Broadsheet

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 (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 career prosecutors who were fired or departed from the Justice Department since the start of Trump’s second term.”

As social media user ctrl+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 depended on what they had 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.

One hundred and fifty 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 Court House, 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 crop 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 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, southern white leaders resurrected the ideology the North had defeated during the war. They changed the memory of what had 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 postwar 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 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 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 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 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 is not illegal,” Nixon told interviewer David Frost in 1977. He went even 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 advisors ignored both U.S. sanctions on Iran’s revolutionary government 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 attorney general, he backed Bush’s pardons of the eleven 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, shattering 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.

“[W]here, 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. “[I]n 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.”

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Notes:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/11/08/after-midterms-justice-dept-braces-barrage-congressional-scrutiny/

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-939_e2pg.pdf

Lawrence E. Walsh, “Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Matters,” vol. 1: Investigations and Prosecutions, August 4, 1993, at Federal Bulletin Board of US Government Printing Office, at https://www.fas.

Elizabeth Varon, Appomattox: Victory, Defeat and Freedom at the End of the Civil War (Oxford University Press, 2013).

Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant, vol. 2 of Memoirs and Selected Letters, selected by Mary Drake McFeely and William S. McFeely (New York: Library of America, 1990), p. 735, 740.

Trump’s Truth:

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Bluesky:

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Up and found myself very well, and so by coach to White Hall and there met all my fellow officers, and so to the Duke, where, when we came into his closett, he told us that Mr. Pepys was so altered with his new perriwigg that he did not know him. So to our discourse, and among and above other things we were taken up in talking upon Sir J. Lawson’s coming home, he being come to Portsmouth; and Captain Berkely is come to towne with a letter from the Duana of Algier to the King, wherein they do demand again the searching of our ships and taking out of strangers, and their goods; and that what English ships are taken without the Duke’s pass they will detain (though it be flat contrary to the words of the peace) as prizes, till they do hear from our King, which they advise him may be speedy. And this they did the very next day after they had received with great joy the Grand Seignor’s confirmation of the Peace from Constantinople by Captain Berkely; so that there is no command nor certainty to be had of these people. The King is resolved to send his will by a fleete of ships; and it is thought best and speediest to send these very ships that are now come home, five sail of good ships, back again after cleaning, victualling, and paying them. But it is a pleasant thing to think how their Basha, Shavan Aga, did tear his hair to see the soldiers order things thus; for (just like his late predecessor) when they see the evil of war with England, then for certain they complain to the Grand Seignor of him, and cut his head off: this he is sure of, and knows as certain.

Thence to Westminster Hall, where I met with Mr. Pierce, chyrurgeon; and among other things he asked me seriously whether I knew anything of my Lord’s being out of favour with the King; and told me, that for certain the King do take mighty notice of my Lord’s living obscurely in a corner not like himself, and becoming the honour that he is come to. I was sorry to hear, and the truth is, from my Lord’s discourse among his people (which I am told) of the uncertainty of princes’ favours, and his melancholy keeping from Court, I am doubtful of some such thing; but I seemed wholly strange to him in it, but will make my use of it.

He told me also how loose the Court is, nobody looking after business, but every man his lust and gain; and how the King is now become besotted upon Mrs. Stewart, that he gets into corners, and will be with her half an houre together kissing her to the observation of all the world; and she now stays by herself and expects it, as my Lady Castlemaine did use to do; to whom the King, he says, is still kind, so as now and then he goes to have a chat with her as he believes; but with no such fondness as he used to do. But yet it is thought that this new wench is so subtle, that she lets him not do any thing than is safe to her, but yet his doting is so great that, Pierce tells me, it is verily thought if the Queene had died, he would have married her.

The Duke of Monmouth is to have part of the Cockpitt new built for lodgings for him, and they say to be made Captain of the Guards in the room of my Lord Gerard.

Having thus talked with him, there comes into the Hall Creed and Ned Pickering, and after a turne or two with them, it being noon, I walked with them two to the King’s Head ordinary, and there we dined; little discourse but what was common, only that the Duke of Yorke is a very, desperate huntsman, but I was ashamed of Pickering, who could not forbear having up my Lord Sandwich now and then in the most paltry matters abominable.

Thence I took leave of them, and so having taken up something at my wife’s tailor’s, I home by coach and there to my office, whither Shales came and I had much discourse with him about the business of the victualling, and thence in the evening to the Coffee-house, and there sat till by and by, by appointment Will brought me word that his uncle Blackburne was ready to speak with me. So I went down to him, and he and I to a taverne hard by, and there I begun to speak to Will friendlily, advising him how to carry himself now he is going from under my roof, without any reflections upon the occasion from whence his removal arose. This his uncle seconded, and after laying down to him his duty to me, and what I expect of him, in a discourse of about a quarter of an houre or more, we agreed upon his going this week, towards the latter (end) of the week, and so dismissed him, and Mr. Blackburne and I fell to talk of many things, wherein I did speak so freely to him in many things agreeing with his sense that he was very open to me.

First, in that of religion, he makes it great matter of prudence for the King and Council to suffer liberty of conscience; and imputes the losse of Hungary to the Turke from the Emperor’s denying them this liberty of their religion.

He says that many pious ministers of the word of God, some thousands of them, do now beg their bread: and told me how highly the present clergy carry themselves every where, so as that they are hated and laughed at by everybody; among other things, for their excommunications, which they send upon the least occasions almost that can be. And I am convinced in my judgement, not only from his discourse, but my thoughts in general, that the present clergy will never heartily go down with the generality of the commons of England; they have been so used to liberty and freedom, and they are so acquainted with the pride and debauchery of the present clergy. He did give me many stories of the affronts which the clergy receive in all places of England from the gentry and ordinary persons of the parish.

He do tell me what the City thinks of General Monk, as of a most perfidious man that hath betrayed every body, and the King also; who, as he thinks, and his party, and so I have heard other good friends of the King say, it might have been better for the King to have had his hands a little bound for the present, than be forced to bring such a crew of poor people about him, and be liable to satisfy the demands of every one of them.

He told me that to his knowledge (being present at every meeting at the Treaty at the Isle of Wight), that the old King did confess himself overruled and convinced in his judgement against the Bishopps, and would have suffered and did agree to exclude the service out of the churches, nay his own chappell; and that he did always say, that this he did not by force, for that he would never abate one inch by any vyolence; but what he did was out of his reason and judgement. He tells me that the King by name, with all his dignities, is prayed for by them that they call Fanatiques, as heartily and powerfully as in any of the other churches that are thought better: and that, let the King think what he will, it is them that must helpe him in the day of warr. For as they are the most, so generally they are the most substantial sort of people, and the soberest; and did desire me to observe it to my Lord Sandwich, among other things, that of all the old army now you cannot see a man begging about the street; but what? You shall have this captain turned a shoemaker; the lieutenant, a baker; this a brewer; that a haberdasher; this common soldier, a porter; and every man in his apron and frock, &c., as if they never had done anything else: whereas the others go with their belts and swords, swearing and cursing, and stealing; running into people’s houses, by force oftentimes, to carry away something; and this is the difference between the temper of one and the other; and concludes (and I think with some reason,) that the spirits of the old parliament soldiers are so quiett and contented with God’s providences, that the King is safer from any evil meant him by them one thousand times more than from his own discontented Cavalier.

And then to the publique management of business: it is done, as he observes, so loosely and so carelessly, that the kingdom can never be happy with it, every man looking after himself, and his owne lust and luxury; among other things he instanced in the business of money, he do believe that half of what money the Parliament gives the King is not so much as gathered. And to the purpose he told me how the Bellamys (who had some of the Northern counties assigned them for their debt for the petty warrant victualling) have often complained to him that they cannot get it collected, for that nobody minds, or, if they do, they won’t pay it in. Whereas (which is a very remarkable thing,) he hath been told by some of the Treasurers at Warr here of late, to whom the most of the 120,000l. monthly was paid, that for most months the payments were gathered so duly, that they seldom had so much or more than 40s., or the like, short in the whole collection; whereas now the very Commissioners for Assessments and other publique payments are such persons, and those that they choose in the country so like themselves, that from top to bottom there is not a man carefull of any thing, or if he be, he is not solvent; that what between the beggar and the knave, the King is abused the best part of all his revenue.

From thence we began to talk of the Navy, and particularly of Sir W. Pen, of whose rise to be a general I had a mind to be informed. He told me he was always a conceited man, and one that would put the best side outward, but that it was his pretence of sanctity that brought him into play. Lawson, and Portman, and the Fifth-monarchy men, among whom he was a great brother, importuned that he might be general; and it was pleasant to see how Blackburne himself did act it, how when the Commissioners of the Admiralty would enquire of the captains and admirals of such and such men, how they would with a sigh and casting up the eyes say, “Such a man fears the Lord,” or, “I hope such a man hath the Spirit of God,” and such things as that. But he tells me that there was a cruel articling against Pen after one fight, for cowardice, in putting himself within a coyle of cables, of which he had much ado to acquit himself: and by great friends did it, not without remains of guilt, but that his brethren had a mind to pass it by, and Sir H. Vane did advise him to search his heart, and see whether this fault or a greater sin was not the occasion of this so great tryall. And he tells me, that what Pen gives out about Cromwell’s sending and entreating him to go to Jamaica, is very false; he knows the contrary: besides, the Protector never was a man that needed to send for any man, specially such a one as he, twice. He tells me that the business of Jamaica did miscarry absolutely by his pride, and that when he was in the Tower he would cry like a child. This he says of his own personal knowledge, and lastly tells me that just upon the turne, when Monk was come from the North to the City, and did begin to think of bringing in the King, Pen was then turned Quaker. This he is most certain of. He tells me that Lawson was never counted any thing but only a seaman, and a stout man, but a false man, and that now he appears the greatest hypocrite in the world. And Pen the same. He tells me that it is much talked of, that the King intends to legitimate the Duke of Monmouth; and that he has not, nor his friends of his persuasion, have any hopes of getting their consciences at liberty but by God Almighty’s turning of the King’s heart, which they expect, and are resolved to live and die in quiett hopes of it; but never to repine, or act any thing more than by prayers towards it. And that not only himself but all of them have, and are willing at any time to take the oaths of Allegiance and Supremacy.

Thus far, and upon many more things, we had discoursed when some persons in a room hard by began to sing in three parts very finely and to play upon a flagilette so pleasantly that my discourse afterwards was but troublesome, and I could not attend it, and so, anon, considering of a sudden the time of night, we found it 11 o’clock, which I thought it had not been by two hours, but we were close in talk, and so we rose, he having drunk some wine and I some beer and sugar, and so by a fair moonshine home and to bed, my wife troubled with tooth ache.

Mr. Blackburne observed further to me, some certain notice that he had of the present plot so much talked of; that he was told by Mr. Rushworth, how one Captain Oates, a great discoverer, did employ several to bring and seduce others into a plot, and that one of his agents met with one that would not listen to him, nor conceal what he had offered him, but so detected the trapan. This, he says, is most true.

He also, among other instances how the King is served, did much insist upon the cowardice and corruption of the King’s guards and militia, which to be sure will fail the King, as they have done already, when there will be occasion for them.

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