In the space of two weeks, the country witnessed two major announcements from the Department of Justice: the first federal indictment of a former president (Donald Trump) for unlawful retention of classified documents and related acts of obstruction, concealment, and false statements, and a guilty plea by the son of the sitting president (Hunter Biden) to federal tax and gun charges.

The identities of the defendants mark these as highly significant political events. And the responses to both sets of charges tell us a great deal about the competing visions of governance on display in the early days of the 2024 election—one vision that threatens to destroy core principles of American law, and one that seeks to safeguard them.

Take, first, Trump’s reaction to his federal indictment. In his political rhetoric and in the emerging legal arguments in his defense, Trump claims that he did nothing wrong. The inquiry, by virtue of the fact that it was conducted by the Department of Justice in a Democratic presidential administration, is an inappropriate “political prosecution,” full stop. Trump leveled similar accusations of political motivation in response to the news of Hunter Biden’s plea deal, although here Trump’s accusation was one of favoritism, not persecution.  

[David A. Graham: The stupidest crimes imaginable]

Trump has spent years dismissing every investigation into him as a political witch hunt, so this should come as no surprise. But what has more recently become clear is that when he asserts that the charges against him are political, he isn’t actually critiquing the prosecutors for what he claims is their lack of independence, or suggesting that they should behave in a neutral and apolitical fashion. His claims that the inquiries are “politically motivated” are neither pure bad faith nor pure projection (though they may be both in part).

Instead, they are something more sinister and more revealing: a promise—a promise that if allowed to return to office, he will implement a vision of law enforcement in which no separation exists between prosecutors and political leadership, including the president. In the short term, this would mean benefits for Trump and his friends, and punishment for his enemies. But the long-term consequences would be much more dramatic: the abandonment of the core value of equal justice under law.

Viewed in the full context of the Trump presidency and the Trump reelection campaign, Trump’s charge of “political prosecution” seems to be in service of two related and complementary goals. The first is to convince the public that law enforcement and the administration of justice are inherently political, and thus that the charges against him can’t be trusted. There’s some evidence that this is working: A recent ABC News/Ipsos poll found that 47 percent of the public believes that the charges against Trump are “politically motivated.”

The second, related purpose is to begin to prime the public to accept the fundamental changes Trump would like to make to federal law enforcement, and maybe to federal government more broadly, if given the chance. The irony, of course, is that these changes are designed to make law enforcement and government more political. But if Trump is successful enough in destroying the public’s trust and confidence in federal law enforcement, he may encounter little resistance in seeking to radically reshape core features of American governance.

Here the evidence of what Trump would like to do is crystal clear. Trump has explicitly pledged to weaponize the DOJ against political adversaries, telling supporters on the very day of his federal arraignment that he would “appoint a real special prosecutor to go after” President Joe Biden and his family. He’s indicated that in a second term he’d bring back loyalists such as Jeffrey Clark, a key DOJ ally in his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. And he has begun to preview the position that all federal employees should serve at the pleasure of the president, which could mean the elimination of long-standing protections that insulate members of the civil service from politically motivated reprisal or removal.

[David A. Graham: Justice comes for Hunter Biden]

All of this is an extension of what was on display throughout Trump’s presidency. This is a man who, as president, regularly flouted norms of separation between his personal or partisan interests and those of the American government. He was also singularly focused on attacking the career civil service, which he referred to as the “deep state.” He inveighed constantly against the “shadowy cabal” that he suggested was seeking to undermine him, and he worked to weaken standards of independence and nonpartisanship inside the federal government. Late in his term in office, he issued an executive order purporting to create a new federal-employment status, “Schedule F”; had it gone into effect, this order would have allowed political appointees to reclassify large swaths of the civil service in order to bring them under political control.

So when Trump calls these prosecutions “political,” he’s offering a candid account of his understanding of the relationship between the president and federal prosecutors—that federal prosecutors, like all federal employees, are subject to the directive authority of the president, and so Biden must be behind the pursuit of Trump. Trump’s complaint actually isn’t about this as an ordering principle—it’s that at the moment, he isn’t in a position to leverage the power of the state for his personal benefit. This claim may sound startling, but it follows naturally from Trump’s brand of right-wing populism, one that that offers a narrow vision of who is authentically a member of the polity—his supporters—and pledges to both represent and protect that circumscribed population against a shifting “other”: liberals, the media, prosecutors in Democratic administrations. As Trump recently promised supporters, “I am the only one that can save this nation because you know they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you. And I just happened to be standing in their way. And I will never be moving.”

These views are in profound tension with core features of the American political and constitutional tradition—which since at least the late 19th century has emphasized the importance of nonpartisanship and expertise in the federal government in general, and in law enforcement in particular. But Trump is not alone in dissenting from the consensus. GOP-primary hopeful and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has suggested that long-standing norms of DOJ independence are inconsistent with the Constitution. Work by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Representative Jim Jordan on the “weaponization” committee has sought to use congressional-oversight authority to bully and intimidate career officials.

The Trump camp’s response to the news of Hunter Biden’s agreement to plead guilty to two counts of tax evasion, and to accept a diversion agreement to avoid gun charges, is revealing on this score. For years, Trump has fixated on the DOJ’s failure to prosecute Hunter Biden as evidence of political favoritism. Now that Hunter Biden has been charged, and has pleaded guilty, Trump has shifted to accusations that the plea terms are excessively lenient, attributable to—you guessed it—political favoritism. The fact that the investigation and charging decisions were made by Delaware U.S. Attorney David Weiss, a Trump appointee whom Biden asked to remain in office, is immaterial, as is the fact that the FBI is still run by Christopher Wray, who was handpicked by Donald Trump; so is the fact that on many accounts these charges are harsher than those that would have been brought against an individual guilty of similar conduct but with a different last name.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

All of this contrasts profoundly with President Biden’s handling of his son’s legal difficulties. Biden has bent over backwards to abide by essential bipartisan norms of law-enforcement independence and insulation from political interference. His retention of a Trump appointee as the top Delaware prosecutor was clearly driven by a desire to ensure that the Hunter investigation would be carried out by someone he had not chosen. His decision to permit John Durham to complete his investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation was similar, as was his hands-off approach to Attorney General Merrick Garland’s appointment of special counsels to investigate the handling of classified materials by both former Vice President Mike Pence and President Biden himself.

In addition to making these personnel decisions, both Biden and Garland have held their silence on politically sensitive investigations. Biden’s lone remarks about his son’s prosecution pledged love and support “as he continues to rebuild his life.” He has maintained a studied silence on Trump’s indictment, and by all accounts intends to continue it.

In all of this, President Biden has offered, through deeds more than words, a different model of governance. His silence and discretion are admirable, and they grow out of a principled commitment to avoiding any hint of political meddling in sensitive law-enforcement matters. Two strikingly different visions are on offer when it comes to the future of the relationship between law enforcement and politics.

The trouble is, the two visions are not equally apparent. Trump’s vision is on stark display; Biden’s approach is more notable for its lack of action—the refusal to comment, his decision to remain hands-off. Americans have to note these absences as collectively the presence of something else: a demonstrated commitment to a functional system of depersonalized, impartial justice. But Biden’s approach should not be misunderstood as inaction or passivity. It is, rather, an active and considered attempt to preserve the principle that, as Special Counsel Jack Smith put it when announcing the Trump indictment, there is “one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”