Resistance isn’t futile
Trump is convinced he is the law. Who will stand up to the autocrat, and who will bend the knee?
First, a programming note: We’re going Live!
We have two Substack Live events coming up this week that you won’t want to miss: Today at 12:30 p.m. Eastern we’ll have our regular conversation with scholar of fascism Ruth Ben-Ghiat. Then on Tuesday, February 18, at noon Eastern, we’ll be talking with Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, who has emerged as one of the most fiery sources of resistance to the new Trump administration. To join us and watch, download the Substack app and turn on notifications. You’ll get an alert that we’re live and you can watch from your iOS or Android mobile device.
JD Vance claimed last week that mere judges had no place restraining the president’s “legitimate power.” Bad enough. But over the weekend, his boss went further. A lot further.
New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie called it “the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.” And it’s hard to think of one that outdoes it.
There’s of course Richard Nixon’s claim in 1977 that “when the president does it… that means that it is not illegal,” but that was said years after he’d been forced to resign for doing things that even his fellow Republicans thought were illegal.
We’re in very different territory now, and there’s already a patent example of what the kind of power Trump is arguing for looks like in practice. It looks like the kind of dealmaking you’d expect from a mob boss. It looks a lot like last week’s Thursday afternoon massacre.
If you’re not up to date on what happened last week and why (and we get it, it’s a long story), back in 2023, Eric Adams, the Democratic mayor of New York City, got into a lot of trouble. The FBI, suspecting he had taken bribes from the Turkish government to speed approval of a new Turkish consulate in Manhattan, investigated Adams, he was indicted, and a trial date was set for April 2025.
But in January, just before the inauguration, Adams flew down to Mar-a-Lago to meet with Donald Trump, supposedly not to ask for a pardon. Just to talk, compare notes on their mutual persecution complexes — that kind of thing. Sports. Movies?
Last week, the Department of Justice ordered the charges against Adams dismissed.
That’s when it got weird.
Emil Bove III, the acting deputy attorney general, sent a letter to the federal prosecutors who had been working the case, demanding they drop the charges — a letter remarkable in its brazenness:
…the pending prosecution has unduly restricted Mayor Adams’ ability to devote full attention and resources to the illegal immigration and violent crime that escalated under the policies of the prior Administration. We are particularly concerned about the impact of the prosecution on Mayor Adams' ability to support critical, ongoing federal efforts "to protect the American people from the disastrous effects of unlawful mass migration and resettlement," as described in Executive Order 14165.
That sounds like a quid-pro-quo. Even Bove seemed concerned it might be seen that way, and added in a footnote that, no, however it might look, that definitely wasn’t what he was saying. Really.
Your Office correctly noted in a February 3, 2025 memorandum, "as Mr. Bove clearly stated to defense counsel during our meeting [on January 31, 2025], the Government is not offering to exchange dismissal of a criminal case for Adams's assistance on immigration enforcement."
That request went to the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Danielle R. Sassoon. She’s a Republican, a Trump appointee, and a member of the right-wing legal association the Federalist Society. To put it mildly, an unlikely resistance hero. But she knows the law as well as her boss, saw that it was that way — and resigned, writing to Attorney General Pam Bondi that:
It is a breathtaking and dangerous precedent to reward Adams’s opportunistic and shifting commitments on immigration and other policy matters with dismissal of a criminal indictment.
Six more U.S. attorneys would quit in turn, each refusing to carry out the order. Assistant U.S. Attorney Hagan Scotten, who resigned after Sassoon and attorneys Kevin O. Driscoll and John Keller, filed a downright heroic letter to Bove that will surely find its way into the history books (assuming such things are still legal) as a testament to the lawlessness of this age, and — hopefully — to the beginnings of real opposition to that lawlessness.
I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion. But it was never going to be me.
Not what Scotten — a Harvard Law graduate who’d done three tours in Iraq and also has sterling conservative credentials, having clerked for Justices John Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh — expected when he set out to practice law on behalf of the American people.
Finally, DOJ leadership threatened to fire everyone in the Public Integrity division unless they caved in.
Reportedly, those lawyers discussed a mass resignation, but, finally, one veteran lawyer did the deed to protect the rest of the division’s jobs. Adams is saved, for now — and he has indeed committed to stepping up immigration enforcement in New York, in line with the administration’s goals — all the while swearing there was no deal.
It was this kind of moment.
On its face, the wave of resignations recalled the “Saturday Night Massacre” on October 20, 1973, when Richard Nixon, looking to evade special prosecutor Archibald Cox’s subpoena for the Oval Office tapes relating to the Watergate burglary, asked Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Cox. Richardson resigned, then Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, leaving the task to then Solicitor General Robert Bork, who finally did fire Cox — which didn’t do Nixon much good.
The eventual ruling that Cox’s firing had been illegal alienated Nixon’s supporters in Congress, drove public support for impeaching the president and ultimately led to the filing of the articles of impeachment that forced Nixon’s resignation.
Nowadays that’s just what happens on a Thursday. But as legal scholar Steve Vladeck writes, what’s going on now comes in the context of a rejection of the rule of law by the White House on multiple fronts (Vladeck points to Bondi’s demand that Apple and Google restore access to TikTok, in clear violation of the law as another clear example of the problem), and that gives it the potential to do even more lasting damage than Watergate. As if that wasn’t bad enough!
The more that we’re seeing these flashpoints in which DOJ is running roughshod over law, the more that augurs poorly for what’s coming down the pike—not just with respect to future troubling conduct by this administration, but with respect to the ability of any future Department of Justice to expect that its public and legal representations will be viewed as inherently credible.
There’s a lot going on here. While many have worried — with good reason — about Democratic fecklessness in the face of a fascist threat, outright collaboration, and corruption — is even worse. And the willingness of the White House and the Justice Department to put Trump’s Napoleonic whims into action and simply ignore the law — that’s a lot worse.
Sassoon, Scotten, and the other U.S. attorneys in the Adams case have given everyone in America an example of how to respond. They’ve decided that the Trump administration’s actions — undeniably the acts of an aspiring king looking to rule by decree rather than a government representing the will of the people — are so intolerable they cannot be endorsed. Will Congress take that to heart? It’s hard to say. But ultimately, it falls to the rest of us.
After Archibald Cox was fired, he released a statement, clarifying the stakes of what had just happened:
Whether ours shall continue to be a government of laws and not of men is now for Congress and ultimately the American people [to decide].
As journalist Michael Harriot wrote this weekend, that’s exactly where we are now. For Harriot, the way to move forward is for the American people to recognize that a coup has already happened, understand that neither the courts nor Congress will step up — and start acting accordingly:
As the great political philosopher and orator Shereé Whitfield said: “Who gon’ check [them], boo?”
Us.
We have always been the answer.
And maybe that first answer needs to be a simple “no.” As Kirk Douglas put it in Kubrick’s Spartacus, “When just one man says ‘No, I won’t,’ Rome begins to fear.”
I am 71 and retired. I never thought that my days in retirement would be spent calling my representatives every day and being hyper-vigilant about what’s going on in Washington.
Whatever form the resistance takes, it must include a reckoning with our allowing Rupert Murdoch to, over 30 years, develop a media system that is so right-wing that it has brought us to this dystopian place where nearly half the country is fed propaganda, 24/7.
Anand, could you include in your emails notifications of NATIONAL actions? Like today 50501 is organizing protests in all 50 state capitals on noon -- "Not My President's Day" Also February 28 is a national 24 Hour Economic Blackout, where no one is to buy ANYTHING. I think people feel much less hopeless when they have some ideas of what ACTIONS they can take. Thank you!