When Trump became the Republican party’s nominee for President earlier this year, there was plenty of renewed chatter about how, if he won the election, it’d created unprecedented strain on the rule of law: a term that went mainstream after the Capitol riots on January 6, 2020.
Then, on 5 November, Trump won. Then the Republicans won the Senate, and later secured the House, conferring on the President-Elect a broad mandate to strip away at the establishment and, some fear, exact retribution against those who sought to bring him down.
‘The rule of law is going to be under assault,’ William Howell, a professor of American politics at the University of Chicago told the International Bar Association.
In the weeks since some will feel those fears have been proven justified.
The President-Elect nominated Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, meaning that a man at the centre of sex trafficking and drugs probes could have, likely would have, been the chief legal adviser to the government had he not withdrawn last week. He tapped self-professed anti-establishment business magnates Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to spearhead a new non-governmental ‘Department of Government Efficiency’, or ‘DOGE’, formalising the mechanics to clipping some $500 billion off public spending.
These are the byproducts of a narrative that has successfully popularised the idea that established ideas and institutions have failed to serve the people and, therefore, should be dismantled. ‘Move fast and break things’ is the big tech clarion call that has now broken into government.
So it doesn’t take all that much to paint the rule of law—a concept that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention but one we all take for granted—as an attempt to limit America’s greatness...
