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After Donald Trump left the presidency in 2021, he was indicted for retaining dozens of government documents, including some containing nuclear secrets. He was convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records. His company was convicted of criminal tax fraud.
When Trump returned to the presidency this year, he sought payback by accusing others of the crimes for which he’d been indicted or convicted. The political ally Trump appointed to head federal housing programs—Bill Pulte, heir to a large home-building fortune—has called for a mortgage-fraud investigation of Letitia James, the New York attorney general who won the 34 convictions against Trump. Pulte has also urged investigations of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and legal actions against Senator Adam Schiff and Fed Chair Jerome Powell.
On Friday, the FBI raided the home and office of former National Security Adviser John Bolton, a prominent Trump critic, reportedly in an investigation of improperly retaining classified documents like those for which Trump was indicted.
Trump has denied advance knowledge of the raid on Bolton’s home and office. Yet his denial included a smug hint that maybe he knew more than he cared to admit: “I don’t want to know about it,” he said, but later added, “I could know about it. I could be the one starting it. I’m actually the chief law-enforcement officer.”
Trump has been demanding the jailing of Bolton for half a decade. The president’s ultra-politicized law-enforcement team—Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—would not need a direct order to understand what Trump wanted them to do. Patel in particular was mistrusted by colleagues in the first Trump administration as someone willing to do anything Trump wished, no matter how improper.
[Graeme Wood: Nobody likes John Bolton]
In this second Trump term, things keep happening that would have seemed outrageous—impossible—just a few months before. Every day, there’s a new movement away from the rule of law, toward arbitrary and corrupt personal rule. Among the fearful questions pressing upon the country: How does America ever turn back?
After the first Trump presidency, the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress made a collective decision about what to do next. Individuals who broke the law on January 6, 2021, would face prosecution for their crimes. Congress would investigate Trump’s role in those crimes and publicize the findings. Congress would also revise the Electoral Count Act to clarify beyond even bad-faith doubt: No, the incumbent vice president cannot overturn a federal election, as Trump pressured Mike Pence to attempt in 2021. Beyond that—and unlike after Watergate or Teapot Dome—Congress passed no major reform legislation. It did not, for example, move to stop future presidents from directing Secret Service funds into their own pockets, or from ignoring conflicts-of-interest laws.
After the discovery that Trump had retained government records, the National Archives quietly negotiated with him for 17 months before at last resorting to legal action in August 2022. The federal government hesitated for nearly two years before commencing legal action against Trump for the January 6 attack. He faced aggressive legal actions from state governments and from wronged private individuals, but the federal executive-branch response to his misdeeds and crimes was slow and reluctant. The federal courts were more reluctant still. The Supreme Court invented—more or less out of thin air—a new doctrine of presidential criminal immunity to protect Trump against legal risk for his January 6 actions.
There was a certain logic to this widespread loathness to act. From the perspective of, say, 2022, Constitution-respecting Americans could congratulate themselves that their system had withstood and overcome the Trump test. Trump’s party lost control of the House of Representatives in 2018. Trump was then himself ejected from office in 2020. When his abuses of his authority came to court, federal judges—including those appointed by Trump’s own party—struck them down. Trump was dissuaded by his own appointees from dissolving NAFTA and quitting NATO. His scheme to overthrow the 2020 election failed. He sabotaged the Biden transition every way he could, but he ultimately did exit office on January 20, 2021.
Despite possessing only a thin Democratic majority in the House and Senate, Joe Biden enacted an impressive mass of programs and policies. Meanwhile, Republican donors raised hundreds of millions of dollars to nominate Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and put the Trump era behind them. Why look backward?
Those cheerful calculations look sadly wrong from the perspective of 2025. Trump was reelected in 2024, this time as the unquestioned leader of the Republican Party and with the support of aides and officials ready to implement his most outrageous whims.
Here’s an example of the contrast between then and now: In his first term, Trump attempted to retaliate against Bolton. Trump fired Bolton in September 2018. Bolton then wrote a book that, among other things, revealed details about Trump’s extortion of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Over three months in early 2019, career officials reviewed Bolton’s book for possible misuse of classified materials. Bolton edited his manuscript as directed and scheduled publication for June 2019. At that point, Trump political appointees ordered a second review to demand excision of hundreds of pages to which the previous reviewers had not objected. Bolton refused to comply with the second review. The Trump administration sued to block the book altogether. It lost, in a decision handed down by Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee and one of the most conservative judges on the federal bench. Lamberth warned Bolton and his publisher that if the book were later proven to contain classified information, they might forfeit any profits from the book. Five years later, no such showing has been made.
Bolton prevailed in 2019 because relevant parts of the U.S. government were still staffed by nonpartisan officials who honored their oath to the Constitution even when that conflicted with the president’s wishes.
But in Trump’s second term, the government is changing fast. In his first half year as president, Trump has systematically purged the federal law-enforcement apparatus of rule-obeying public servants. He is replacing them as quickly as he is able with people chosen for their loyalty, without regard for their other qualifications. At the FBI, Trump forced out his own first-term appointees to replace them with absurdly unqualified loyalists chosen for their record of complying with any Trump wish, no matter how glaringly unlawful. Over at Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Trump is building an enormous paramilitary force staffed by people hired for pro-Trump zeal—and who may ignore written law. The administration has claimed an emergency to collect hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue without the approval of Congress. Post-Watergate ethics rules have collapsed beyond recovery as Trump and his family collect hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, gratuities, and payoffs.
[Read: The Bolton raid feels like a warning]
Even if the House changes hands in 2026—even if a president is elected in 2028 who possesses a healthy respect for the rule of law—Trump’s second-term perversion of the government will not be easily undone. Yes, of course the next president must immediately fire Patel from the FBI—but will Trump supporters understand the difference between the firing of Patel for the abuse of his office, and Trump’s firing of his own appointee Christopher Wray for resisting the abuse of that same office? Trump is teaching his many supporters that public office is just a game of revenge, that there’s no difference between the government pleading with an ex-president for 17 months to return stolen secret documents and a serving president using claims about documents to target a critic for retaliation.
The American system depends upon public understanding that law is bigger than politics, that right and wrong exist independent of who screws whom. Trump’s life and career are based on discrediting the distinction between right and wrong, and on convincing himself and others that the only reality is who screws whom. As of right now, he’s winning that messaging debate, regardless of what happens to him personally. After Teapot Dome, after Watergate, the supporters of the implicated president accepted that he had done wrong, that the guilty should be punished, and that these misdeeds should never be repeated. Any aftermath of the Trump presidency seems more likely to resemble the aftermath of the Civil War: The reactionary losers who tried to overthrow the U.S. Constitution may acknowledge themselves beaten, but they won’t acknowledge themselves wrong.
If they won’t acknowledge that, what confidence can anyone feel that they won’t try again if they get the chance?
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