The Rule of Law Under Trump
"I found the attached excerpt from an article by Charlie Savage in the Sunday NYT to be the best synopsis I’ve seen of how the rule of law in this country has depended heavily on “norms and expectations,” and how Trump is presenting such an extraordinary threat to this system."
--Bernie Butcher
The Rule of Law Under Trump
From “Openly Killing Suspected Smugglers, Close-Mouthed on Law”
by Charlie Savage, New York Times October 26, 2025 (excerpted)
It is becoming clearer than ever that the rule of law in the White House has depended
chiefly on norms – on government lawyers willing to raise objections when merited and to resign
in protest if ignored, and on presidents who want to appear law-abiding. This is especially true
in an era when party loyalty has defanged the threat of impeachment by Congress, and after the
Supreme Court granted presidents immunity from prosecution of r crimes committed with
official powers.
Every modern president has occasionally taken some aggressive policy step based on a
stretched or disputed legal interpretation. But in the past, they and their aides made a point to
develop substantive legal theories and to meet public and congressional expectations to explain
why they thought their actions were lawful, even if not everyone agreed.
This administration has found a two-part hack to the system in which executive branch
lawyers are supposed to independently determine the legal boundaries within which
policymakers may act.
The first is that Mr. Trump has told executive branch lawyers that they may not
question any legal judgement that he – or Attorney General Pam Bondi, subject to his
“supervision and control” – already decided. “The president and the attorney general’s opinions
on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties, Mr.
Trump declared in a February executive order.
The second is that Mr. Trump has been declaring that as president, he has determined that
the factual and legal scenarios exist that are necessary for him to exercise various extraordinary
powers.