970x125
James Comey’s indictment is a seminal moment in U.S. history. And more seem imminent.
In a social media post, Donald Trump ordered Attorney General Pam Bondi to take immediate action against Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif) and New York Attorney General Leticia James, saying, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!” He later added former FBI director Christopher Wray to his list.
These orders fulfill Trump’s promise to be his supporters’ “retribution.” Eight months into his second term the Constitution, individual liberty and adherence to the rule of law are under attack.
Congress is no longer an equal branch of government but is essentially subservient to the president. The Supreme Court has granted immunity to most presidential actions.
For Trump, that means being the president of everything — from absolute ruler over foreign policy, to determining which laws he will obey, to presiding over the Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution.
Resistance is building. The public outcry over Disney’s refusal to air Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night program, and his moving monologue upon his return, gave his show its highest ratings in a decade.
But so, too, are Trump’s victories. Since taking office, Trump has won 20 cases at the Supreme Court. Major law firms have also bowed before him.
After signing executive orders in March suspending five law firms’ security clearances, preventing the government from hiring their employees and requiring federal agencies to terminate their contracts, those firms and others agreed to provide a total of $1 billion in free legal services to the president.
Rachel Cohen, an attorney who resigned in protest of the deal, said the nation is “teetering on the brink of authoritarianism” and “many leaders of our most prestigious and profitable law firms recognize this risk and choose to ignore it because they are afraid.”
Others who refuse to bend their knees remain targets. In Rhode Island, district court Judge John McConnell received voicemails calling for his assassination after blocking Donald Trump’s attempt to freeze federal funding to the states.
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Ga.) says McConnell is guilty of “high crimes and misdemeanors” and has introduced a resolution calling for his impeachment and removal.
Other judges who have ruled against Trump have received unsolicited pizza deliveries using the name Daniel Anderl. Anderl, the son of Judge Esther Salas, was murdered in 2020 when a dissatisfied litigant rang her doorbell and opened fire. Daniel was shot through the heart and Salas’s husband was critically wounded.
Judge Salas described the horror of hearing “my beautiful son’s name” used as a weapon to “inflict fear” on her colleagues.
The late Russian dissident Alexei Navalny once said: “A huge number of people are either forced to act like cowards, or act like cowards without being forced or even asked to. They just look the other way and try to ignore what is happening.”
Large media conglomerates are one example.
Paramount, whose $8 billion merger with Skydance depended on approval by the Trump-controlled Federal Communications Commission, agreed to pay Trump $16 million after a CBS News 60 Minutes segment featured a 2024 interview with Kamala Harris that Trump thought was unfairly edited.
ABC News paid Trump $15 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump. And when Trump-appointed FCC Chair Brendan Carr demanded that Kimmel’s show be canceled after saying, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” ABC suspended the program “indefinitely.”
YouTube settled a Trump lawsuit for $24.5 million after banning him from its platform following the January 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Meta and X also settled with Trump for $25 million and $10 million, respectively, after imposing similar bans.
Comey released a statement after the indictment saying: “My family and I have known for years that there are costs for standing up to Donald Trump, but we couldn’t imagine ourselves living any other way. We will not live on our knees, and you shouldn’t either.”
In an 1838 speech, a young Abraham Lincoln said, “let every man remember that to violate the law is to trample on the blood of his father.” Reverence for the law, Lincoln argued, must be the country’s “political religion.”
Adherence to the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the framework for realizing them advanced by the U.S. Constitution, make the U.S. an exceptional nation built on the ideas of freedom, equality of opportunity and individual rights.
On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, we must decide whether we will continue to uphold our democracy and the rule of law that undergirds it, or whether, as Lincoln stated, we choose to “die by suicide.”
Winston Churchill once called democracy “the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried.”
I, like Churchill, choose democracy, as messy as it is with its cacophony of dissenting opinions, knowing that the alternative means abandoning the political religion Lincoln called us to uphold.
John Kenneth White is a professor emeritus at The Catholic University of America. His latest book is titled “Grand Old Unraveling: The Republican Party, Donald Trump, and the Rise of Authoritarianism.”
