For more than 30 years I taught thousands of university students about law, focusing on law in the U.S. They were undergraduate and graduate students, many aiming at careers in law or law enforcement, others simply interested in various topics such as crime and criminal justice.
A point about American law that I emphasized was that it was key to holding this diverse nation together. Separated by so many factors–socioeconomic classes, religious
faiths, urban and rural residences, age groups, racial and ethnic backgrounds, political views–Americans, I proclaimed, were nonetheless stably bonded by their shared belief in law.
In particular, I emphasized that we all shared a strong cultural commitment to our legal system’s founding documents: the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. There we find our collective commitments in our beliefs in our Natural Rights to Life, Liberty, the Pursuit of Happiness, and equal opportunity, as well as to the structures of government carefully designed to preserve these.
Sisters and Brothers, I was wrong about the law. But not about the nation.
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There was reason for my confident assertion on law’s consolidating effects in the United States. After all, despite even severe disruptions in the nation’s history–economic depressions, widespread plagues of both deaths and deadly racism, even the Civil War–the country has always regained its footing in social stability rather than disintegrating. We remained Americans, one nation under law, we pledged allegiance, and we saluted ourselves as the ‘greatest nation on earth.’
Until Trump and Trumpism showed that we were neither one nation under law nor close to being the world’s ‘greatest’ country. After all, at his inauguration Trump swore the presidential oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States,” then immediately began to undo it in office.
At his second inaugural address, President George Washington said that a violation of the presidential oath would occasion not only ‘constitutional punishment,’ but the ‘upbraidings of all who are now witnesses of the present solemn ceremony.’ Trump and his party have given the lie to this original expectation.
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What they have laid bare is that there is a sizable minority of Americans that does not hold to the framework that our Founders designed to protect our democratic experiment from human folly and greed. The most recent analysis of opinion polls finds that 40 percent of Americans continue to approve of Trump’s performance in office despite his rampant lawlessness, apparently no matter what he does. They appear willing to cash in the Constitution so long as the rights being denied are being taken from ‘those people.’
Moreover, one of the nation’s two major parties has given itself over to the creation of an authoritarian, fascist central government, licensing the American president’s worst antidemocratic and lawless actions. Even the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts and dominated by Republican appointees, has abandoned its democratic purpose, Equal Protection Under Law.
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Not that it is to his credit, but Donald Trump has never hidden his disdain for law, including the U.S. Constitution. He has established this throughout his private and political lives. In his blind pursuit of wealth and power in business he bulldozed laws against racial discrimination in housing, financial fraud, and not paying subcontractors on building projects. But it has been in his two terms in the presidency that he has most remarkably dismissed the relevancy of any and all law to his typically vile intents and purposes.
This has been especially true in his current term in the White House, in which he has surrounded himself with a Cabinet and staff wholly subservient to his whims, lies and anarchy. His violations of black letter law and rules of procedure began with his unilaterally granting clemency on his first day back in office–without any of the familiar vetting procedures–to all of the nearly 1600 persons convicted or awaiting trial for their rioting at the U.S. Capitol following his defeat in the 2020 election.1 And in what looks like nothing so much as a pay-for-pardons scheme, he has pardoned dozens of donors, allies and other persons convicted of fraud in the federal courts.
His mayhem quickly ran to illegally deporting thousands of immigrants without due process, including American citizens, and to having Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents routinely invading homes in American cities without warrants, and assaulting and even killing nonviolent American protestors against these activities.
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And, perhaps most notable, Trump’s anarchy includes turning the nation’s top law enforcement agency, the U.S. Department of Justice, into a transparent cesspool of crime and corruption. Under his leadership it now prioritizes the pursuit of fraudulent criminal cases against his political and legal opponents. At the same time it has openly failed to comply with the new federal law2 requiring it to release all of the Government’s files relating to its investigations of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking of underage girls to powerful men, possibly including Trump himself.
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And it is not simply a case of a lawless executive running riot against law and order. Republicans in Congress have almost unanimously endorsed this pattern of gross illegality either openly or by their silence in the face of it. This includes such manifestly unconstitutional Trump executive orders that attempt to erase birthright citizenship for babies born to parents who are not citizens or lawful permanent residents3, and to restrict mail-in voting in the states4.
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And then there is the Republican-dominated Supreme Court.5
Intended to be the last line of defense for the Constitution, the Roberts Court has made a number of recent decisions that weaken its protection of citizens’ rights. These include the 2022 decision6to overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision that had provided for legal abortions for nearly 50 years. It was the first Court decision in history that revoked what earlier Courts had determined to be a fundamental right of individual liberty in the United States.
Two years later, the Supreme Court ruled that the President was immune from criminal prosecution for any acts committed in connection to his official acts.7 In this 6-3 decision Chief Justice Roberts also wrote that the President has “‘exclusive authority and absolute discretion’ to decide which crimes to investigate and prosecute.” In this the Court gave Trump license to his own inclination to believe that he is above the law.8
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During the Obama presidency the Supreme Court also gave rein to antidemocratic forces. In 2013 the Roberts Court crippled the federal Voting Rights Act of 1965 by disabling its requirement that states with records of passing laws to illegally restrict minority voting needed to have future voting laws to be approved by the Department of Justice (the ‘preclearance’ requirement) before those laws could go into effect. In Shelby County v. Holder,9 Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority in the 5-4 decision, wrote that the problems of discriminatory laws restricting minority voting in the 1960s had been remedied–by the Voting Rights Act itself, including importantly the preclearance requirement. Hence the mechanism for identifying the need for preclearance was no longer appropriate.
The antidemocratic consequences were immediate. A number of states, largely in the South, passed new laws that discriminated against voters. These laws required voter IDs to vote, closed polling places, reduced early voting in elections, and purged people from voting lists. All of these had the effect, and presumably also the purpose, of reducing the voting rights of poorer and minority citizens.
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Notably, too, the Court has extended a right that ironically also reduced the liberty of individual citizens. In its 2010 Citizens United decision,10 the Court ruled that American corporations had the same First Amendment rights as did individual citizens, and hence that any limitations on their independent11 spending on political advertisements–seen as political speech–violated companies’ free speech rights.
The 5-4 Court decision that corporations had the same rights as persons has led to an explosion of political spending by wealthy corporations and individuals through so-called Super PACs (political action committees), giving their interests much greater influence over elections than those of most American voters.
And this anti-democratic decision rests on an even deeper irony. The Roberts Court’s decision overturned the 1990 Supreme Court decision that had ruled against such corporate political ads because of ‘the corrosive and distorting effects of immense aggregations of wealth’ on our political processes.12 In addition, it reversed the earlier decision by using as a precedent a 19th century Court decision that it erroneously read as having already established that corporations had the same rights as citizens.13
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As wrong as I was about Americans’ loyalty to the Constitution, including too many of those sitting on the current Supreme Court, democracy itself continues to meld our shaken diversity into a nation. There can be no mistake: the Trumpist assault on democracy continues unabated. But thus far our democratic structures retain enough firepower to fight back, even in the face of its radically weakened Rule of Law and of a major political party having foresaken it.
The lower courts in our federal government–the U.S. District Courts around the country–have especially stood fast against Trump’s unconstitutional orders and acts that they have been asked to review. Importantly, they have constrained his attempts to illegally monopolize authority and control over policies ranging from his illegal deportations of undocumented immigrants and his executive order to eliminate birthright citizenship, to imposing illegal tariffs on goods imported from other countries,14to illegal grand jury subpoenas of his perceived political opponents. The attorneys bringing these cases against the President’s power grabs, and the judges restraining them, honor their oaths to defend the Constitution and the Rule of Law.
Ordinary citizens have also played key roles in blocking his autocratic abuses of law. As members of federal grand juries, they have rejected a highly unusual number of cases brought by Trump’s Department of Justice (DOJ) in his second term by refusing to return indictments in them. As designed, the grand jury process is heavily weighted in favor of the prosecution’s requests for indictments, so much so that it has long been said that a prosecutor could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich.
A 2020 DOJ report of all federal cases charged in 201615 found that in only six (less than .005 percent of all suspects) did the grand jury fail to indict the suspect.16 As of early this year, federal grand juries had already rejected several cases brought by the DOJ in Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Virginia. These include the insensible but politically motivated case against six Democratic members of Congress for having publicly advised military service members of their existing duty to disobey illegal orders; cases against three persons in Chicago for allegedly assaulting federal officers during immigration enforcement operations; the mortgage fraud case against New York Attorney General Letitia James (as punishment for her successful 2022 lawsuit against Trump and his family for financial fraud), dismissed by two grand juries, and a case against a Washington, D.C., woman who was arrested for allegedly assaulting an FBI agent filming outside the D.C. jail to which men arrested for possible deportation were taken, dismissed by three grand juries.
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Finally, and ultimately, there is citizen action that resists the Trump Government’s turn to autocracy. His two terms in office have seen more protests and more citizens in the streets than any other presidency in the nation’s history. The first Trump presidency (2017-2021) saw more than 60,000 marches and protests comprising a total of between 21 and 31 million people. In little more than his first year of his current term in office, the three No Kings marches alone have each occurred from coast to coast and in small towns and major cities, and have collectively involved between 19 and 22 million protestors.
And there are the federal and state elections that have shifted to the left since Trump’s second inauguration in 2025. In special elections in both red and blue districts, the electorate has moved toward Democrats in almost 85 percent of them. American citizens are voting with both their feet and their ballots.
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CODA: The Founders left us a foundation just flexible enough to withstand a variety of insidious assaults on its integrity. At its center stand the People themselves, the majority of whom understand the democratic principles and processes that sustain a society worth saving–and worth living in.
- A good number of whom, an estimated 33 to date, have since been arrested and accused of separate new crimes including sexual assault of a child, rape, and conspiracy to murder FBI agents, among other felonies.[↩]
- Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed by Congress Nov. 19, 2025.[↩]
- A right provided in the Constitution’s 14th Amendment.[↩]
- Rules governing elections are the province of the separate state governments, not the Federal Government.[↩]
- Six of its nine sitting justices were nominated by Republican presidents, three of them during Trump’s first term.[↩]
- Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, 597 U.S. 215.[↩]
- Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593 (2024).[↩]
- In dissent in this case, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that, “The relationship between the President and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably. In every use of official power, the President is now a king above the law.”[↩]
- Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013[↩]
- Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 310.[↩]
- That is, other than to individual candidates’ campaigns.[↩]
- Austin v. Michigan Chamber of Commerce, 494 U.S. 652 (1990). This earlier decision had been decided by a 6-3 vote of the justices, with Republican-nominated Chief Justice William Rehnquist voting in the majority.[↩]
- I describe this mistake in an earlier essay.[↩]
- In a rare rebuke to Trump, the Supreme Court in February ruled that under the Constitution reserves the right to level taxes–which tariffs comprise–to the Congress, not the President.[↩]
- The most recent data available.[↩]
- Federal Justice Statistics, 2016 – Statistical Tables, Tables 2.2, 2.3, pp. 12-13.[↩]
