The True Face of - Democracy in Brazil

 Fogy’s Unflinching Gaze: The True Face of Brazilian “Democracy”.*

With a lot of help from my AI friends

Brazil’s democracy, since the 1985 transition, stands as a towering edifice built on a shaky, uneven foundation. It is a democracy of chronic contradictions, where formal institutional strength coexists with deep social and political fragility.

Its flaws are not new; they are structural inheritances from a transition that never fully broke with the past. Unlike Argentina’s post-Malvinas reckoning, Brazil’s move away from military rule was a slow and managed opening — the abertura — orchestrated by the generals themselves. The old guard was never purged, and the architects of repression were neither tried nor disgraced. What emerged was not a clean slate but a rebranded continuation, with authoritarian reflexes still woven into the democratic fabric. Even today, the military’s influence, though often dormant, remains a latent presence in political life.

This fragile architecture rests atop one of the most unequal societies on earth. Brazil’s staggering social and economic inequality, a direct legacy of slavery and exclusion, has created a democracy of formal rights but unequal realities. Political representation is theoretically universal, yet in practice distorted by disparities in education, income, and access to justice. The promise of citizenship collides daily with the persistence of privilege. The Brazilian state, too, mirrors this imbalance — powerful at the center, but weak and often absent at the margins. Across the Amazon, in the vast interior, and in the favelas of its major cities, the state’s presence is intermittent, sometimes replaced altogether by militias and criminal groups. In these territories, democracy is not simply fragile; it is conditional.

The political machinery that should sustain this democracy often clogs under the weight of its own design. Brazil’s system combines an overwhelming proliferation of political parties with a presidency endowed with near-imperial powers. Governing requires constant negotiation — a relentless exchange of ministries, favors, and budgetary concessions in return for congressional support. This system of presidencialismo de coalizão has been described, not unfairly, as the art of organized horse-trading. It is an arrangement that rewards opportunism, blurs accountability, and transforms politics into a market of influence. Parties, rather than acting as ideological vehicles, frequently operate as franchises — rentable structures serving local patrons and business interests.

Corruption, in this context, is not an aberration but a structural feature. The great scandals — Mensalão, Petrolão, and the epic saga of Lava Jato — revealed the same pattern repeated at scale: the diversion of public funds through state enterprises to finance campaigns and personal fortunes alike. These revelations confirmed what many Brazilians already believed — that politics itself had been monetized. The result has been a profound corrosion of public trust. When all parties appear complicit, cynicism replaces conviction, and voters become susceptible to those who promise to burn down the system entirely. It was precisely this exhaustion that opened the door to the populist wave of recent years.

What began as a judicial crusade against graft soon hardened into a political weapon. The moral fury that once targeted systemic corruption became entangled with ideological battles, deepening polarization. From the protests of 2013 to the turmoil of impeachment and pandemic politics, Brazil’s public sphere has been saturated with mutual suspicion. The debate shifted from policy to purity — from the complex art of governance to the simplistic duel between “the corrupt” and “the righteous.”

And yet, despite it all, the structure holds. Elections remain fiercely contested and largely credible. Institutions, though battered, have withstood populist assaults. Civil society and the press remain vigilant, and the 1988 Constitution — an imperfect but vital framework — continues to serve as a bulwark against collapse.

Brazil’s democracy endures less because of flawless design than through the sheer persistence of its people. It votes, it protests, it adapts. But it does so against the undertow of inequality, institutional frailty, and a political culture addicted to transactional survival. The republic’s survival is proof of vitality; its malaise, proof that the work of true democratization is far from finished.

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The True Face of - Democracy in the US

 Fogy’s Unflinching Gaze: The True Face of American “Democracy”.*

With a lot of help from my AI friends

So, we come to the grand curtain call. After dissecting the Democrats’ feckless moralizing, the GOP’s financial rigor mortis, and the sheer, glittering ego of Trumpism, Fogy must finally look at the stage itself—the American system, or what remains of that once-glorious, Enlightenment-era contraption. The true face of American democracy is not the Statue of Liberty but a cracked, dusty gargoyle clinging to the side of a cathedral whose roof is already sagging.

The American experiment was never built for efficiency; it was built for paralysis. The Founders—wise, fearful men who understood too well the dangers of power—constructed a machine of endless friction. What was meant to ensure careful deliberation has become a weapon of self-destruction. Checks and balances have devolved into a kind of vetocracy, where every impulse meets its equal and opposite resentment. The majority can barely breathe without the minority reaching for a filibuster or a lawsuit. Long-term thinking, once a civic virtue, has become a myth. Nothing that requires short-term pain for long-term gain—be it infrastructure, fiscal reform, or climate action—can survive an election cycle that begins the moment the last one ends.

And then there is the Senate—an antique so warped it gives a few hundred thousand residents of Wyoming the same power as tens of millions of Californians. It is not governance; it is an institutional hostage crisis in which the rural minority forever holds the knife at the urban majority’s throat.

Money, of course, is the bloodstream of this faltering democracy. Let us dispense with the polite fiction of campaign finance and call it what it is: a rich man’s game. The only thing more sacred than the Constitution is the astronomical cost of political competition itself. Elections cost billions, and that money comes from somewhere—a tiny, insulated stratum of wealth that treats political donations not as generosity but as a legitimate form of bribery. Representatives, once elected, are not beholden to the people who queued in the rain to vote but to those who covered the five-figure catering bill at their fundraiser.

None of this is new, but it has accelerated beyond parody. The endless partisan warfare is perfect camouflage. While the tribes scream about pronouns, flags, and bathrooms, the quiet, efficient work of looting the treasury continues in the back room, guided by lobbyists who now openly draft the legislation. The public spectacle is a jester’s dance—a noisy distraction to conceal the steady, unglamorous machinery of wealth extraction.

Yet the dirtiest component of all is the erosion of reality itself. The system functioned only so long as its participants respected a few unwritten rules: accept the vote, respect the courts, and maintain a shared sense of what is real. That era is gone. The game has moved outside the game. When one side begins to treat election rules—gerrymandering, ballot access, voter registration—as legitimate political weapons, democracy becomes sabotage. When a political leader can declare the press an enemy of the people and the courts illegitimate, the system is no longer merely dysfunctional; it is degraded.

And beneath all this lies the great sediment of cynicism. The American voter has come to believe, with weary accuracy, that the system is rigged. They assume their leaders are self-serving, that corporations pull the strings, that the whole pageant is performed for someone else’s benefit. The only thing keeping the center from collapsing entirely is the quiet fear that the complete upheaval a quarter of them secretly crave would almost certainly lead to something worse.

What remains, then, is theater—grand, expensive, hollow. A democracy reduced to choreography, still capable of applause but devoid of conviction. America’s political system is a stage lit by nostalgia and kept alive by habit. The show continues, such as it is—until the audience, finally bored or broken, stops pretending to believe in the play.

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The True Face of - Trumpism

Fogy’s Singular Obsession: The Gold-Plated Blister (A Study in Trumpism).*

With a lot of help from my AI friends

Fogy notes that while America’s two ancient parties—the Democrats and the Republicans—deserve historical autopsies, Trumpism demands something far more urgent: an exorcism. It is not an ideology forged in the slow furnace of centuries but a sudden, spectacular fever dream born of mass disillusionment. “This is just politics!” cry the desperate establishmentarians, as if the world has simply gone slightly mad. Fogy disagrees. It seems painfully clear—and, I suspect, to anyone who remembers a time before reality was optional—that Trumpism is merely the grotesque, funhouse-mirror reflection of America’s deepest, longest-festering psychological wounds.

Trumpism did not spring fully formed from the head of a Greek god. It oozed from the cultural crevices abandoned by everyone else, a thick residue of resentment, nostalgia, and neglect. It is, in essence, a three-part cocktail of poison. First came the Abandoned Man—the Rust Belt worker, the rural resident, the person who felt their dignity and job were outsourced by the GOP’s cold, globalist piety. They were told the Free Market would make them rich; instead, they got a pink slip and a cheap Chinese T-shirt. Then came the Culture Warrior—the socially conservative voter who watched the Democrats weaponize identity and dismiss vast swathes of the country as inherently backward or irredeemably deplorable. They wanted respect, and they got a sneer. And finally, the Nihilist—the exhausted center that simply stopped believing anything the government, the press, or the elites said. They found, in the Duck-in-Chief’s chaos and crassness, a perverse kind of honesty: the comfort of seeing the con laid bare.

The so-called doctrine of Trumpism is not policy but pout—a governance of grievance, an administration of impulse. Its trade stance was never strategic, merely the erection of tariffs like medieval toll bridges meant to punish countries he disliked and to flatter the gut instincts of the abandoned man. Immigration was not border management but weaponized nativism: a symbolic wall, both literal and psychological, promising a return to an imagined, ethnically pristine past. And the state? Never the smaller government once worshipped by conservatives, but a demand for executive overlordship—absolute, unconstrained personal power, wielded against the “Deep State,” the press, and the rule of law itself. The federal government, under this fever, became a machine of personal retribution.

Trumpism is not about what it builds but what it destroys. It is a sickness, a collective psychological surrender to the notion that chaos and anger are the only honest responses left. If Fogy must concede one mitigation, it is this: the terrifying success of Trumpism was not solely the Duck’s dark genius, but the inevitable result of a massive, decades-long failure by both major parties to tend to the emotional infrastructure of the nation. The vacuum left by their managerial arrogance and ideological rigidity was always going to be filled by something loud, ugly, and entirely unexpected.

What emerged was the ultimate American celebrity spectacle turned governing philosophy—a colossal, gold-plated blister on the national psyche, lanced by a leader whose only consistent ideology is the glorification of his own self-pity and the punishment of anyone who dares to contradict him. It is not merely a party but the collective, furious id of a tired empire, lumbering its hideous cargo of ego across the globe and demanding that the world not only look but applaud. And watch we must, for the spectacle is far from over.

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The True Face of - The Republicans

An Honest Admission: The Republican Party’s Shifting Sands (or, The Grand Contradiction)

With a lot of help from my AI friends

Recently, Fogy completed a dispassionate—though appropriately cynical—survey of the Democrats’ slippery history. Now, we turn our gaze to the other half of the American duopoly: the Republican Party, an entity equally skilled at moral rebranding and ideological amnesia.

“Principled conservatism!” is hardly the phrase that leaps to mind. It seems obvious to Fogy—and, I suspect, to any observer capable of holding two thoughts simultaneously—that the GOP is less a coherent ideology than a century-and-a-half-long game of political three-card monte.

The party was founded in 1854 on a moral crusade against slavery, a moment of genuine, high-minded principle. The early GOP of Abraham Lincoln represented the North’s industrial, capitalist, and abolitionist interests, making it the progressive force of its time. To judge today’s party by those original abolitionist standards is perhaps unfair, but then again, the Republicans themselves are quick to drape themselves in Lincoln’s mantle while executing policies he would scarcely recognize.

And is this institutional shape-shifting an isolated case? Hardly. One might look at the transition of the Whig party into the modern GOP itself, or the sudden, convenient conversion of any political class that finds itself on the cusp of power. Principles are easily discarded when proximity to power promises a longer stay at the trough.

After the Civil War, the GOP became the party of big business and tariffs—a friend to the industrialists, a foe to the agrarian populists. Figures like Theodore Roosevelt briefly dragged the party into a “Progressive” movement, fighting trusts and conserving land, only for the party’s soul to return swiftly to the embrace of limited government and market fundamentalism.

The final, decisive pivot—the one that defined the modern grotesque—came in the mid-to-late 20th century. Figures like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan consciously lured the disgruntled conservative Southern Democrats into the GOP tent by opposing the civil rights movement and championing a blend of social conservatism and radical supply-side economics. The party of Lincoln, the Great Emancipator, became the preferred home for those who had most vehemently opposed emancipation’s legal and social consequences.

Americans themselves, and particularly the modern Republicans, have internalized this contradiction: they advocate small government while demanding massive, unprecedented power for their executive; they preach fiscal austerity while running up titanic deficits. What can be done? Very little, it seems. We are left watching an entity that began by freeing men now obsessively focused on freeing corporations from regulation.

An honest admission, then: the Republican Party has never been old, nor particularly grand—only perpetually reborn in pursuit of power.

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The true face of - The Democrats

A Whiggish Admission: The Democrats’ Long, Strange Trip (Indeed).*

With a lot of help from my AI friends

Fogy has long wanted to peer into the grubby, sprawling history of the Democratic Party — a political beast so old it practically predates coherent thought. Those who follow Fogy’s pronouncements might expect the usual lack of reverence for institutions that survive mainly by shedding their skin and forgetting their sins.

“Evolutionary success!” is not quite the word. It seems painfully clear to Fogy — and, I suspect, to any rational observer not dazzled by the orange-and-blue glow of perpetual American self-congratulation — that the Democrats are a nation’s contradictions made flesh.

It’s almost unfair to judge the modern, supposedly progressive party by its noxious, slave-owning, states’-rights beginnings under Andrew Jackson in the 1820s. Yet for more than a century, it was a sanctuary for the worst kind of reactionaries — the Solid South, fiercely defending Jim Crow long after the Civil War. That such an entity could survive, and then pivot, is less a tribute to American democracy than a testament to its bottomless pragmatism — or perhaps its bottomless cynicism.

And is this chameleon-like survival an isolated case? Hardly. If not the blueprint, it is at least the echo of other ideological creatures that endured through sheer adaptability. One might glance at the Soviet Union’s transformation into modern Russia, or the opportunistic shape-shifting of global finance; all prove that power will warp principle into whatever grotesque form ensures survival.

The grand mid-20th-century pivot, when FDR forged the New Deal coalition of urban workers and immigrants, was merely a change of costume. When the South finally bolted in the 1960s over civil rights, the party simply abandoned its most shameful tradition and rebranded itself as the champion of the marginalized, conveniently adopting the language of federal intervention and social justice.

The Americans — and particularly the modern Democrats — have perfected this art of ideological amnesia, convinced that their current platform somehow washes away the historical grime. It is not entirely their fault, of course. When such a tidal wave of righteousness carries a nation forward, complacency sets in — the comforting belief that past sins cannot possibly contaminate present virtue.

What can be done, you might ask? Very little, it seems. We are left to watch the great political machine lumber on, hoping that the party’s current sickness — the heavy dependence on virtue signalling and performative politics — does not infect the genuine and necessary goals it still claims to champion.

The cure, as always, begins with the courage to admit that the “oldest party” is really just the oldest survivor, shedding its skin not for moral clarity, but for the simplest of human motives — the will to endure.

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Carfuffle 2025 - October #1

A Singapore Sauna of Surprises.*

Sunday in Singapore saw the Heat Hazard warning for the first time in a long time. Temperatures off-track, and especially on-track were considered high enough to warrant the use of cooling devices if requested and ballast for cars whose drivers did not want to use the vests.

The mighty McLaren cars faltered once again having forsaken a lot of the dominance they had shown through most of the year. Not exactly a failing as such, but an indication of how frequently competing teams are able to catch up and match the fastest on the grid. Not an easy car to drive now; so much like the woes that held RedBull back for so long.

So a third and fourth were all they could manage, possibly enough to keep the nipping Verstappen at bay for a little longer while more than sufficient to guarantee back-to-back team championships.

Congrats to the breakfast favourites. Papaya rules!!

The lone Bull once again unleashed another round of serious challenges, but with only 6 more rounds left, chipping away at this rate makes a fifth championship seem beyond even his reach.

The Mercs were unleashed with an unexplainable burst of consistent speed in even those hot conditions. A well deserved win and 5th place to boot. Second in the team's championship seems a lot more secure than before.

Then the unstoppable crimson devils proved even more so when the Ham got docked 5 seconds for too much corner cutting. 

The brakes were done he complained while the Charlesmobile was nowhere close to previous years. 

With retirement looming, the Green Giant keeps punching above his weight, while his teammate keeps… strolling. Alonso — you either love him or hate him — but the GOATs are still bleating.

Among the newer names, fortunes were mixed. On a circuit new to many, some shone while others slid from hero to zero. Bearman rubbed salt in Ocon’s wounds; Sainz rediscovered consistency as Albon lost grip on his. Hadjar — Red Bull’s future hope — fared only slightly better than last week’s Racing Bull darling Liam, who crashed twice and disappointed more.

The butterfly effect seems to have abandoned the green Stakes, leaving them perilously close to the flailing French.

All in all a hot sticky and tricky race where most must have been glad to see the chequered flag and plunge into well deserved ice baths.

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Told you so!!!

Fogy’s Humble Admission (Not).*

Yesterday I was happy to post the New York Times article on American lawmakers’ opinions of the Duck (POTUS). Those who read it might have noticed a few familiar points — echoes of Fogy’s long-standing dislike and distaste for this particular person.

“Told you so!” isn’t really fair. It seems painfully obvious to Fogy — and, I suspect, to many observers around the world not hypnotised by the messy and greedy machinations of what appears to be a nation teetering on its own contradictions.

It’s hardly fair, too, to throw everyone that once-great nation represents under a bus simply because they were born there or live there. Yet so many years of carefully crafted manipulation of minds and souls have led to what the world now sees.

And is it an isolated case? Hardly. If not the forerunner, it is at least the follower of other modern states that have bred systems and people capable of moulding nations and politicians alike into the same grotesque shapes. Russia, Israel, and Venezuela quickly spring to mind — an odd grouping, perhaps, but all have used strong-arm tactics to sway outcomes and dominate headlines.

Topping those same headlines we now see the UAE-financed Air Force One lumbering its hideous cargo of ego across the globe, poisoning a planet that was once on track to recovery.

The Americans themselves have developed a more ego-centric approach to the world, convinced that all serve their mighty empire — shades of Rome, methinks, and probably not far from the truth.

It is not their fault, of course. When such domination wells up and carries a team forward, complacency sets in and a “It can’t happen to us!” mindset takes over. It was not by accident that so many Germans remained ignorant of what was happening around them during WWII — and one might argue that the modern Duck-in-Chief has carried this tradition of collective blindness into twenty-first-century America.

What can be done, you might ask? Very little, it seems. Sometimes it’s best to ride out the fiercest of storms so that a clearer assessment can be made — of when the bandages must be applied and what vaccines might be needed to cure all and sundry of such sicknesses.

Heavy-handed, perhaps, to call it an illness. But it does seem that this nation and its people are sick, struggling to find a cure that doesn’t infect the rest of the world.

Yes, I’ve left some obvious situations and hotspots off the table. Posts will come in time. So keep tracking the POV.

The cure, as always, begins with the courage to admit the infection.

This image borrowed from the web

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Nature’s oddities we can forgive. It’s when imitation becomes policy that things turn toxic.

NYT - ‘Bow to the Emperor’ By Emily Bazelon Oct. 6, 2025

 

Credit...Photo illustration by Derek Brahney

‘Bow to the Emperor’: We Asked 50 Legal Experts About the Trump Presidency

Before the election, we surveyed the legal establishment about what a second Trump term could mean for the rule of law. A year later, they’re very, very worried.

Credit...Photo illustration by Derek Brahney

By Emily Bazelon

• Oct. 6, 2025 Updated 9:53 a.m. ET

Last year, in the months before the 2024 presidential election, the magazine surveyed 50 members of what might be called the Washington legal establishment about their expectations for the Justice Department and the rule of law if Donald Trump were re-elected. The group was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. They had worked as high-level officials for every president since Ronald Reagan.

A majority of our respondents told us they were alarmed about a potential second Trump term given the strain he put on the legal system the first time around. But several dissenters countered that those fears were overblown. One former Trump official predicted that the Justice Department would be led by lawyers like those in the first term — elite, conservative and independent. “It’s hard to be a bad-faith actor at the Justice Department,” he said at the time. “And the president likes the Ivy League and Supreme Court clerkships on résumés.”

Eight months into his second term, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to those beliefs. “What’s happening is anathema to everything we’ve ever stood for in the Department of Justice,” said another former official who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Trump’s first term.

We recently returned to our group with a new survey and follow-up interviews about Trump’s impact on the rule of law since retaking office. The responses captured almost universal fear and anguish over the transformation of the Justice Department into a tool of the White House. Just as chillingly, the new survey reflects near consensus that most of the guardrails inside and outside the Justice Department, which in the past counterbalanced executive power, have all but fallen away. The indictment of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom Trump ordered the Justice Department to charge, represents a misuse of power for many of our respondents that they hoped never to see in the United States.

These respondents include former attorneys general, solicitors general and their deputies in the Justice Department and White House counsels, as well as former U.S. attorneys and retired federal judges from across the country. (Forty-two people who took the survey last year did so again, and we added eight more to replace those who did not. The group is again evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.) Some of the former officials we surveyed, in both parties, are speaking out against the wrongs they see unfolding despite the professional and personal risks.

But many of them — more so than last year — don’t want to speak on the record. These are people with stature in their world, custodians of the American Bar who have represented clients of all stripes, taught law students, served on professional committees. But now they’re worried about retribution, for their law firms or their family members, if they draw Trump’s ire.

Our new survey channeled their collectively grim state of mind. All but one of the respondents rated Trump’s second term as a greater or much greater threat to the rule of law than his first term. They consistently characterized the president’s abuses of power — wielding the law to justify his wishes — as being far worse than they imagined before his re-election.

And every single one of the 50 respondents believe that Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have used the Justice Department to go after the president’s political and personal enemies and provide favors to his allies.

To measure the degree to which the Justice Department has changed in Trump’s second term, several people pointed to what happened at the end of his first presidency. Trump insisted that the department investigate “fact-free claims,” as Bill Barr, the attorney general at the time, wrote in his memoir, that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election because of voter fraud. Until then, Barr had been Trump’s close ally. But in late December 2020, he resigned rather than give in to the president’s demands. When Trump continued to push for the baseless investigation, other remaining top officials said that they too would resign rather than use the department to seek to overturn the election.

Because of the lawyers in the room, the safeguards held. But if such a scenario were to play out in Trump’s second term, the same result is “unthinkable,” said Peter Keisler, who was an acting attorney general under President George W. Bush.

“No one in the room now will say no,” said the Justice Department official from Trump’s first term. The lesson Trump drew from his first term, the former official continued, is that the lawyers who talked him out of “bad ideas” were the wrong kind of lawyers. “The president has set it up so that the people who are there are predisposed to be loyalists who will help him do what he wants.”

That is not how things are supposed to work. Since Watergate, presidents have continued to nominate the attorney general and to set policy priorities for the Department of Justice. But the department’s case-by-case legal judgments “must be impartial and insulated from political influence,” according to the Justice Manual, the department’s bible, first written in 1953. “It is imperative that the department’s investigatory and prosecutorial powers be exercised free from partisan consideration.”

In the eyes of almost all our survey respondents, this post-Watergate structure is collapsing. “I still think we get through it,” said the former official who served in several administrations, “but I’m less certain of that each passing day.”

Several legal experts told us they began worrying on the day Trump retook office. One of the president’s first acts — granting pardons and commutations to the Jan. 6 rioters — unraveled the work of what prosecutors have said is the Department of Justice’s largest-ever investigation. Trump also fired lawyers who worked on the Jan. 6 cases.

Then, in February, Emil Bove, a former defense attorney for Trump who was appointed second in command at the Justice Department, ordered Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to drop an active corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams. Sassoon resigned, saying the administration was rewarding Adams for promising to help with Trump’s immigration-enforcement plan. It was a clear example of quid pro quo, Sassoon said.

At least 10 more career prosecutors resigned over the order to drop the Adams charges. Bove, in turn, took the unusual step of appearing alone in court to argue for the dismissal of Adams’s charges himself, presumably because no one else would.

In June, Trump nominated Bove for a lifetime appointment to a federal judgeship. The Senate confirmed him 50 to 49 in July despite a whistle-blower report from another prosecutor accusing Bove of suggesting that the Justice Department tell a judge “[expletive] you” and ignore a court order in an immigration case. Bove said he couldn’t recall making such a statement. (News of two more whistle-blower reports, corroborating parts of the first complaint, also emerged before the Senate vote.)

Image

Emil Bove was Trump’s defense lawyer before he was appointed to be No. 2 in the Justice Department and then nominated to be a federal judge. Credit...Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times

Several respondents raised Bove’s ascension as a sharp break from the past. Trump also stunned many of them when he issued a flurry of executive orders in March and April targeting big law firms perceived as being aligned with Democrats. Four firms sued and won injunctions against the president. But nine struck deals, offering nearly a combined $1 billion worth of pro bono work.

Just as notable, in the eyes of many of our respondents, is the work these firms and others are not doing for fear of Trump — their names, and the resources they bring, are missing from suit after suit challenging his executive orders. Thirty-three said that big firms as a group are doing little or nothing to constrain excessive uses of presidential power; another 12 said they were doing so only somewhat. “We’re off the playing field,” said an Obama administration official who works at a large firm. “Big law was so active right after the travel ban in Trump’s first term. He figured out he could make us all stop.”

More than any step the president has taken, according to a lawyer from the Reagan solicitor general’s office, Trump’s bullying of law firms has undermined the rule of law. “Whatever happened to the bedrock principle that everyone deserves the best lawyer they can find?” asked a former Republican-appointed judge. “My firm is scared to death.”

Bottom of Form

Six respondents lay blame on the Biden administration for posing similar, or even greater, threats to the rule of law as Trump. Some of them saw Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate Trump as a fatal misjudgment. “Garland thought he was limiting himself by appointing Smith,” said the former Trump official. “But from Day 1 of Smith’s appointment, it was clear Trump would be indicted. In an alternate universe, there’s no Smith, no Jan. 6 case against Trump, which they didn’t have to bring, and maybe American politics looks different today.”

Another respondent, Richard Painter, who was chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, faulted Biden for diminishing public trust at the end of his term by accusing the justice system of playing “raw politics” in prosecuting his son, Hunter Biden. “To lash out at D.O.J. when he knew that Trump was coming set a poor example,” Painter said.

But the prosecution of Biden’s son, along with the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Biden’s own handling of classified documents, demonstrated the Justice Department’s independence from the White House. Painter sees the opposite happening now. “We haven’t seen the president use the department to go after his enemies since Nixon,” he said, “and it’s frightening.”

In Trump’s Justice Department, in fact, retribution has been institutionalized. In February, Bondi created a “weaponization working group” to investigate “abuses of the criminal justice process.” She instructed the group to look into people who prosecuted Trump.

To the dismay of some of our respondents, the head of the working group, Ed Martin, promised to smear the reputations of any targets he couldn’t indict. “In a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed,” Martin said in May.

Martin’s promise, respondents pointed out, is a clear violation of Justice Department policy. “You prove your charges in court, or you walk away,” said the former official who served in multiple administrations. “There’s no third way. Nor should there be. What Martin is doing is disgusting.”

In September, Trump trampled whatever remaining hope prosecutors had of exercising their judgment independent of the president. Trump forced the resignation of Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney in Eastern Virginia who had concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Comey, whom Trump blames for the F.B.I.’s investigation of whether Russia meddled in the 2016 election.

On social media, Trump ordered Bondi to take action “NOW!!!” against Comey, as well as against Senator Adam Schiff, who led the congressional investigation of Russian influence, and Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, who prosecuted Trump and the Trump Organization for fraud. The next day, news broke that Trump’s Justice Department closed an investigation into Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar, who was recorded last year accepting a bag with $50,000 in cash in an undercover F.B.I. investigation.

Image

Attorney General Pam Bondi (center) acceded in Trump’s demand to oust the U.S. attorney in Virginia who refused to prosecute James Comey. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

“It’s disturbing,” said Stephen McAllister, who was the U.S. attorney in Kansas during Trump’s first term. “As a prosecutor, you gather evidence. You look at it. You think, Can we prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt? If not, in the old D.O.J., that was it. You did not proceed. It looks to me like the U.S. attorney in Virginia was trying to do the job in the right and professional way. They pushed him out because he wouldn’t bring a case that probably isn’t there.”

Trump installed one of his personal lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, as Siebert’s replacement, even though she had never prosecuted a case. Halligan, an insurance lawyer, obtained an indictment of Comey from a federal grand jury a few days later. The charges, for allegedly making a false statement to Congress and obstructing justice, were among those Siebert and the career attorneys in the office had rejected.

The former Trump official pointed out that while Bondi and her deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, reportedly opposed appointing Halligan, they subsequently went along with it. “They apparently made their arguments, but then they were willing to be rolled,” he said. “They tweeted their support of having the president’s insurance lawyer prosecute Comey.”

“It is the ultimate hypocrisy to accuse President Trump of what Joe Biden actively did throughout his presidency: engaging in lawfare against his political opponents,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in an email. “The indictment against Comey, by a grand jury, speaks for itself, and the Trump administration looks forward to fair proceedings in the courts.”

In late September, a lawyer in Blanche’s office directed several U.S. attorney’s offices to investigate the Open Society Foundations, a global grant network established by the liberal donor George Soros. Moves like these are “an attack on our most basic right — free speech,” said Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general under Biden. “The president is using the D.O.J. as his tool to silence dissent and the work of nonprofits that challenge his administration or criticize his policies. That’s what’s happening. It’s unlawful and un-American.”

The firing of the Jan. 6 prosecutors, the resignations over the Adams case, Martin’s conduct and the indictment of Comey — each step corroded the Justice Department in the eyes of our respondents. “It’s all about dismantling the institution,” said the former official who served in multiple administrations. “And the message to everyone in the department is that if you speak up, something could happen that has never happened before. Maybe you’ll only be demoted or fired. But maybe it will be worse. Either way, you’d better bow to the emperor.”

Before Trump’s re-election, many of our respondents expressed faith in the government’s system of checks and balances to do what it historically had done: provide a necessary corrective to the potential overreach of any other branch. Now all 50 believe that Congress, which the framers intended to be the most powerful branch of government, is doing very little — or nothing at all — to fulfill its role of restraining the president.

“The greatest threat,” said Stuart Gerson, an assistant attorney general for President George H.W. Bush, “comes with the probability that the president is on the road to assuming autocratic powers and that the Congress has allowed its countervailing constitutional powers to wither.”

The lower courts have done more to push back against excessive uses of power by the president, many of our respondents said. But they also see the conservative majority of the Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by Trump, as kneecapping the lower-court judges by overruling them in a series of emergency orders in consequential cases — like allowing Trump to gut the Department of Education, or suspend hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research grants by the National Institutes of Health, or refuse to pay $4 billion in foreign aid allocated by Congress, or fire the heads of federal agencies. (Biden, by contrast, had far less success on the emergency docket.)

Some former officials said the Supreme Court set the country up for disaster by ruling in July 2024 that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for most of their official actions. “The Supreme Court has shocked me the most,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Gertner referenced the theory of some experts that the justices’ rulings are an effort to amass credibility with Trump so that he’ll abide by their order when they eventually rule against him. “I am more and more skeptical of that,” she said. “I believe that they are fully on board with enabling him.”

Respondents also have concluded that the Justice Department cannot effectively check Trump from the inside. Last year, nearly half of them thought it was possible or likely that the department’s career professionals, who are nonpartisan and work across administrations, would stand in the way of one of the worst abuses of power — a criminal investigation not based in facts or law. Such an event “would trigger mass resignations,” predicted Michael W. McConnell, a former federal judge and an assistant to the solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “Guess I was wrong,” he emailed recently.

Eight months into Trump’s second term, more than 4,000 of the department’s roughly 105,000 employees have left. A small number departed in public protest, like the prosecutors in New York who quit over the Adams case. Many more left in response to the Trump administration’s bid to purge the government ranks, receiving months of pay in exchange for their resignations. Hundreds have been fired, often for being perceived as out of step with the president’s agenda.

Our respondents worried about the message the firings and forced resignations send to those career lawyers who remain: Do whatever it takes to show you’ll carry out the administration’s wishes.

All but one of our respondents said they were concerned or very concerned about Department of Justice attorneys failing to tell the truth in court, which judges across the country have complained about. “It upsets me,” Judge William Alsup in California said in court in March, because he thought that a Justice Department lawyer was submitting sham documents and withholding a witness in a case about the mass firing of federal employees. “I want you to know that I’ve been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years. And I know how we get at the truth, and you’re not helping me.”

The reactions of judges like Alsup signal how lawyers who used to uphold the standards of the legal profession are compromising them to adapt to the Trump era. “The D.O.J.’s loss of credibility is devastating to the rule of law,” said William Yeomans, an attorney in the civil rights division for a quarter century. “The legitimacy of the proceedings will be damaged in a way that will be difficult to repair.”

While our latest survey captured the reactions of experts to Trump’s second term so far, we also asked some respondents what they think the remaining years of his presidency may hold. If so many norms have been obliterated in nearly nine months, what will our legal landscape look like in a year? Or three?

The lawyer from Reagan’s solicitor general’s office predicted that the Trump administration would, at some point, push the Supreme Court past its limit in one major case or another — birthright citizenship or tariffs or trying to fire Lisa Cook of the Federal Reserve board, perhaps. Such a ruling against the president, he hoped, would restore the constitutional checks and balances. “Part of me sees a brighter future when the court says this has gone too far,” he said. “Once they say no, and the world doesn’t come to an end, my gut tells me the court will be more comfortable saying no more.”

But even if the court can be relied upon to hold the line at some point, Trump is cowing people and institutions in a way that could change the foundation of America’s system of government. “When people can’t trust law enforcement to be fair on the merits, many of them adjust their behavior — many more than are actually targeted,” said Keisler, the former George W. Bush official. “People self-censor. And then they don’t stand up for those who are really at risk.”

McAllister, the former U.S. attorney in Kansas, worries about the next administration. With another president like Trump, “D.O.J. could really be destroyed long-term. But I also fear, if the Democrats win, they’ll think, He did it, now it’s our turn to retaliate. Then you destroy what was the ethos of the department — that it’s not overtly partisan.”

“In my darkest moments, I think, maybe the premises on which our Constitution was founded are just not widely shared anymore,” the former Republican-appointed judge said. “What do we do then?”

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