The Crisis of Belief

Trump’s plan for the Eisenhower Executive Office Building—and for the country.

I left off last time with Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation as a symbol of the failures of leadership that got us into our current mess. Today, I want to start by looking at some cases in which people are showing real leadership and pushing back against the sliding of our moral standards.

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Special Thanksgiving Sale

But first: I normally do an end-of year roundup of the top stories of the year, combined with a Holiday Sale, and a pitch for donations to support my work at this newsletter. For various reasons, I’m doing that early this year as a Thanksgiving Sale and fund-raising drive.

Subscribe or renew now at 10% Off. Rather than offer a discount that you have to enter separately, I have simply lowered the subscription price temporarily for everyone.

I set the current subscription price in 2021, so to keep up with inflation, I suppose I would have to raise it, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, by 25%. But because the economy is fragile, and I want to keep you all as subscribers—and lure in a few more—instead I’m offering 10% off for now.

Take advantage of it while you can, because after doing that calculation, I might be raising the subscription price in the new year.

You can also give a gift subscription.

Or donate to support The Tracinski Letter.

And of course, buy my new book, Dictator From Day One, to get ahead of the Christmas rush.

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The Crisis of Belief, Part 1

In covering the Trump administration’s attempt to designate, well, just about everyone who disagrees with them as “terrorists,” I left readers with an example of how this is likely to be applied: Larry Bushart, a Tennessee man put into jail for posting a meme critical of Charlie Kirk, because the local sheriff arbitrarily deemed it a threat.

I became aware of that case by way of an interview with the Sheriff by Nashville investigative reporter Phil Williams, and simply bringing the case to light had quick results. Bushart was subsequently freed and the charges were dropped.

Here’s more evidence of a bounce-back. One of the most shocking surrenders to Donald Trump was the scramble among some big law firms to make deals after being specifically targeted by the administration—effectively surrendering their independence from the administration.

That’s a big problem for lawyers whose job is to represent their clients, not the government. It ought to be a major lapse in legal ethics—and the DC Bar Association has decided to treat it that way.

See an overview in The Bulwark:

As reported in the New York Times, the District of Columbia Bar Legal Ethics Committee recently issued an opinion calling into grave question the ethical appropriateness of Big Law’s settlements with Trump.

Though the opinion does not mention Trump by name, the upshot of the opinion is that the big law firms that settled with him have to address significant ethical questions. Taken seriously, this opinion is a quiet earthquake that might shake the foundations of several law firms both because it says that what the law firms have done may have violated the Rules of Professional Conduct and because it also suggests that their violations cannot be cured without rescinding their agreements with Trump.

This is exactly what a bunch of us have been saying from the beginning.

When a big organization like this makes that kind of decision, it is the product of a series of smaller decisions that preceded it.

One of those precursors came early this year when Brad Bondi, the brother of Attorney General Pam Bondi, sought election as the new head of the DC Bar Association. This was an attempt to do to the Bar Association what his sister was doing to the Justice Department: make it a pliant tool of an authoritarian leader. But Bondi lost the election in a blowout, and this new ruling from the DC bar is a consequence of that earlier decision to assert the bar’s independence.

Now here’s another sign: a federal district court judge, Mark Wolf, recently resigned so he could be more free to sound the alarm over abuses of executive power and attacks on the judiciary. Here’s the key passage from his statement in The Atlantic.

As I watched in dismay and disgust from my position on the bench, I came to feel deeply uncomfortable operating under the necessary ethical rules that muzzle judges’ public statements and restrict their activities. Day after day, I observed in silence as President Trump, his aides, and his allies dismantled so much of what I dedicated my life to.

When I became a senior judge in 2013, my successor was appointed, so my resignation will not create a vacancy to be filled by the president. My colleagues on the United States District Court in Massachusetts and judges on the lower federal courts throughout the country are admirably deciding a variety of cases generated by Trump’s many executive orders and other unprecedented actions. However, the Supreme Court has repeatedly removed the temporary restraints imposed on those actions by lower courts in deciding emergency motions on its “shadow docket” with little, if any, explanation.

Others who have held positions of authority, including former federal judges and ambassadors, have been opposing this government’s efforts to undermine the principled, impartial administration of justice and distort the free and fair functioning of American democracy. They have urged me to work with them. As much as I have treasured being a judge, I can now think of nothing more important than joining them, and doing everything in my power to combat today’s existential threat to democracy and the rule of law.

What follows is an overview of abuses of executive power that ought to be familiar to readers of this newsletter. But what’s more interesting is what comes before, where Judge Wolf recounts his long history at the Justice Department and then in the judiciary, in a career prosecuting and judging numerous cases of official corruption. That is what he means when he expresses alarm at Trump dismantling “what I dedicated my life to.”

Our current moment is not really a political crisis. It is more a crisis of belief.