The Law is King

November 8th, 2026. Since the dramatic victories of the Democrats on Tuesday, Trump has been posting increasingly provocative material on social media in what appears to be an attempt to turn attention away from the Democrats and back to himself. Amidst all that mess, there are signs that the president is deeply concerned about anyone getting a window into how his administration has been operating. Yesterday, he insisted that the Democrats are threatening a lot of people just because they happen to be Republicans or Republican supporters. He said that the Democrats' promises to investigate the administration are themselves crimes and that he is ordering the Department of Justice, or DOJ, to investigate. The post is convoluted, but Trump insists that there have been no impeachable acts committed or even thought of by the victims of this illegal process. Shortly after, he posted, These sleazebags should go to jail for what they are doing. The Senate must act and stop being pushed around to the point of the Republican Party losing elections and worse, he insisted. In another post, he suggested just what that worse might be. Apparently worried that this time his impeachment by the House might lead to a conviction by the Senate, Trump posted creative math to argue that the outcome of the Senate race in Alaska, where Democrat Mary Peltola is ahead, is really a romp by Republican Dan Sullivan. Trump got there by counting the actual votes for Sullivan and then adding to that total the votes for everyone else in the race, other than Peltola. The Alaska race is over, he said, Dan Sullivan won by a lot. It feels desperate. As Perry Stein and Jeremy Roebuck of the Washington Post wrote today, Congressional Democrats are already building the investigative staff of the committees they will begin to lead in January. In a line that shows just how much things have changed, Stein and Roebuck write that the Congress members have been hiring from the large pool of former Democrats, who were fired or departed from the Justice Department since the start of Trump's second term. As social media user Control-Alt-Resist commented, Trump purged DOJ to bury the evidence and instead handed Congress a staff of people who know exactly where everything is filed. You cannot shred institutional memory. It just changed employers. Attorney General Todd Blanche appears to have thought events through in a similar fashion. Today on CNN, he seemed rattled as he tried to frame upcoming investigations as a system of threats and revenge against Republicans. Asked by Dana Bash what crime Democrats were committing by saying they would exercise their duty of oversight, Blanche did not have one. Asked if Democrats should be imprisoned, as Trump suggested, Blanche said it depends on what they've done. When asked about the Trump administration's attacks on Trump's perceived enemies, he tried to dismiss them by saying such cases are only a few of the thousands the department has brought. While Trump has perverted the Department of Justice by using it as his own personal weapon, in fact, accountability is not revenge. It is fundamental to maintaining the rule of law. 150 years ago, after the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant believed the cause of the Confederacy was one of the worst for which a people ever fought and for which there was the least excuse. But when he accepted General Robert E. Lee's surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia in the hamlet of Appomattox Courthouse, Virginia, in April 1865, he allowed Confederate soldiers to go home with only a promise that they would not take up arms again in the hope that they would be able to put in a cross, to carry themselves and their families through the next winter. It was a humanitarian gesture and also a practical one, for Southerners were starving, and if they missed planting season, the devastation would get worse. Grant's amnesty also reflected the widespread belief among Northerners that the blame for secession and the war that killed more than 600,000 Americans fell on the political leaders who had taken their states out of the Union to create a new world. That is, a new slave-holding nation they could dominate. But President Andrew Johnson, who took office after the death of President Abraham Lincoln at the hands of an assassin, made a partisan decision to pardon all but about 1,500 of those leaders, returning to them all the privileges of citizenship in a nation they had tried to destroy in hopes that they would support him. Never facing accountability for their attack on the United States, the Southern White leaders resurrected the ideology the North had defeated during the war. They changed the memory of what happened at Appomattox, turning Grant's clemency into something entirely different. Rather than being a gesture of a victor's mercy, it was, they argued, a recognition of the superiority of the Southern cause, proof that the Confederates were right all along and had lost only because they were overawed by the North's superior firepower. The lack of accountability for attacking the United States of America meant that the Confederates' treason never became odious. Former Confederates were able to spread their ideology across the country in the post-war years. In 1871, just six years after the surrender at Appomattox, the first Confederate Secretary of State, Robert Toombs, was being quoted in Northern newspapers about the dangers of permitting poor Americans and poor men, especially poor black men, to vote and his advocacy for a property requirement for voting. Within a decade, white Southerners were lamenting the lost cause and Northern sympathizers threw black Americans overboard in their rush to reunite with white Southerners against a government that worked for all Americans. The true history of the Confederacy, a brief rebellion against the United States to create a system of democracy, a slave-holding nation, was whitewashed as a stand against federal overreach. As such, it endured, carrying racism and rebellion forward for more than a century. In 2021, when rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, some of them carried Confederate battle flags. That same partisan reworking of history took place in the late 1920s, after President Gerald Ford issued a preemptive pardon to President Richard Nixon for his actions surrounding the 1972 break-in at the Democratic National Committee's headquarters at the Watergate Complex in Washington, D.C. Although Ford relied on the 1915 Burdick v. United States decision that said accepting a pardon carries with it an imputation of guilt, acceptance, a confession of it, Nixon never agreed to that. He never publicly accepted responsibility for his obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress. Instead, Nixon blamed the press, whose members designed their leaks and accusations and innuendo to destroy him. When the president does it, that means that it's not illegal, Nixon told interviewer David Frost in 1977. He went further, suggesting that a president could authorize his staff members to break the law as well. The theme that accountability for lawbreaking is somehow a partisan plot by those who hate Republicans continued to fester. Over time, it bolstered the right-wing drive to declare a strongman president above the law. Confident that presidents would not be held accountable for lawbreaking, President Ronald Reagan's advisers ignored both U.S. sanctions on Iran's revolutionary party and the law prohibiting aid to the right-wing Contra rebels trying to overthrow Nicaragua's Marxist-Sandinista government. In what became known as the Iran-Contra affair, they sold highly marked-up arms to Iran and sent the proceeds, off the books, to aid the Contras. During Reagan's administration, the Office of Legal Counsel expounded a new theory of the unitary executive that said because the president was the head of one of the three independent branches of government, neither of the other two branches, the legislative branch, Congress, or the judicial branch, the courts, could check him. In 1989, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel, William Barr, wrote a memo warning officials in the George H.W. Bush administration to be wary of legislative encroachments on the president's authority. When he later became an attorney, Attorney General, he backed Bush's pardon. of the 11 Reagan officials charged in the Iran-Contra affair. Lawrence Walsh, the independent prosecutor in the case, worried that pardoning the officials removed accountability and thus weakened American democracy. It undermines the principle that no man is above the law, he said. It demonstrates that powerful people with powerful allies can commit serious crimes in high office, deliberately abusing the public trust without consequences. Barr went on to become the attorney general in Donald Trump's first administration, and that administration continued the push against accountability. Then, after one grand jury charged Trump with 40 criminal counts for retaining and mishandling classified documents after he left office and then obstructing justice to cover up that retention, and a second charged Trump with four felony counts related to his attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, Trump moved to dismiss the cases on the grounds that a president has absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for actions performed within the outer perimeter of his official responsibilities. On July 1, 2024, in Trump v. United States, the Supreme Court agreed that the president's decision to dismiss the case was in line with the fundamental principle of U.S. democracy, that no one is above the law. Since returning to office, Trump has taken advantage of that immunity by turning the machinery of the federal government against those he perceives as his enemies. But now, with the prospect of investigations into behavior that might fall outside a president's official duties, Trump is trying to convince the American people that enforcing the rule of law is a partisan attack. In fact, it is the opposite. The true rule of law is nonpartisan. It is the fundamental rule under which the American government was conceived. Where, say some, is the King of America? Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense, the 1776 pamphlet that convinced British colonists in North America to cut ties with their king and start a new nation. In America, the law is king. For as, in absolute governments, the king is law, so, in free countries, the law ought to be king, and there ought to be no other. Letters from an American Letters from an American was written and read by Letters from an American was written and read by Arthur Cox Richardson. It was produced at Soundscape Productions, dead in Massachusetts. Recorded with music composed by Michael Moss.