'Bow to the Emperor': We Asked 50 Legal Experts About the Trump Presidency

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/06/magazine/legal-experts-trump-justice-department.html

https://archive.ph/CYp3S

‘Bow to the Emperor’: We Asked 50 Legal Experts About the Trump Presidency
Before the election, we surveyed the legal establishment about what a second Trump term could mean for the rule of law. A year later, they’re very, very worried.
By Emily Bazelon
Oct. 6, 2025 Updated 9:53 a.m. ET

Last year, in the months before the 2024 presidential election, the magazine surveyed 50 members of what might be called the Washington legal establishment about their expectations for the Justice Department and the rule of law if Donald Trump were re-elected. The group was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. They had worked as high-level officials for every president since Ronald Reagan.

A majority of our respondents told us they were alarmed about a potential second Trump term given the strain he put on the legal system the first time around. But several dissenters countered that those fears were overblown. One former Trump official predicted that the Justice Department would be led by lawyers like those in the first term — elite, conservative and independent. “It’s hard to be a bad-faith actor at the Justice Department,” he said at the time. “And the president likes the Ivy League and Supreme Court clerkships on résumés.”

Eight months into his second term, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to those beliefs. “What’s happening is anathema to everything we’ve ever stood for in the Department of Justice,” said another former official who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Trump’s first term.

We recently returned to our group with a new survey and follow-up interviews about Trump’s impact on the rule of law since retaking office. The responses captured almost universal fear and anguish over the transformation of the Justice Department into a tool of the White House. Just as chillingly, the new survey reflects near consensus that most of the guardrails inside and outside the Justice Department, which in the past counterbalanced executive power, have all but fallen away. The indictment of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom Trump ordered the Justice Department to charge, represents a misuse of power for many of our respondents that they hoped never to see in the United States.

These respondents include former attorneys general, solicitors general and their deputies in the Justice Department and White House counsels, as well as former U.S. attorneys and retired federal judges from across the country. (Forty-two people who took the survey last year did so again, and we added eight more to replace those who did not. The group is again evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.) Some of the former officials we surveyed, in both parties, are speaking out against the wrongs they see unfolding despite the professional and personal risks.

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https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/06/john-roberts-donald-trump-supreme-court-00594600

Trump looms large in Chief Justice John Roberts’ legacy
As Roberts enters his third decade as chief, critics see him enabling power grabs by a norm-breaking president.
By Josh Gerstein
10/06/2025 05:00 AM EDT

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Last week marked the 20th anniversary of Roberts’ appointment — by President George W. Bush — as chief justice. At age 70, Roberts may preside over the court for many more years. But critics say the court he oversees is doing little to rein in a president targeting political opponents for criminal prosecution, eliminating hundreds of thousands of federal workers without congressional input, and using funding halts to intimidate the country’s top universities. What’s more, many legal experts say, Roberts has actually emboldened Trump.

“The Supreme Court and the chief justice have given Americans zero reason to believe that they will slow this president in any way whatsoever,” said former 4th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge J. Michael Luttig, a George H.W. Bush appointee. “The Supreme Court has acquiesced in — if not given its imprimatur to — the president’s lawlessness.”

So far this year, Trump has enjoyed an impressive winning streak in a series of emergency appeals to the high court involving administration policies. Of 25 such appeals ruled on by the justices since Jan. 20, the administration has won 21, notching short-term victories on bids to cancel federal grants, fire federal workers, oust former President Joe Biden’s appointees from independent agencies and ship undocumented immigrants to countries they have no ties to.

But the court’s liberal justices and Roberts’ critics complain that most of those decisions — rendered on the high court’s emergency or “shadow” docket without full briefing and almost always without oral argument — contain little or no reasoning or explanation. The rulings have also irritated lower-court judges, who say they’re willing to follow Supreme Court direction but have trouble divining the meaning of what are often one- or two-paragraph decisions.

“I analogize the shadow docket to, essentially, rulings on the back of a napkin,” said former U.S. District Judge Nancy Gertner, a Clinton appointee. “I talk to district court judges all the time. District court judges are dealing with essentially an incoherent path. Decisions on the shadow docket, which no one ever anticipated would be precedential, are now being considered precedential.”

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