{"id":45,"date":"2026-05-24T20:37:52","date_gmt":"2026-05-24T20:37:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=45"},"modified":"2026-05-24T20:37:52","modified_gmt":"2026-05-24T20:37:52","slug":"donald-trump-and-the-department-of-justice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nationalconsumerreportss.com\/?p=45","title":{"rendered":"Donald Trump and the Department of Justice"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Editor’s note: This piece is cross-posted with “Executive Functions.”<\/em><\/p>\n

What follows are two sets of reflections on the rule of law at the dawn of Trump 2.0. One is a distillation of an article I have written for The Atlanticon President-elect Donald Trump\u2019s nominations of his personal legal team to the most senior positions in the Department of Justice and what this choice raises for the coming confirmation process. The other is prompted by Quinta Jurecic\u2019s opinion piece in the New York Times on what the 2024 election suggests about voter attitudes to rule-of-law values, and in particular the significance of the Jan. 6-related criminal prosecutions of Trump.<\/p>\n

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In an essay published last week in The Atlantic, I note the extraordinary steps Trump is taking to make the Justice Department his own, in the most personal terms. He has nominated to the top department posts\u2014deputy attorney general, principal deputy attorney general, and solicitor general\u2014members of his personal legal defense team. And his nominee for attorney general was also a member of his personal legal team, in the first impeachment trial.<\/p>\n

To fully appreciate the questions this raises, it is helpful to look back on the history of the Department from the founding to the present. As I explain, there has always been tension:<\/p>\n

between professionalism and fidelity to the president\u2019s policy agenda\u2014between \u201ctoo little\u201d and \u201ctoo much\u201d politics\u2014and it has persisted to this day. \u201cToo little\u201d politics, and the president was denied a legitimate instrument for the achievement of his policy goals; \u201ctoo much\u201d politics, and the impartiality of law enforcement would be compromised.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The sweet spot lies somewhere between \u201ctoo little\u201d politics and \u201ctoo much.\u201d In the article, I discussed how various presidents have purported to strike this balance\u2014or, like Richard Nixon, failed disastrously to do so.<\/p>\n

Only Trump has moved to build, at the Justice Department, in its senior ranks, a small law firm made up of his personal lawyers, and he has done so while expressly rejecting the values of \u201cindependence.\u201d Loyalty, to him, is paramount, and he may believe that he has locked it down with these nominations.<\/p>\n

This places great importance on the Senate\u2019s duty in the confirmation process to question these nominees on how they understand their role in the circumstances. They should be scrutinized specifically about their commitment to existing Justice Department policies and norms intended to manage the \u201ctoo little\u201d\/\u201ctoo much\u201d political boundary lines. As I note in the piece, an early indication of how at least one of these nominees may manage the lines is not promising.<\/p>\n

But the Justice Department also faces questions about the past and what became of the cases it brought against Trump. In an opinion piece in the New York Times, <\/em>Jurecic asks \u201cwhy voters seem to have cared so little about [the] values\u201d of equal justice under law. Her question is motivated in large part by the electorate\u2019s apparent indifference to the federal prosecution of Donald Trump for the events of Jan. 6.<\/p>\n

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In exploring the possible reasons for this indifference, she sees the department as having badly failed. The attorney general\u2019s \u201cslow and careful approach\u201d to this criminal case effectively \u201callowed Mr. Trump to slip free of criminal accountability.\u201d Then the Supreme Court did its part by both adopting a similarly leisurely pace and \u201ccasting the prosecution into legal uncertainty in its ruling on presidential immunity.\u201d For these reasons, \u201cvoters could be forgiven, not seeing haste on the part of the legal system to treat Mr. Trump\u2019s abuse of power as a matter worthy of condemnation, if they concluded the January 6 must not have been such a big deal.\u201d<\/p>\n

This important issue will engage us for a long time to come. It can also be put in different terms\u2014ones presumably acceptable to even those commentators who are generally more sympathetic to Trump than Jurecic, or who would not agree that his voters must have cared little about rule-of-law values because they declined to find the criminal prosecutions to be a \u201cdeal-breaker.\u201d One possible version: How could a presidential candidate widely denounced at the time for his conduct on and in relation Jan. 6, even by his own party\u2019s leadership, and who was then prosecuted for it, escape decisive political consequences and win a second term?<\/p>\n

The possible additional factors bearing on the answer\u2014an answer to a complex question about public opinion\u2014go beyond the pace of Justice Department and Supreme Court decision making, and complications like the immunity ruling, which Jurecic cites. Among those other factors:<\/p>\n