The Insidious Effort to Rationalize Trump’s LawfareThis is not a president justified in going after those who went after him. It’s a person making a mockery of our justice system.
William Kristol
,
Andrew Egger
, and
Jim Swift
Oct 10, 2025
Donald Trump and Greg Abbott’s deployment of Texas National Guardsmen to Chicago has hit a legal wall—for now. A federal judge in Illinois handed down an order Thursday night temporarily blocking the deployment, saying she had seen “no credible evidence that there is a danger of a rebellion in the state of Illinois.”
How the president will respond remains to be seen. An appeal is all but certain, but Trump has also contemplated more extreme measures: If judges kept getting in his way, he said this week, he might just be forced to invoke the Insurrection Act. What a fun weekend activity, anticipating this! Happy Friday.
(Composite by Hannah Yoest / Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)
One Size Fits All
by Andrew Egger
One of the most insidious things about Donald Trump’s decade-long turn atop our politics is the way it has seared our political conscience. For years, it has been a cliché to call his various awful behaviors and decisions “shocking, but not surprising.” These days, however, we seem to be losing some of our inability even to feel the shock.
You could see this in some of the early reactions last night to the news of Letitia James’s indictment on two counts of mortgage fraud. The New York attorney general has been near the top of Trump’s enemies list for a while, and literally nobody—at least that I can dig up—seems to be trying to argue that this indictment isn’t an act of naked political retribution. (To be fair, arguing this would be difficult after Trump removed all doubt last month by accidentally putting a post out in public that he had meant to send as a DM to Attorney General Pam Bondi demanding James’s prosecution.)
Instead, the Republican line—parroted by some who should really know better—is that this is a justified act of retribution, in some sort of street-justice sense. Or if not justified, at least understandable, from Trump’s point of view: They tried to get him, now he’s trying to get them. Most charitably, they say, it is an unfortunate tit-for-tat that can’t go on indefinitely—but also a situation in which Trump is just one bad actor in a cast of many.
An editorial from the new-look, more Trump-forgiving Washington Post editorial board this week cast the current moment along those lines. “Many Democrats still cannot see how their legal aggression against Trump during his four years out of power set the stage for the dangerous revenge tour on which he is now embarked,” it mourned. Those who were trying to hold Trump accountable had “show[n] little restraint” in their investigations—a big part of why he was now “showing still less restraint” while hitting back. It’s unfortunate that he lashed out at you like that—but maybe you shouldn’t have made him so mad.
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We should be clear about this. There is no comparison between the acts Letitia James took as attorney general of New York to hit Trump’s companies and the ones he is now taking to hit “back” at her. The difference between them is not the difference between a lesser act of political malice and a greater one. (Although it is worth noting the massive difference of scale here: While James’s civil suit accused Trump’s companies of pocketing hundreds of millions of dollars off a years-long practice of misrepresenting properties, the indictment against James accuses her of filing a misleading loan application andcoming out ahead less than $20,000.) It’s the difference between the application of law and the application of raw power.
When people accuse James of “lawfare,” or of pursuing a “politicized” civil fraud case against Trump, they mean that she pursued that case with a zeal they believe she would not have shown against another target. Could be! But her fundamental case, as the New York Times noted last month, was not unreasonable. It was rooted in sworn testimony Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen had made before Congress that Trump habitually inflated the value of his properties to get favorable treatment in loans. She won her civil case against Trump at trial. This year, an appeals court vacated the financial penalty the initial judge had handed down, but did not vacate Trump’s civil liability. Trump had his day to argue in court that James’s investigations into him were vindictive and politically motivated—and the courts threw that argument out.
Now consider Trump. As he staffed out his administration with lickspittles and cronies, he didn’t just instruct them to look into James to see what they could rustle up. Instead, he twisted the entire federal government into a shape designed to produce the criminal indictment he demanded. The roots of the mortgage-fraud claim into James weren’t anything he came by honestly: They were the results of a fishing expedition carried out by Bill Pulte, who has used the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which he directs, as a databank to plumb for information on a host of Trump enemies. When that pretext didn’t prove compelling enough to the first Trump-appointed U.S. prosecutor with jurisdiction, the president canned that prosecutor and moved on to someone he was sure would give him the result he wanted: his former personal attorney Lindsey Halligan. Halligan, sure enough, has now done so.
Just how unjust a campaign of retribution this will turn out to be remains to be seen. It’s possible, of course, that Pulte’s muckraking turned up actual wrongdoing on James’s part—though James vigorously denies this and Halligan’s non-compromised predecessor seemed to agree. We’ll get to find out, as James will still get a trial—no matter how much Trump, who already says he knows her to be “guilty as hell,” might want to skip ahead.
Still, it’s important to be lucid about where we are. This isn’t Trump escalating a fight James started. It’s Trump being Trump the only way he knows how: smashing, smashing, and smashing until the last irritating opponent is gone from his sight.
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The Sound of Silence
by William Kristol
Though I know I give the impression of being impressively hip, it’s been a little while since I’ve followed pop music—about a half century, in fact. But we were all young once. And so I, along with virtually all my fellow impressionable 12-year-olds, quickly became big fans when the overdubbed electric version of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” was released in September 1965.
We knew the tune, we knew the lyrics. And it’s amazing how those things stick in your head decades later. Indeed, I’ve found myself in recent years recalling—even humming!—the song, and especially the final two stanzas.
“Fools,” said I, “You do not know
Silence like a cancer grows.
Hear my words that I might teach you
Take my arms that I might reach you.”
But my words like silent raindrops fell
And echoed in the wells of silence.
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets
Are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sounds of silence.”
You can see why the song came back to mind. Somehow the image of the people bowing and praying to the neon god they made has a certain resonance today. And so does the idea that the response—especially I’d say from those who should know better than to bow to a neon god—has been . . . the sound of silence.
Indeed, over the past nine months, as we’ve descended rapidly down the path to authoritarianism, “silence like a cancer” has grown. From Republican elected officials to business tycoons, from conservative luminaries to establishment functionaries—it’s been dry “wells of silence” all around.
But could it be that a few raindrops are beginning to be heard? Just yesterday, the Republican governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, criticized President Trump’s deployment of the Texas National Guard to Illinois. “Oklahomans would lose their mind if [Gov. JB] Pritzker in Illinois sent troops down to Oklahoma during the Biden administration,” Stitt told the New York Times.
And a few weeks ago, Texas’s own Republican Sen. Ted Cruz challenged Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr over his threats against late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. “I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying we’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you off air if we don’t like what you’re saying,” Cruz said of Carr’s warning that he would use the power of the federal government against critics and opponents of Donald Trump.
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More recently, during the current government shutdown, a few Republican members of Congress have expressed concerns about OMB Director Russ Vought’s threats to take advantage of the shutdown to begin permanently firing government employees and killing programs he and his boss don’t like.
These moments have mattered. Cruz’s words actually may have had a real-world effect in saving Kimmel and deterring Carr. Vought hasn’t so far carried through on his threats. And later Thursday, another Republican governor, Phil Scott of Vermont, stepped forward to echo Stitt.
But these remain pretty small raindrops of protest in a parched desert of complicity and silence. Indeed, the sounds we’ll hear today from Republicans will not be words of dissent. It will be the pitter-patter of GOP feet scurrying as fast as they can to cameras to curry favor with their neon god by complaining loudly that he didn’t get the Nobel Peace Prize they have to say he deserved.
But maybe, in the midst of all that, a few of them will actually read the citation of the Nobel committee for the prize awarded to Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, who has been living in hiding after attempting to peacefully oppose President Nicolás Maduro.
Machado was recognized for being willing to “rise and resist” and for keeping “the flame of democracy burning” amid “a growing darkness” and “ever-expanding authoritarianism in Venezuela.”
As the committee said:
Democracy depends on people who refuse to stay silent, who dare to step forward despite grave risk, and who remind us that freedom must never be taken for granted, but must always be defended — with words, with courage and with determination.
Here in the United States, of course, the risks of stepping forward pale compared to those faced by dissidents in Venezuela and around the world. Surely it’s not too much to hope that some heretofore timid Americans, especially Republicans, could find inspiration from the example of María Corina Machado and “refuse to stay silent.” |
