This article contains spoilers through Season 3 Episode 5 of Slow Horses.

The third season of Slow Horses, Apple TV+’s magnificent, impertinent spy series, begins with a feint: two lovers chasing state secrets in Istanbul, followed by a thrilling boat chase across the Bosphorus that turns into a car chase that ends in tragedy. This is 007 territory, not the usual world of mangy MI5 rejects that the show has so adeptly built up. An adaptation of Mick Herron’s novels about a spy branch occupied by the supposed dregs of British intelligence, Slow Horses typically plays out in dirty cafés and gas-station forecourts, not the azure Instagram backdrops of European glitterati. So what are we doing here?

The cold open, I think, exemplifies what makes the series better than virtually anything else on television right now—its ability to be both a riveting espionage drama and an absurd workplace comedy, without ever flubbing the mix. The show delights in upending our expectations about what a spy story should be. In the most recent episode of the third season, “Cleaning Up,” River Cartwright (played by Jack Lowden) finds himself in a clandestine MI5 storage facility where the only thing between him and a heavily armed private militia is a panicky Welshman named Douglas who can’t remember the security-override codes. The tension is excruciating, even as the dialogue is pure ham. (Will Smith, the show’s creator, was a co-producer and writer on Veep.) The contrast befits a series whose conceit is that the spies regularly saving Britain aren’t the immaculately groomed, borderline-sociopathic charmers who have dominated our screens for the best part of a century; instead, they’re the losers, the slovenly and objectionable problem children who get stuck with one another because no one else can stand them. These are heroes of Slow Horses.

The show’s tonal blend is unusual: Its intricate plotting pays homage to the novels of John le Carré—whose later portrayals of British espionage could be just as threadbare and Brexit-afflicted as Herron’s universe—while its surly, bumbling characters sometimes feel ripped right out of The (British) Office. The first season of Slow Horses focused on River, a newish MI5 recruit with cherubic looks and physical ruthlessness who seems like he could be James Bond’s little brother—particularly when, while chasing a suspect through an airport, he hijacks a police car and then breaks the arm of an officer who won’t get out of his way.

[Read: The double life of John le Carré]

The nervy, nine-minute sequence is revealed to be a training exercise, but River’s failure to stop a “bomber” from blowing up a train gets him relegated to Slough House, an island of misfit spies presided over by the exiled chief Jackson Lamb (Gary Oldman). MI5’s headquarters in Regents Park is a sleek fortress run by the regal Diana Taverner (Kristin Scott Thomas); Slough House is a dank, moldering block in northeast London where Lamb, nested peacefully amid overflowing ashtrays and takeout boxes, wakes himself up by farting. Can you see the symbolism yet? If most spy dramas dwell in a glamorous, highly unrealistic milieu of Aston Martins and tailored tuxedos, Slow Horses has its characters wear primarily polyester and drive cars whose broken stereos are stuck on Coldplay. It’s not that the show can’t do big-budget set pieces—it can, as the meticulously staged action sequences attest. It just has a different thesis about what kinds of people deserve our attention.

The next time someone tells you that TV characters need to be likable, point them to Slow Horses. Lamb is disgusting, a wheezing, fingernail-picking, vindaloo-stained grub who berates his team, deploys flatulence as a weapon, and is perhaps the most preternaturally gifted spy in popular culture. River is the viewer’s bland escort into the world of the show—yet another instance of nodding toward more conventional storytelling before giving it the finger—but Lamb is the hook you can’t unreel yourself from. The question of how much of his grotesquerie is genuine and how much is armor matters less than Oldman’s relish for the role, his cheerful commitment to outright repugnance. Lamb is also more and more unreadable as the show progresses. Early, it was easier to see his hostility as a front, but recent episodes complicate his dynamic. (My only complaint about Slow Horses is that its short seasons—six episodes each—never feel long enough to process everything the show narratively stacks up.)

Lamb’s dollar-store spies, the “slow horses” of the title, aren’t nearly as useless as they’re made out to be, even if they are—like most of us—frequently sloppy, misguided, and inept. Lamb’s deputy of sorts, and the only person he professes to care about, is Catherine (Saskia Reeves), a frail-seeming recovering alcoholic with sharp instincts. Louisa (Rosalind Eleazar) and Sidonie (Olivia Cooke) are both excellent agents with caustic temperaments whose presence at Slough House seems to nod at the reception that forthright women receive in the workplace. Roddy (Christopher Chung) is an incel-ish tech genius with a terrible personality; Shirley (Aimee-Ffion Edwards) is a slob who abuses cocaine; Marcus (Kadiff Kirwan) is a compulsive gambler who gets off on danger. Most of them (Roddy excepted) seem at heart like decent people, a trait that distinguishes them from their reptilian counterparts at MI5. The show’s portrayal of British intelligence is devoid of heroism or strength of character; the governing impulse is self-protection, which Lamb’s spies fail at as reliably as they fumble firearms, leave top-secret documents on trains, and grumble over who forgot to buy biscuits.

My colleague Helen Lewis has written about how Slow Horses functions as an allegory for British decline—how the nation’s institutions have been fully co-opted over decades by ruthlessly ambitious and self-serving politicians. (In the Herron books, the politician Peter Judd, played in the show by Samuel West, is more transparently an avatar of Boris Johnson.) And it’s true that more often than not, the cases the Slough House agents are trying to crack stem from an MI5 failure and a botched cover-up. Yet over time, the triumph of Lamb’s spies in the face of constant, venal game-playing by their fancier colleagues starts to reinforce a worldview that’s less cynical than it might seem.

In the first season, River’s demotion seems meant to set up his inevitable return to MI5 proper, if he can only crack a big enough case or do something suitably audacious. But as the show goes on, it becomes clear that being summoned back to the viper pit at Regents Park would be his real punishment. The blessing in disguise for Lamb’s agents is that having all of their career prospects eliminated leaves them free to actually do intelligence work, without the distractions of trying to clamber up the greasy pole of political elevation. They can be loyal to one another, and even heroic, if not in a way that their bosses will ever recognize. This might make for a depressing real-world status quo, but on Slow Horses, it translates into exemplary television: the most unlikely champions saving the day (and themselves) in ways that only we, the viewers, can truly appreciate.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

There were times, during the first two years of the Biden presidency, when I came close to forgetting about it all: the taunts and the provocations; the incitements and the resentments; the disorchestrated reasoning; the verbal incontinence; the press conferences fueled by megalomania, vengeance, and a soupçon of hydroxychloroquine. I forgot, almost, that we’d had a man in the White House who governed by tweet. I forgot that the news cycle had shrunk down to microseconds. I forgot, even, that we’d had a president with a personality so disordered and a mind so dysregulated (this being a central irony, that our nation’s top executive had zero executive function) that the generals around him had to choose between carrying out presidential orders and upholding the Constitution.

I forgot, in short, that I’d spent nearly five years scanning the veldt for threats, indulging in the most neurotic form of magical thinking, convinced that my monitoring of Twitter alone was what stood between Trump and national ruin, just as Erica Jong believed that her concentration and vigilance were what kept her flight from plunging into the sea.

Say what you want about Joe Biden: He’s allowed us to go days at a time without remembering he’s there.

[Adam Serwer: An incompetent authoritarian is still a catastrophe]

But now here we are, faced with the prospect of a Trump restoration. We’ve already seen the cruelty and chaos that having a malignant narcissist in the Oval Office entails. What will happen to the American psyche if he wins again? What will happen if we have to live in fight-or-flight mode for four more years, and possibly far beyond?

Our bodies are not designed to handle chronic stress. Neuroscientists have a term for the tipping-point moment when we capitulate to it—allostatic overload—and the result is almost always sickness in one form or another, whether it’s a mood disorder, substance abuse, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or ulcers. “Increase your blood pressure for a few minutes to evade a lion—a good thing,” Robert Sapolsky, one of the country’s most esteemed researchers of stress, emailed me when I asked him about Trump’s effect on our bodies. But “increase your blood pressure every time you’re in the vicinity of the alpha male—you begin to get cardiovascular disease.” Excess levels of the stress hormone cortisol for extended periods is terrible for the human body; it hurts the immune system in ways that, among other things, can lead to worse outcomes for COVID and other diseases. (One 2019 study, published in JAMA Network Open, reported that Trump’s election to the White House correlated with a spike in premature births among Latina women.)

Another major component of our allostatic overload, notes Gloria Mark, the author of Attention Span, would be “technostress,” in this case brought on by the obsessive checking of—and interruptions from, and passing around of—news, which Trump made with destructive rapidity. Human brains are not designed to handle such a helter-skelter onslaught; effective multitasking, according to Mark, is in fact a complete myth (there’s always a cost to our productivity). Yet we are once again facing a news cycle that will shove our attention—as well as our output, our nerves, our sanity—through a Cuisinart.

[Read: ‘This is fine,’ the meme that defined a decade]

One might reasonably ask how many Americans will truly care about the constant churn of chaos, given how many of us still walk around in a fug of political apathy. Quite a few, apparently. The American Psychological Association’s annual stress survey, conducted by the Harris Poll, found that 68 percent of Americans reported that the 2020 election was a significant source of strain. Kevin B. Smith, a political-science professor at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, found that about 40 percent of American adults identified politics as “a significant source of stress in their lives,” based on YouGov surveys he commissioned in 2017 and 2020. Even more remarkably, Smith found that about 5 percent reported having had suicidal thoughts because of our politics.

Richard A. Friedman, a clinical psychiatry professor at Weill Cornell Medical College, wonders if a second Trump term would be like a second, paralyzing blow in boxing, translating into “learned helplessness on a population-level scale,” in which a substantial proportion of us curdle into listlessness and despair. Such an epidemic would be terrible, especially for the young; we’d have a generation of nihilists on our hands, with all future efforts to #Resist potentially melting under the waffle iron of its own hashtag.

Which is what a would-be totalitarian wants—a republic of the indifferent.

Ironically, were Trump to win, an important group of his supporters would bear a particular psychological burden of their own, and that’s our elected GOP officials. I’ve written before that Trump’s presidency sometimes seemed like an extended Milgram experiment, with Republican politicians subjected to more and more horrifying requests. During round two, they’d be asked to do far worse, and live in even greater terror of his base—and even greater terror of him, as he tells them, in the manner of all malignant narcissists, that they’d be nothing without him. And he wouldn’t be wholly wrong.

The Trump base, however, will be intoxicated. We should brace ourselves for a second uncorking of what Philip Roth called “the indigenous American berserk”: The Proud Boys will be prouder; the Alex Jones conspiracists will let their false-flag freakishness fly; the “Great Replacement” theorists will become more savage in their rhetoric about Black, Hispanic, and Jewish people. (The Trump administration coincided with a measurable increase in hate crimes, incited in no small part by the man himself.)

[From the January/February 2024 issue: The Proud Boys love a winner]

But at this point, even an electoral defeat for Trump might not significantly diminish the toll that politics is taking on the collective American psyche. “In such a polarized society, everyone is always living with a lot of hate and fear and suspicion,” Rebecca Saxe, a neuroscientist at MIT who thinks a good deal about tribalism, told me. The winner of the presidential election “may change who bears the burden every four or eight years, but not the burden itself.”

Of course, fractured attention, heightened anxiety, and moral cynicism may come to seem like picayune problems if Trump wins and some 250 years of constitutional norms and rules unravel before our eyes, or we’re in a nuclear war with China, or the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is frog-marched off to court for treason.

“You get Trump once, it’s a misfortune,” Masha Gessen, the author of Surviving Autocracy, told me. “You get him twice, it’s normal. It’s what this country is.”

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “The Psychic Toll.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

There has never been a graver test of America’s rule of law than the prosecutions of Donald Trump. He “stands alone in American history for his alleged crimes,” as Jack Smith put it in a recent court filing. No president has ever schemed for months to retain power after losing an election—and over the repeated advice of his advisers and lawyers—nor taken and concealed classified documents for many months following his return to civilian life. No behavior could more urgently call for criminal sanctions, in order to protect values essential to national survival.

Notwithstanding what is at issue, the actions now under way to hold Trump to account are viewed by many with uncertainty, about both their wisdom and their chances of success. Respected people have expressed foreboding that Trump probably cannot be convicted, and that any actual prosecution may well damage the justice system, or otherwise have bad consequences. And the delay of two and a half years in bringing charges following January 6 has contributed to the sense of unease, raising further doubts about whether our system is up to the task of holding Trump to account.

A sounder perspective, urgently needed now, is to focus on how our adaptable and resilient system of justice is actually succeeding, with proceedings now moving forward at deliberate speed, and trial dates in two cases just a few months away. To get here, multiple obstacles blocking the path to legal accountability for Trump have already been overcome.

First, remember the world of January 2021. The coronavirus pandemic was reaching its peak, the program to administer the just-approved vaccines had to be organized and ramped up, and much-needed economic relief had to be—and was—enacted by bipartisan legislation within 60 days of the inauguration.

In the face of these challenges, directly following the election, President-elect Joe Biden was clear about his desire to avoid the distractions of investigating Trump. That view was in sync with a fairly broad consensus that the prosecution of a former president by a successor administration might occur in banana republics, but in America it would do more harm than good “to the nation and to the governing party in power.” Overcoming that premise would demand a fuller realization, in part through the testimonials of his own closest aides, of how thoroughly and willfully Trump had undermined the foundations of our system of government.

Another top priority at the start of the Biden administration was the need to restore public trust in a Department of Justice that Bill Barr had repeatedly misused to advance Trump’s personal and political interests. On the day of his nomination and in his first remarks to the department, Attorney General Merrick Garland placed great emphasis on the need to restore the norms of evenhanded, apolitical justice that had been “part of the DNA of every Justice Department employee since Edward Levi’s stint as the first post-Watergate Attorney General.”  

That concern also counseled that initial enforcement efforts relating to the events of January 6 should focus most attention on the violent offenders, against whom cases could most readily be made, with the idea of following leads upward to ultimately reach the organizers and leaders. The earnest pursuit of that project led to more than 500 arrests within six months of January 6, and ultimately made it the largest investigation in the department’s history, with charges filed against well over 1,000 defendants in almost all 50 states.

[David Frum: Trump’s reckoning with the rule of law]

All the while, without singling out Trump by name, Garland made clear that the department would “follow the facts … and charge what the evidence supports to hold all January 6 perpetrators accountable.” In particular, he emphasized that “there cannot be different rules for the powerful and the powerless” and that the investigation would reach perpetrators “at any level … whether they were present that day” or not.

A crucial contribution in realizing Garland’s promise to reach perpetrators “at any level,” the “powerful” as well as the “powerless,” was the extraordinary work of the House Select Committee, presented to the country in televised hearings over six months starting in June 2022. Through the testimony, mostly of Trump’s own former associates, often based on their firsthand observations, he was shown to have been the primary instigator of the entire project, who regularly overrode the contrary counsel of his closest advisers.

Another key element in expanding the prosecutorial reach to leaders including Trump was the availability of the special-counsel process, which allowed appointment from outside the Justice Department of an experienced attorney “with a reputation for integrity and impartial decisionmaking” to take primary responsibility and to “follow the facts and the law wherever they may lead, without prejudice or improper influence.”

The attorney general appointed Jack Smith in November 2022, right after Trump’s announcement of his candidacy, to take responsibility for cases likely to involve the leaders of the coup attempt but not the foot soldiers, as well as all matters related to the Mar-a-Lago search warrant for classified documents. With Smith in place, and Garland left only with a never-exercised power to modify Smith’s actions or remove him for cause, the claims of a political vendetta by Biden became even more unreasonable.     

Within nine months, Smith had filed the first-ever criminal cases against a former president, alleging, in the District of Columbia, the attempt to overthrow the election, and, in Florida, the criminal retention of classified documents. Two weeks after the federal indictment was filed in D.C., the district attorney of Fulton County, Georgia, filed state charges against Trump and 18 others for conduct aimed at corrupting the electoral process of that state.

The filing of charges in any criminal case is a watershed moment, ending what may be many months or years of laborious investigation with no predictable outcome. A criminal indictment states the claims of society against the defendant. At that point, the rights of both the defendant and the public to a speedy trial kick in, and the flow of events becomes more orderly and predictable.

That is not, of course, to say that the trial dates now scheduled—March 4, 2024, in D.C., and May 20, 2024, in Florida—are cast in stone, or even that we know for sure that at least one trial will proceed to a verdict well before the election. There is much work to be done, including pretrial motions on which the trial judge must rule, which will mainly address Trump’s legal theories of defense and the admissibility of evidence. The plausible legal motions for the defense are widely viewed as lacking in merit and unlikely to undermine the prosecutions, a perception confirmed by the December 1, 2023, ruling on the key absolute immunity, double jeopardy, and First Amendment motions filed by Trump in the District of Columbia federal case. At the same time, a small proportion of the possible motions are also subject to appeal before trial, and probably the greatest chance for delay will emerge in resolving that limited number of appeals.

With regard to all the events that will unfold from here on, we can take some comfort in the fact that these cases are now in the hands of trial judges who are, with the possible exception of Judge Aileen Cannon, highly competent and principled, and dedicated to seeing the cases resolved in a manner consistent with due process and the national interest. They understand what is at stake, and the need for expedition. They also know how to try a case fairly—how to select an unbiased jury, respect the rights of all parties, and proceed in accordance with the rules of evidence. In handling the appeals of any pretrial motions, the appellate courts can also be counted on to do their best to follow the law and give due consideration to the urgent national interest in expediting their resolution.  

As for the trials of the cases, no one can ask more than that the evidence be fairly presented to a properly instructed, unbiased jury, and there is good reason to believe that can be achieved. Because no fair trial in our system ever has a totally predictable outcome, this is a measure of uncertainty we must have the courage to accept. But the ample public record, including especially the many statements of Trump’s own associates about his conduct, gives grounds for expectations about what outcomes are likely to result from a fair airing of the facts.

In pursuing this path of justice for the former president, our rule of law may also serve the nation in another quite important way. Trump’s primary public appeal has always been closely tied to his defiance of the norms observed by normal people, and his claimed ability to make his own rules and define his own truth. But Trump’s engagement now in a prolonged and personal interaction with our judicial process does not sit easily with these claims to be above all authority.

[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump – a guide]

These three pending criminal cases—and the civil cases involving E. Jean Carroll and the New York attorney general’s allegations of systematic business fraud—all show him, day by day as events unfold, to be subject like everyone else to society’s rules of conduct. Not only the convictions that may well result, but the judicial proceedings themselves are graphic demonstrations for all to see that our democratic rule of law, and not Donald Trump, is indeed supreme.

In short, compared with the mire of uncertainty in which the nation has wallowed for the past several years, with no clear plan or path to deal with the most serious threat to our governmental system since the Civil War, we are now in a new and much better moment. Indeed, while the final chapters have yet to be written, it is not too soon for patriotic Americans to publicly take pride in what is now clear—that our rule of law is durable and works, even under the most challenging circumstances. A quiet celebration of that fact might begin with the suggestion made by the 28-year-old Abraham Lincoln when, in 1838, the country faced a different threat of mob rule: that by our renewed respect for the rule of law, we make it “the political religion of the Nation.”

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “If Trump Wins,” a project considering what Donald Trump might do if reelected in 2024.

If Donald Trump regains the presidency, he will once again become the chief law-enforcement officer of the United States. There may be no American leader less suited to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed,” as the Constitution directs the president. But that authority comes with the office, including command of the Justice Department and the FBI.

We know what Trump would like to do with that power, because he’s said so out loud. He is driven by self-interest and revenge, in that order. He wants to squelch the criminal charges now pending against him, and he wants to redeploy federal prosecutors against his enemies, beginning with President Joe Biden. The important question is how much of that agenda he could actually carry out in a second term.

Trump tried and failed to cross many lines during his time in the White House. He proposed, for example, that the IRS conduct punitive audits of his political antagonists and that Border Patrol officers shoot migrants in the legs. Subordinates talked the former president out of many such schemes or passively resisted them by running out the clock. The whole second volume of Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report, which documented 10 occasions on which Trump tried to obstruct justice, can be read as a compilation of thwarted directives.

[From the November 2023 issue: How General Mark Milley protected the Constitution from Donald Trump]

The institutional resistance Trump faced has reinforced his determination to place loyalists in key jobs should he win reelection. One example is Jeffrey Clark, who tried to help Trump overturn the 2020 election. Trump sought to appoint Clark as acting attorney general in early January 2021, but backed off after a mass-resignation threat at the DOJ. People who know him well suggest that he would not let that threat deter him a second time. Trump will also want to fire Christopher Wray, the FBI director, and replace him with someone more pliable. Only tradition, not binding law, prevents the president and his political appointees from issuing orders to the FBI about its investigations.

The top jobs at the DOJ require Senate confirmation, and even a Republican Senate might not confirm an indicted conspirator to overturn an election like Clark for attorney general. Under the Vacancies Reform Act, which regulates temporary appointments, Trump can appoint any currently serving Senate-confirmed official from anywhere in the executive branch as acting attorney general. Of course, all of the officials serving at the beginning of his new term would be holdovers from the Biden administration.

Trump’s allies are searching for loyalists among the Republicans currently serving on several dozen independent boards and commissions, such as the Federal Trade Commission, that have “party balancing” requirements for their appointees. Alternatively, Trump could choose any senior career official in the Justice Department who has served for at least 90 days in a position ranked GS-15 or higher on the federal pay scale—a cohort that includes, for example, senior trial attorneys, division counsels, and section chiefs. As Anne Joseph O’Connell, a Stanford law professor and an expert on the Vacancies Reform Act, reminded me, “This is how we got Matthew Whitaker,” the former attorney general’s chief of staff, as acting attorney general. (Whitaker was widely criticized as unqualified.)

Would some career officials, somewhere among the department’s 115,000 employees, do Trump’s bidding in exchange for an acting appointment? Trump’s team is looking.

Once Trump has installed loyalists in crucial posts, his first priority—an urgent one for a man facing 91 felony charges in four jurisdictions—would be to save himself from conviction and imprisonment.

Of the four indictments against him, two are federal: the Florida case, with charges of unlawful retention of classified documents and obstruction of justice, and the Washington case, which charges Trump with unlawful efforts to overturn the 2020 election. Those will be the easiest for him to dispose of.

To begin with, there is little to stop Trump from firing Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing both of the federal investigations. Justice Department regulations confer a measure of protection on a special counsel against arbitrary dismissal, but he may be removed for “misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or for other good cause.” That last clause is a catchall that Trump could readily invoke.

[David A. Graham: The cases against Trump: A guide]

The regulations state that a special counsel may be fired “only by the personal action of the Attorney General,” but that would not stop Trump either. In the unlikely event that his handpicked attorney general were reluctant, he could fire the attorney general and keep on firing successors until he found one to do his bidding, as Richard Nixon did to get rid of Archibald Cox. Alternatively, Trump could claim—and probably prevail, if it came to a lawsuit—that the president is not bound by Justice Department regulations and can fire the special counsel himself.

Smith’s departure would still leave Trump’s federal criminal charges intact, but no law would prevent Trump from ordering that they be dropped. He could do so even with a trial in progress, right up to the moment before a jury returned a verdict. No legal expert I talked with expressed any doubt that he could get away with this.

Dismissing the charges would require the trial judges’ consent. But even if the judges were to object, Trump would almost certainly win on appeal: The Supreme Court is not likely to let a district judge decide whether or not the Justice Department has to prosecute a case.

Trump will be able to avoid going to prison even if he has already been convicted of federal charges before he is sworn in. Here again, a trial judge is unlikely to order Trump imprisoned, even after sentencing, before he exhausts his appeals. And there is no plausible scenario in which that happens before Inauguration Day.

At any time while Trump’s appeals are pending, his Justice Department may notify the appellate court that the prosecution no longer wishes to support his conviction. This is known as a confession of error on the government’s part; the effect, if the court grants the request, is to vacate a conviction. Under Attorney General Bill Barr, the Trump administration did something to similar effect in a false-statements case against former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, moving to dismiss the charges after Flynn had pleaded guilty but before his sentencing. (Trump later pardoned Flynn.) According to the relevant rule of criminal procedure, dismissal during prosecution—including on appeal from a conviction—requires “leave of the court,” but it’s highly unlikely that an appellate court would refuse to grant such a motion to dismiss.

Trump might also invoke the pardon power on his own behalf. He has already asserted, as far back as 2018, that “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.” No president has ever tried this, and whether he can is a contested question among legal scholars. Experts who agree with Trump say the Constitution frames the pardon power as total but for one exception, implicitly blessing all other uses. (The exception is that the president may not pardon an impeachment.) Those who disagree include the Justice Department itself, through its Office of Legal Counsel, which concluded in 1974 that a self-pardon would be invalid under “the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.”

But the debate over self-pardons wouldn’t matter much to Trump in practice. If he pardoned himself of all criminal charges, there would be no one with standing to challenge the pardon in court—other than, perhaps, the Justice Department, which would be under Trump’s control.

Unlike the federal charges, Trump’s state criminal cases—for alleged racketeering and election interference in Georgia and hush-money payments to a porn star in New York—would not fall under his authority as president. Even so, the presidency would very likely protect him for at least the duration of his second term.

The Office of Legal Counsel, which makes authoritative interpretations of the law for the executive branch, has twice opined, in 1973 and again in 2000, that “the indictment or criminal prosecution of a sitting President would unconstitutionally undermine the capacity of the executive branch to perform its constitutionally assigned functions.” That conclusion is binding for federal prosecutors, but state prosecutors are not obliged to follow it.

No one knows what would happen if Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, or Alvin Bragg, the DA in New York, decided to press ahead with their cases against Trump should he regain the presidency. Like so many outlandish questions pertaining to Trump, this one has no judicial precedent, because no sitting president has ever been charged with felony crimes. But legal scholars told me that Trump would have strong arguments, at least, to defer state criminal proceedings against him until he left the White House in 2029. By then, new prosecutors, with new priorities, may have replaced Willis and Bragg.

Trump has named a long list of people as deserving of criminal charges, or execution. Among them are Joe Biden, Mark Milley, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, John Brennan, James Clapper, and Arthur Engoron, the judge in his New York civil fraud case.

If he returns to office, Trump may not even have to order their prosecutions himself. He will be surrounded by allies who know what he wants. One likely DOJ appointee is Mike Davis, a Republican who has substantial government credentials: He was a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch and chief counsel for nominations to Senator Charles Grassley when Grassley chaired the Judiciary Committee.

If Davis were acting attorney general, he said on a right-wing YouTube show, he would “rain hell on Washington.” First, “we’re gonna fire a lot of people in the executive branch, in the deep state.” He would also “indict Joe Biden and Hunter Biden and James Biden and every other scumball, sleazeball Biden.” And “every January 6 defendant is gonna get a pardon.” Trump could not immediately appoint an outsider like Davis attorney general. But he could make him a Justice Department section chief, and then appoint him as acting attorney general after 90 days.

Trump could also appoint—or direct his attorney general to appoint—any lawyer, at any time, as special counsel to the Justice Department, with the authority to bring charges and prosecute a case. Trump might not be able to convict his political enemies of spurious charges, but he could immiserate them with years of investigations and require them to run up millions of dollars in legal fees.

Likewise, if he managed to place sufficiently zealous allies in the Office of Legal Counsel, Trump could obtain legal authority for any number of otherwise lawless transgressions. Vice President Dick Cheney did that in the George W. Bush administration, inducing the OLC to issue opinions that authorized torture and warrantless domestic surveillance. Those opinions were later repudiated, but they guided policy for years. Trump’s history suggests that he might seek comparable legal blessing for the use of lethal force at the southern border, deployment of federal troops against political demonstrators, federal seizure of state voting machines, or deferral of the next election in order to stay in power. He would be limited only by the willingness of Congress, the Supreme Court, and the career civil service to say no.

It occurred to me, as I interviewed government veterans and legal scholars, that they might be blinkered by their own expertise when they try to anticipate what Trump would do. All of the abuses they foresee are based on the ostensibly lawful powers of the president, even if they amount to gross ruptures of legal norms and boundaries. What transgressions could he commit, that is, within the law?

But Trump himself isn’t thinking that way. On Truth Social, in December 2022, he posted that righting a wrong of sufficient “magnitude” (in this case, his fictitious claim of election fraud) “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”

The “take Care” clause of the Constitution calls for the president to see that laws are carried out faithfully. But what if a court rules against Trump and he simply refuses to comply? It’s not obvious who would—or could—enforce the ruling.

This article appears in the January/February 2024 print edition with the headline “Trump Will Get Away With It.”

It starts where it finishes, in a dead-end drone: a single accordion note that seems to refine itself, thin itself out, even as it goes nowhere and lasts forever. That the song was recorded in 1985 is a mere accident of history: It could have been written at any point in the past 200 years. It could have been written by nobody at all—by Anonymous or by some mystery of collective authorship. Acid like a ballad by Brecht and Weill, blunter than all but the most sawn-off punk rock, the late Shane MacGowan’s “The Old Main Drag” is as undeceived a statement of human despair as anything in the canon of folk music.

MacGowan, who died last Thursday, recorded it with his band the Pogues, and if you ever saw the Pogues play live, you know that their fans were wild. They stomped and roared and fought and sang along and spilled their Guinness, turning every show, anywhere, into a punctually berserk rite of the Irish diaspora. And how they adored Shane, the out-of-his-head front man leering brokenly and steadying himself with the mic stand. His very name, to them, was a rallying cry.

His true constituency, however, was never at the shows. Its members were always somewhere outside the venue, in the dark streets, in doorways or behind dumpsters. They were under striplights in emergency rooms, or in a cell.

The song that precedes it on Rum Sodomy & the Lash, the Pogues’ second studio album, is “The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn”: a dying man’s delirium, world-famous Irish tenors warbling at his bedside as he flashes back through a life of glory and squalor, of punching fascists in Madrid and catching STDs in Cologne. The song’s mood swings, alternating between dolorously shimmering verse and thrashy rave-up chorus, and its hero is mythically ubiquitous and unkillable. Ejected from a London pub and beaten up outside, he “walked back in through a bolted door”; dead and buried in Cloughprior, he bulbs up headfirst from the earth, yelling for another round.

This is not the story with “The Old Main Drag.” No comebacks or revivals here, no slapstick regenerations. The narrator arrives alone at 16 in London’s West End and falls into drugs, sex work, and life on the street. He gets brutalized by the police—“they ruined my good looks”—and, having started with nothing, ends up with less: “I’ve been spat on and shat on and raped and abused / I know that I am dying and I wish I could beg / For some money to take me from the old main drag.” The last four words, devastatingly, are not sung but lifelessly muttered: The music disappears, gives up, as if the very possibility of music has been exhausted, and the song flatlines into that single accordion note, now an octave lower.

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“The Old Main Drag” is a song, not a spiritual manifesto. Its impact depends on certain technical effects: the way the gently clucking banjo line seems to nurse the on-his-last-legs singer through the turns of the melody; the ragged climb of MacGowan’s voice; the sparsity of rhythm, only the fatal ticking of a drumstick against the rim of the snare; the foreshadowing, in a wordless mid-section of that final death-drone. (I’ve been trying to think of other street-level songs that pack a comparable musical punch. The only one I can come up with is Grant Hart’s addiction hymn “The Main”: “Well, it sinks to the bottom or floats to the top / I avoided policemen when I went to cop …”)

But it also kind of is a spiritual manifesto. In 1989, a chaotic interview-slash-summit organized by New Musical Express found MacGowan sitting in a London pub, arguing with Mark E. Smith, hobgoblin singer of the Fall, about Nietzsche. Smith approved of Nietzsche; MacGowan didn’t. “He wasn’t a Nazi,” scoffs Smith, “you’re only saying that ’cos some polytechnic fuckin’ lecturer told you he was.” “I’m saying it,” replies MacGowan, “because I read two of his books where he dismissed the weak, the ugly, the radically impure, Christianity, Socrates, Plato. He was anti anyone who hadn’t a strong body, perfect features.”

MacGowan, self-evidently, was no fan of the Nietzschean Superman. He was for the weak, the ugly, the radically impure, the spat-on and shat-on, the beloved of Christ. The compassion in “The Old Main Drag” is not empathy. To empathize with is to objectify. This is closer to real spiritual poverty: obliteration of self—by art or drugs or both—and a heart opened to the breaking point. MacGowan is the rent boy in Piccadilly Circus, the victim behind the “metal doors” of the police station, the down-and-out descending into death. At every station of the old main drag, he’s there.

Irish traditional or post-traditional music is in great shape right now: Lankum, John Francis Flynn, Lisa O’Neill, the Mary Wallopers. This, too, is part of MacGowan’s legacy. But what’s going to get him past St. Peter, and prolong his name here on Earth, is his fidelity to the dispossessed. To those outside, to the people he’d meet—and who would meet him—drinking in the park. His voice in pop music, his bawling, shattered voice, was like the cry of the owl in the Edward Thomas poem: “a most melancholy cry … Speaking for all who lay under the stars, / Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.”

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