Luttig: The End of Rule of Law in America

[Nevilledog]

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/05/law-america-trump-constitution/682793/

No paywall link
https://archive.li/qJPUd

The president of the united states appears to have long ago forgotten that Americans fought the Revolutionary War not merely to secure their independence from the British monarchy but to establish a government of laws, not of men, so that they and future generations of Americans would never again be subject to the whims of a tyrannical king. As Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense in 1776, “For as in absolute governments the king is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.”

Donald Trump seems also not to understand John Adams’s fundamental observation about the new nation that came into the world that same year. Just last month, an interviewer from Time magazine asked the president in the Oval Office, “Mr. President, you were showing us the new paintings you have behind us. You put all these new portraits. One of them includes John Adams. John Adams said we’re a government ruled by laws, not by men. Do you agree with that?” To which the president replied: “John Adams said that? Where was the painting?”

When the interviewer pointed to the portrait, Trump asked: “We’re a government ruled by laws, not by men? Well, I think we’re a government ruled by law, but you know, somebody has to administer the law. So therefore men, certainly, men and women, certainly play a role in it. I wouldn’t agree with it 100 percent. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and ideally, you’re going to have honest men like me.”

And earlier this month, a television journalist asked Trump the simple question “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?” Astonishingly, the president answered, “I don’t know.” The interviewer then asked, “Don’t you agree that every person in the United States is entitled to due process?” The president again replied, “I don’t know.”

This is not a man who respects the rule of law, nor one who seeks to understand it.

*snip*