Law Versus Power
There's a tendency to confuse the rule of law with obedience to the rules of a regime.
Within that confusion lies one of the multiple, dangerous threats posed by our current administration--a threat that became manifestly clear when Trump pardoned the January 6th insurrectionists. Autocrats can devise rules; the rule of law, however, is defined as a durable system characterized by four universal principles: accountability, just law, open government, and accessible and impartial justice.
Those elements are entirely foreign to MAGA and Trump. (Let's face it--Trump wouldn't even be able to define those terms...)
The chaos of the Trump administration, and the breadth of its attacks on democratic governance, have operated to distract public attention from its ongoing assault on the rule of law, and its persistent substitution of rules benefitting plutocrats and autocrats for laws benefiting society.
A recent issue of the American Prospect addressed that under-appreciated assault.
“A functioning economy depends on a basic principle: cheaters shouldn’t win. But Donald Trump has tossed aside that principle, and that has real consequences. When the rules disappear, the worst actors thrive and everyone else pays the price.
In our new print issue, we examine how the collapse of financial enforcement and consumer protection is opening the floodgates to a golden age of scams. Under Trump, the referees have left the field. Civil penalties go unenforced. White-collar fraudsters are rewarded with pardons. Entire arms of the government designed to prevent theft, abuse, and discrimination are being dismantled.
It’s an intentional choice to let exploitation run wild. If there’s a way to game the system, someone’s doing it—and now they’re doing it with the government’s blessing.”
The issue documented a variety of scams that have gained new security against government enforcement. One article reported on the multiple ways in which the gutting of the CFPB--the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau--has facilitated a wide variety of rackets and frauds. Another article delved into the failures of the Department of Education under Trump to protect student loan recipients from predatory lenders.
An article titled "Three Coin Monte" described what the magazine calls "the greatest and most brazen tale of corruption in history"-- Trump’s crypto project. That article outlined "how Trump is using his 'shitcoin' to monetize the presidency and create new avenues for influence peddling."
There's also an explanation of a scam involving merchant cash advances. These are transactions in which tycoons sell what are effectively payday loans to small businesses and ruin their livelihoods. (We are told that one of those "tycoons" was on Trump’s pardon list in 2020; he’s back in jail, for now.)
These investigative articles are just a few examples of what happens when government fails in what has always been considered a foundational task: to prevent some citizens from taking advantage of others, to prevent the strong (or unscrupulous) from harming the weak and/or naive.
Donald Trump's government has corrupted the very concept of law. The evidence is overwhelming: the gutting of the Department of Justice, the indiscriminate labeling of immigrants as "criminals" as justification for masked ICE agents' thuggish behaviors, the appalling arrests of elected lawmakers on transparently false premises, orders from the administration to the EPA directing the agency not to enforce environmental rules against fossil fuel companies, the Trump family's failure to even try to mask its monetization of the Presidency...the list goes on.
When the rule of law is replaced with rules favoring the predatory, when people in positions of authority sneer at the very notion of ethics and ethical behavior, when elected members of Congress fail to exercise their constitutional oversight responsibilities, ordinary citizens lose respect for the very concept of law. Corrupt regimes encourage lawbreaking by people who wouldn't otherwise be scofflaws. Cynicism explodes. The trust on which societies rely evaporates.
The central goal of Project 2025 was to replace the rule of law with rules allowing selected people to exercise unrestrained and arbitrary power--power to give their sycophants and fellow-travelers free reign to plunder, but--more fundamentally-- to facilitate the remaking of America into the Lily-White "Christian" nation of Project 2025's fantasies.
In Henry VI, Shakespeare wrote "First you kill all the lawyers." The authors of Project 2025 understood why that's wrong. First you kill the rule of law.