
Construction, Revitalization, and Complete Rebuilding” that’s expected to last
approximately two years. The renovation, he said, “will take a tired, broken,
and dilapidated Center, one that has been in bad condition, both financially
and structurally for many years, and turn it into a World Class Bastion of
Arts, Music, and Entertainment, far better than it has ever been before.” He
ruined the institution’s prestige by taking it over—but don’t you worry, the
grandeur to come will knock your socks off.
His decision was supposedly made after a year of
consulting with experts about whether reconstruction would or wouldn’t require
a shutdown, but three staffers at the center told the Washington
Post that “they had not been previously notified
of any plans to close the center, though some had long speculated a shutdown
was possible.” There’s no word on how any currently existing contracts with
artists to perform there after July 4 will be dealt with. (The organization’s website has events scheduled for August and September as of this
writing.) And of course there’s no indication that Congress will have a say in the center’s renovations
despite the fact that it was created by federal statute and continues to be
federally funded.
The episode reeks of a spoiled child taking his ball and
going home because no one wanted to play by his rules, but it reveals something
important about the president’s relationship with prestige. “It’s the
equivalent of his thinking he can extort someone else’s Nobel Prize on an
institutional level,” Vox editor Benjy Sarlin said of Trump attaching his name to the center. “He wants the
prestige from elite institutions, but the prestige is derived from the
institutional history and disappears when he wrecks it.”
Precisely right. The same thing is happening at the DOJ.
Despite its gold-plated brand, Trump’s law enforcement agency now
struggles to attract talent because under his
leadership the qualities that made it prestigious no longer remain. He dirtied
it up by appointing cronies to key positions, tasked them with carrying out his
grudges, then watched as his deputies steered the department into
predictable embarrassments. As with the Kennedy Center, I think he assumed
that the traditional public esteem in which the Justice Department has been
held would legitimize his dubious plans for the organization. Instead the
opposite happened: He delegitimized the institution by politicizing it so
brazenly and ruined its prestige.
As the saying goes, if you mix a pint of ice cream with a
pint of dog feces, the result will taste distinctly more like one ingredient
than the other. The president keeps whipping up concoctions along those lines
at institutions like the DOJ and Kennedy Center, desperately hoping everyone
will tell him they taste like Ben & Jerry’s, then seems caught off guard
when people start vomiting it up.
But closing the center is only half the story. It’s also
revealing that Trump’s response to once again being denied the prestige he
craves is to wreck and rebuild the structure, one of several ambitious
construction projects he’s undertaken. We all know about the empty space where the
White House’s East Wing once stood, still awaiting a presidential ballroom
that seems
to get bigger by the day. The Post reported last week, though, that
the president is now also hoping to erect
a 250-foot-high “triumphal arch” across the river in
Arlington, Virginia, in time for America’s 250th birthday this July.
He’s even posted mock-ups
of three designs to his social media account. Given
his usual taste in decor, I have a guess as to which of the three is his
favorite.
“I’d like it to be the biggest one of all,” he told
reporters of the arch, referring to similar structures in countries like France
and India. After all, “we’re the biggest, most powerful nation.” (The biggest?)
That argument has begun to turn up on his
Truth Social account too. Size matters, it seems.
But why? Why all the focus lately on architectural
grandeur?
The gilded age.
One not very interesting answer is that it’s his usual
grandiose narcissism at work, nothing more or less. This is a guy whose gut
reaction on 9/11 after watching the World Trade Center
fall was that he now owned the largest tower in lower Manhattan. Building the
biggest arch, the best ballroom, the most amazing performance-arts center is
just who he is.
Besides, each project is destined to be a monument to him
personally to some greater or lesser (i.e., greater) degree. Each will bear the
Trump name in conspicuous ways, I’m sure, with the new “Trump Kennedy Center”
especially likely to have his fingerprints all over it in order to make it
harder for his political enemies to remove all trace of him after he’s gone.
Chiseling his name off the facade is too easy. He’s going to splatter it on the
walls, the rugs, and the ceiling.
Another answer is that his monument projects reflect his
imperial ambitions.
That’s also grandiose narcissism, of course, but of a
particular kind. All emperors aim to leave their mark on history and one facet
of that is leaving their mark architecturally by building gleaming marble
memorials of their reign. No president in American history has aspired to be
Caesar as plainly as Trump has, from his habit of gilding everything in sight
to his thirst for conquest in Greenland and Venezuela to his grotesque
autocratic domination of Republicans in Congress. To be a proper Caesar, you need
proper grandeur. That includes public works.
The Kennedy Center is his amphitheater, the White House
ballroom is his palace, and the triumphal arch is, well, his triumphal
arch. It’s a “RETVRN”
fantasy come to life. God only knows what self-aggrandizing stunts he has
planned for the 250th anniversary of American independence this
summer, but I admit to being morbidly curious. Nothing would capture the
perversion of our founding ideals as succinctly as turning the
semiquincentennial into a glorification ritual for a monarch whom 55
percent of the country dislikes.
There’s a third possibility. Perhaps the president’s
recent binge of architectural grandeur betrays his awareness that he, and
America, are in decline.
Probably not—or not consciously. Trump is the last
person you’d expect to engage in self-reflection, and
if he did, his ego would find any evidence of diminishment intolerable. But
he’s conscious of his mortality, at least, political and otherwise.
He’s doubtless aware of how much his opponents detest him, he must realize that
most of his policies can and will be reversed by executive order in time, and
he might grasp that America under his leadership is less esteemed
abroad than it used to be. (Whether he cares is
another matter.)
If I were Nero in twilight, anxious that posterity would
remember my reign chiefly for its
grotesquely rapacious corruption and my calamitous
stewardship of Rome, I might also resolve to carve a grand legacy for myself
into the landscape. Historians might impugn me, my successors might disavow
me—but my arch would stand forever.
The absurd grandeur of the projects he’s planning is a
confession of national decadence even if Trump isn’t aware of it, I think. The
“biggest, most powerful nation” somehow managed to become the biggest, most
powerful nation without turning its executive mansion into a palace or building
a tacky faux-Roman tribute to its military victories. Small-R republican
America didn’t need the paraphernalia of imperial power to feel assured of its
greatness. The fact that we do need that paraphernalia now, per our elected
leader, suggests we’ve at last reached a point of decline where reassurance is
necessary.
Chad Mizelle’s tweet, the Kennedy Center shutdown, and
the Arlington arch are each reactions to losing respect—of the legal
profession, of patrons of the arts, and of a population that doesn’t
believe America is being made great again. We chose a grubby kakistocracy
to govern us, it’s predictably turning the United States into a third-world
country, and the best it can do to replace the grandeur that it’s squandered is
to start slapping gilt on stuff. To atone for wrecking the prestige that
American institutions spent centuries amassing, postliberal populists are
humbly offering to build crapola built with marble. After all, marble is
prestigious.
It’s the material of which ruins are made, perfect for an
administration trapped in
a nostalgic fantasy.
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