The lawsuit filed last week to halt the Trump administration’s dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development stands on a bedrock constitutional principle: “Congress, not the President or the U.S. Constitution, creates and organizes the offices and departments” of the government—as a 2017 Heritage Foundation report accurately stated.

Good-faith arguments exist both for and against America having an independent USAID, or—to name another Donald Trump target—a stand-alone federal Department of Education. Over the decades, Congress has changed its mind about both. Constitutionally, however, that’s the point: The decision is up to Congress. Unilateral moves to dismantle USAID, to mothball the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or, if Trump’s advisers have their way, to disassemble the Education Department are beyond the president’s constitutional authority.

Since the Kennedy administration, foreign-assistance functions have been lodged in different agency homes. With authority granted him by the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, President John F. Kennedy established USAID as a division of the State Department. Using powers delegated to him by statutes enacted in 1979, President Jimmy Carter moved USAID’s functions to the United States International Development Cooperation Agency. In 1998, Congress gave President Bill Clinton authority to either return USAID to the State Department or allow it to become an independent establishment within the executive branch; Clinton did the latter. Although presidential judgment thus informed the shape of USAID at every stage of its evolution, everything that presidents pre-Trump did with regard to the structure of USAID or the allocation of its functions was done pursuant to laws that Congress had enacted. No president asserted authority independent of Congress to create, reshape, or eliminate USAID.

This history reflects the Framers’ decision to give Congress, not the president, the authority to generate the executive-organization chart. The Constitution’s executive-branch charter, Article II, envisions what we now call the federal bureaucracy. The president is given explicit authority to “require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices.” But Article II says nothing else about those “departments.” Instead, Article I of the Constitution, the charter for the legislative branch, assigns to Congress the responsibility to “make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution … all … powers vested by this Constitution in the government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.” The president’s job is to faithfully execute the law, but law—including law that establishes and structures executive offices and agencies—gets made by Congress.

[Read: The other fear of the founders]

Since the very first Congress, the legislative branch has jealously guarded its power over organization. When the first House bill creating the Department of Foreign Affairs was introduced in the Senate, Senator William Maclay of Pennsylvania suggested that the organization of the executive branch might be left to the president, as the holder of executive power. His scheme would have given to the president the power of a British monarch to create offices. The Senate rejected his position, and the First Congress enacted a round of statutes organizing the new departments—Foreign Affairs, War, and Treasury. The statutory duties of the secretaries heading Foreign Affairs and War were largely to carry out presidential instructions; Congress recognized that Article II envisioned significant discretionary roles in foreign and military affairs for the president. The Treasury, however, was organized in detail. Not only did Congress assign the Treasury Secretary a significant number of specific legal duties, but it also created additional offices within the department—all requiring Senate advice and consent. These additional offices, as explained by the administrative-law scholar Jerry L. Mashaw, “were meant to provide checks on the Secretary and each other in the crucial matter of safeguarding the integrity of the fiscal and monetary affairs of the nation.” Congress went on to create a variety of other agencies, including the Mint, the Post Office, a Customs Service, and a national bank, tailoring the structure of each according to its sense of how best to fit structure to mission. No one doubted that this was Congress’s prerogative to decide.

Supreme Court jurisprudence recognized Congress’s role. In Myers v. United States, the 1926 Supreme Court decision most protective of broad presidential power over administration, Chief Justice (and former president) William Howard Taft acknowledged: “To Congress under its legislative power is given the establishment of offices, the determination of their functions and jurisdiction, the prescribing of reasonable and relevant qualifications and rules of eligibility of appointees, and the fixing of the term for which they are to be appointed.” This proposition has never been open to serious question.

Congress has recognized, of course, that presidents may have valuable ideas regarding administrative organization. Beginning in 1939, Congress enacted a series of so-called Reorganization Acts, which gave presidents significant (but not unlimited) discretion to create, abolish, or restructure administrative agencies, subject to an important caveat. Presidential reorganization plans were subject to a “legislative veto”—that is, a resolution disapproving the plan enacted by both Houses of Congress, which could keep it from going into effect. This would be a concurrent resolution of the House and the Senate that the president could not veto and did not have to sign in order to make it binding. Through the threat of legislative vetoes, Congress kept control over what got created, abolished, or restructured.

In 1983, however, the Supreme Court held that legislative vetoes were an unconstitutional form of legislation. As a result, Congress took away presidential authority to implement reorganizations unilaterally. If presidential reorganization plans could not easily be blocked, Congress would no longer authorize them. Since 1984, presidents have been allowed only to propose reorganizations, which Congress could enact or reject through the ordinary legislative process. (A suggestion in 2023 by Vivek Ramaswamy that a 1977 Reorganization Act continues to empower presidents to abolish agencies despite the statutory changes Congress enacted in 1984 is an appallingly fanciful statutory interpretation.)

[Read: The Constitutional crisis is here]

In light of this legal background, the question is why Trump thinks a president can legally disassemble agencies on his own—assuming, that is, that he cares if it is legal. The likely answer would involve an especially ambitious version of an Article II interpretation called the “unitary executive theory.” The baseline premise of the unitary executive theory is that Article II guarantees presidents complete removal authority over every subordinate member of the executive branch. Bolder versions contend that he or she can also directly command how every function of the executive branch be performed—or even perform them personally.

The Supreme Court has never fully embraced the unitary executive theory. However, a broad reading of the Myers decision mentioned earlier—a reading the Court unanimously rejected seven years later—would invalidate any attempt by Congress to create independent administrators protected from presidential at-will removal. The Roberts Court has gone nearly all in on the broad reading of Myers, treating Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the 1935 opinion upholding the Federal Trade Commission, as a mere exception to Myers. (In the intervening decades, the Supreme Court had repeatedly reaffirmed Humphrey’s Executor as the controlling authority, most famously in its 1988 decision upholding the constitutionality of post-Watergate independent counsels.) As a result, the constitutionality of agency structures such as the Federal Trade Commission and the National Labor Relations Board now hangs by a thread; the Court could conceivably uphold the firing of the NLRB member Gwynne Wilcox.

Of course, even a presidential power to fire an individual agency head would not necessarily translate into authority to shut down entire government departments. However, in its 2024 opinion granting former presidents all-but-blanket immunity from prosecution for crimes committed while in office, the Court seemed to signal something far more ominous. The majority described the president’s authority to supervise the executive branch as a power that Congress may not touch—a conclusion that flies in the face of constitutional text. As explained by the Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, who had headed the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during part of George W. Bush’s second administration: “The ruling about the exclusivity of presidential enforcement discretion, especially vis-à-vis Congress, is entirely novel … And it has potentially massive implications, depending on its scope.” What the opinion now apparently implies to Trump is that the president, constitutionally speaking, is the entirety of the executive branch, and he can configure it however he wants.

That said, Trump’s record of legal success in the Supreme Court is a mixed one. But he presumably thinks it a good bet either that the legal challenges to his scorched-earth tactics will be too slow to stop him or that, if they reach the Supreme Court, that body’s right-wing supermajority will continue to improvise on behalf of de facto executive supremacy. Eyeing the latter possibility, the newly confirmed Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought has affirmed the administration’s position that Congress lacks authority to force the spending of appropriated funds—a position the Supreme Court has never endorsed, and which is constitutionally unfounded. But a majority that would proceed as vigorously and creatively as it did to protect Trump from prosecution might be willing to improvise some more.

[Read: Trump signals he might ignore the courts]

A government agency’s structure and location are not just abstract; they matter to the work the agency does on the ground. When Congress extracted a Department of Education from what was formerly the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, it was to give federal support for education greater emphasis. When Congress moved the Coast Guard from Transportation to Homeland Security, it was presumably to prioritize the Coast Guard’s role in security rather than safety. The reason proposals to merge the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service have always failed is that the organizational DNA of the Interior Department, which houses BLM, favors conservation, whereas the reflexive policy mood of the Agriculture Department, which owns the Forest Service, is pro-development.

Perhaps the most worrying development is that the administration’s commitment to obeying court orders may not prove any more reliable than its dedication to following statutes. On Sunday, with a soupçon of Trumpian deniability in his precise wording, Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.” Taken literally, Vance’s statement is accurate; what it fails to acknowledge is that the judicial power includes authority to state just how far the executive’s legitimate power extends. In rejecting President Richard Nixon’s claim of entitlement to withhold the Watergate tapes, the Court held in a unanimous opinion: “Many decisions of this Court … have unequivocally reaffirmed the [1803] holding of Marbury v. Madison that ‘[i]t is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.’” Should Trump ignore any court order to halt his demolition of the executive branch, he will have dismantled not just an agency, but the Constitution itself.

Elon Musk has brazenly dismantled government agencies because he can feel assured of his insulation from the law. By the end of Donald Trump’s presidency, he may well receive a pardon. That’s what many recent pardons (Paul Manafort, the Biden clan, the January 6 insurrectionists) suggest: Presidential loyalists and family members are, in effect, immune from prosecution. On the most disturbing scale, they have become like diplomats who can park wherever they want.

The dawn of this age of impunity can be dated to any number of administrations. In his new book, The Pardon, Jeffrey Toobin makes a compelling case that a primary culprit is the 38th president, Gerald Ford. Toobin’s thesis is brashly revisionist; Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon has gone down in history as a great act of beneficence. According to conventional wisdom, by immunizing Nixon from prosecution, Ford short-circuited years of polarizing legal proceedings against the former president that would have torn the nation asunder. But Toobin argues that this overpraised act of catharsis established a precedent of lawlessness. The road to Trump begins, in some moral sense, with the absolution of Nixon.

At a glance, the amiable Ford, a college football star and World War II veteran, seems impossible to villainize. Compared with Trump or Nixon, he was the picture of humble decency. On the day he became president, he lumbered out of his suburban-Virginia house in a bathrobe to pick up the paper. In the White House, he toasted his own English muffins. He told dad jokes, played in celebrity golf tournaments, and had a reputation for basically wanting to do the ethical thing.

Having stumbled into the Nixon presidency, as the replacement for the venal vice president Spiro Agnew, he stumbled into the presidency after Watergate. As Chevy Chase portrayed him on Saturday Night Live, dooming him in popular memory, he was always stumbling. The shtick drew on President Lyndon B. Johnson’s famous aperçu, “Jerry Ford is so dumb that he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time.” (Johnson also declared, “There’s nothing wrong with Jerry Ford, except that he played football too long without his helmet.”)

As the Watergate scandal unfolded, Ford made it his mission to learn as little about it as possible. He defended Nixon in the vaguest terms, and essentially ran in the other direction when Nixon asked him to examine evidence in the scandal. Ford stubbornly, and somewhat inexplicably, refused to prepare for the possibility that he might become president. He had initially accepted the vice presidency in the hope that it would be a capstone to his long political career. Indeed, that was the reason Nixon picked him: He knew that Ford had so little appetite for the big job, and so little political guile, that he was unlikely to conspire to oust him.

[Read: Trump’s pardons are sending a crystal-clear message]

In the days leading up to his ignominious departure, Nixon hatched a very Nixonian plot to exploit Ford’s goodwill and naivete. He wanted to pressure the future president into pardoning him without ever making a direct ask—a strategy he conceived with the White House counsel Fred Buzhardt, under the cover of attorney-client privilege.

On August 1, 1974, Nixon told Alexander Haig, his chief of staff, that he wanted him to begin preparing Ford to assume the job. “Tell him what’s coming,” he instructed. Nixon knew that Haig would check in with Buzhardt before sitting down with Ford. This was the twist in his scheme: Buzhardt had prepared a memo for Haig, listing six “endgame” scenarios for Ford to consider. In classic Washington style, he arrayed the possibilities so that every plan entailed a messy, prolonged handoff except for one: “Nixon could resign and then Ford could pardon him.” This was the elegant solution, but it had the whiff of corrupt horse-trading.

The pardon wasn’t something that Ford had ever considered, so he peppered Haig with questions about it. Although they didn’t agree to anything in the course of conversation, Ford’s interest had been ignited. He came to believe that a pardon genuinely served his own interests. When he finally assumed the job, he wanted to be more than a pleasant placeholder, and he could never be his own man without first disposing of the looming presence of Richard Nixon.

And so Ford talked himself into the pardon. He read a 1915 Supreme Court decision, which ruled that the acceptance of a presidential pardon is tantamount to admitting guilt, and convinced himself that the public would accept that legal logic. He would tell aides that he felt sorry for poor old Nixon, who he worried was in physical decline.

Ford pushed the process forward without really debating the merits of a pardon with his staff. His poorly argued, nervously delivered speech announcing the decision to the nation was so rushed that aides didn’t have time to prepare a teleprompter. Ford barely gave congressional leaders a heads-up, and none of them could quite grasp his reasons for haste. Tip O’Neill, the majority leader in the House, asked Ford, “Then why the hell are you doing it?” He posed that question minutes before Ford went on national television.

In the most outrageous passage of the speech, Ford declared the fate of Richard Nixon “an American tragedy in which we all played a part.” The public, having been accused of complicity, took its revenge. In a single week, Ford’s popularity plummeted 21 percentage points. His party suffered catastrophic collapse in that year’s midterm election.

[Jeffrey Crouch: O]ur Founders didn’t intend for pardons to work like this

With the benefit of time, however, Washington revised its opinion of the decision. Bob Woodward, of all people, eventually concluded, “Ford was wise to act. What at first and for many years looked like a decision to protect Nixon was instead designed to protect the nation.” Ford slowly remerged with the reputation of a healer, a man of grace.

That revisionism is nostalgic gloss. Toobin makes a damning, nuanced case against Ford. Nixon had, at that point, committed the worst crimes in the history of the presidency, vividly and irrefutably captured on tape, and he escaped without any punishment. He received absolution without displaying remorse. “The pardon was just a free pass handed from one powerful man to another,” Toobin writes.

Despite his earnest desire to undo Nixon’s legacy, Ford’s pardon was itself an assertion of the imperial presidency. That’s because the pardon is an inherently Caesarean implement. In every other facet of the American system, carefully installed safeguards are designed to limit the authoritarian exercise of power. But there is no curb on the pardon other than the conscience of the executive issuing one. Presidents tend to tacitly admit that they are misusing this authority when they sheepishly hoard pardons for the final hours of their administration, waiting for the moment when there’s no political price to pay and hoping that their shabby behavior is drowned out by the inaugural hoopla.

By absolving his former patron, Ford helped create a new Washington ritual: the moment when presidents release their cronies, friends, and family from the bonds of justice. George H. W. Bush sprinkled his magic forgiveness dust over Casper Weinberger, Robert McFarlane, and Elliot Abrams, among others, letting them off the hook for the Iran-Contra scandal. Bill Clinton bailed out the financier Marc Rich, whose alleged crimes included buying oil from Iran in defiance of an embargo. (Rich’s wife was a generous donor to Clinton.) And then Joe Biden had the temerity to pronounce himself a defender of the rule of law before he used his presidential powers to insulate his own family from potential prosecution.

Over the past few weeks, Donald Trump has exposed the flimsiness of American institutions. Pressure-tested by his audacious assault on the civil services, those institutions instantly folded. But when a bridge tumbles into a river, the rivets and bolts don’t suddenly fail. They erode over generations. This is what happened in Washington: The unfettered power of the president kept expanding, Congress entered a state of sclerosis, the parties became apologists for their leaders, and courts fell into the hands of ideologues. As Toobin depressingly shows, even upstanding nice guys like Gerald Ford played their part in the collapse.

Donald Trump is waging war on the civil service in the name of efficiency. But Washington created the modern civil service to make the government efficient in the first place, ending a patronage system wracked with graft and incompetence. Trump’s so-called reforms will only make it harder for the White House and the Republican Congress to enact their own policy aims, and harder for any president to get things done in the future.

Trump sees the “deep state” as an impediment to policy change, not as an instrument of it; he attacks the idea of a nonpartisan civil service and the civil service itself. Government workers are “crooked people,” Trump said while campaigning last year. “They’re dishonest people. They’re going to be held accountable.” To that end, his White House has offered to buy out federal employees under his “Fork in the Road” policy, fired more than a dozen inspectors general, transferred hundreds of workers outside their area of expertise, spurred experienced career employees to quit, put thousands of workers on furlough or leave, and attempted to strip job protections from nonpartisan employees. A message sent to millions of civil servants late last month emphasized the importance of loyalty and trust; a message sent this week argued that fewer positions should be held by the “impartial.”

In many ways, Trump is seeking to return the country to the spoils system that existed in the 19th century. Pioneered by President Andrew Jackson, that system awarded tens of thousands of civil-service jobs to allies and co-partisans of the White House. (The phrase “to the victor belong the spoils” does not originate in ancient Athens or Rome. It was first uttered by New York Senator William L. Marcy in the early 1830s.) This kind of patronage was efficient, Jackson and his supporters argued: “Rotation in office” meant that the civil service aligned with the ideology of the president, and brought fresh workers into the stodgy government.

But having party loyalists manage the Postal Service and firing thousands of people every time the White House changed hands was not a model of efficiency. Postmasters, clerks, and surveyors paid a share of their salary as kickbacks to the party in control of their position. “Solicitation letters were sent by the party to each worker, return envelopes were provided to ensure that payments were made, and compliance was carefully monitored,” the economists Ronald Johnson and Gary Libecap note. Scandals abounded. The collector of the Port of New York embezzled $1 million, not adjusted for inflation, before fleeing for England in 1838.

[Read: Make government efficient again]

In 1880, President James Garfield ran on reform, promising in his inaugural address to pass civil-service regulations “for the good of the service” and “for the protection of incumbents against intrigue and wrong.” Shortly after, he was assassinated by a deranged preacher and onetime resident of the Oneida free-love commune who’d been seeking a diplomatic appointment in Paris. At that point, Congress decided things needed to change. Garfield’s successor, Chester Arthur, “only got his job as vice president because he was a product of the spoils system,” Jon Rogowski, a political scientist at the University of Chicago, told me. Arthur had held the post of collector of the Port of New York too, and had gotten rich on the job. “He was this incredible messenger, saying, We should reform, even though it would dramatically upend the very system that I came through myself,” Rogowski said.

The Pendleton Act of 1883 finally ended the spoils system, requiring government employees to pass an exam and forbidding hiring on the basis of race, politics, religion, or national origin. It led to a 25 percent reduction in staff turnover and increased the qualifications held by bureaucrats. Postal-delivery errors dropped by 22 percent, and the volume of mail delivered by carriers increased as much as 14 percent.

During the Progressive Era and the New Deal—and after the Watergate scandal—Congress passed further regulations, making it easier for federal agencies to promote high-performing employees, protecting whistleblowers, ensuring that the executive branch did not overstep its authority, and eliminating racial bias and nepotism in hiring. Today, a thicket of laws prevents the White House from making partisan hiring decisions, and civil servants from engaging in partisan activity. The Government Accountability Office and inspectors general root out incompetence, inefficiency, and waste.

[Read: Trump’s campaign to dismantle the government]

Every bureaucracy has some bloat. But there are no more civil servants now than there were in the late 1960s, even as the population they serve has grown by two-thirds. The tasks these 2.2 million employees perform are often uncontroversial; the Department of Veterans Affairs is one of the largest employers, and 70 percent of the civil service works in defense and security-related agencies. Moreover, federal workers are more efficient than private workers; they are less expensive to hire too.

Nor is the system biased against conservative administrations. Government employees are not particularly ideological. They tend to have long careers, working with presidents from both parties. On the job, civil servants tend to be better than politicians at shaping policy. The country does not need White House staffers to make decisions “setting interest rates or deciding which banks to bail out, to determine schedules for Air Force aircraft maintenance, or to certify particular drugs as safe and effective,” the political scientist Francis Fukuyama argues. When they do, he says, “the results are almost always harmful.”

Other countries show the risks. Viktor Orbán’s attack on Hungary’s civil service has led to the degradation of the country’s water, sanitation, and electric systems, and corruption in the construction industry and real-estate market. In Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro’s purging of public officials made the government less efficient.

In the United States, the strong, nonpartisan civil service reduces costs for taxpayers, with meritocracy and impartiality bolstering the country’s economic growth, one sweeping review found. The system also protects the public from graft and lawlessness. “There is a group of actors that are sworn to uphold the Constitution,” Donald Moynihan, a scholar of public administration at the University of Michigan, told me. “If someone in the government is trying to do an illegal thing, there will be a general counsel who says no, and there will be a bunch of civil servants who raise red flags, and there will be an inspector general who will catch it.”

Civil servants and inspectors general are raising red flags right now, filing lawsuits and notifying members of Congress as scarcely adult Trump officials commandeer government systems, access private data, illicitly shut down payments, and put whole agencies through the “wood chipper,” in the Trump adviser Elon Musk’s phrasing, contravening the country’s laws. But, as Moynihan pointed out, Trump is attempting to “defang” these systems of internal control.

[Read: Trump advisers stopped Musk from hiring a noncitizen at DOGE]

As a result, Americans can expect greater incompetence, higher costs, increased turnover, less expertise, falling trust in government, and lower morale. They can also anticipate higher sovereign-debt costs: Investors charge eroding democracies with incompetent bureaucracies more to borrow. The fallout will not end when the Trump administration ends. Future presidents will have to rely on less experienced civil servants to enact their policies.

The country’s civil service could use reform—to empower it. Right now, Washington’s bureaucrats are mired in bureaucracy, tasked with meeting strict and onerous procedural requirements rather than achieving the government’s policy goals. Hiring rules make it hard for Washington to poach experienced workers from private industry; procurement rules make outsourcing over-common and expensive. But Trump is seeking to cow the civil service and politicize it, not reform it. Rather than seeing the country’s 2 million public employees as agents, he sees them as enemies. This is not going to make the government more efficient. It is not going to make America great.

The first time I recall my mother mentioning Amway, we were in the car late at night, coming back from a meeting at her boss’s house. Ten years old, I’d gone upstairs to play and missed the whole point of the whiteboard sitting on an easel downstairs. My mother, however, had been rapt. Riding home with my brother and stepfather, she seemed almost to glow, as if she were throwing off sparks in the darkness.

The name Amway, she told me, was short for the “American Way.” We could sign up and buy products we already needed for the house, then sign up friends and neighbors to buy things, too. We would get rich by earning a little bit from everything they sold.

It was 1978. I didn’t realize that this was one of those moments, like Waterloo or Watergate, after which nothing would be the same. Amway—or, as we soon began to call it, the business—would become the load-bearing beam of my mother’s existence for the next four decades.

The business as then practiced in our West Virginia river town had its own culture. I found myself plunged into religious nationalism, anti-communist obsessions, denunciation of the very idea of public schools, and the worship of money. Across my lifetime, versions of these ideas would be marketed again and again to working-class Americans. Amway leaders would help elect presidents. Familiar characters from my childhood—the Amway celebrity Doug Wead, members of the DeVos family, which co-founded the company—would reappear in Republican administrations. In many ways, Amway adherents embraced a fusion of conspiratorial thinking and populism that would remain a central thread of America’s political story, prefiguring the Trump era.

But for many years, I had no context for what had swallowed my family. I had no way to understand how I’d managed to lose my mother.

Amway products began to appear around the house. We changed our laundry detergent to SA-8 and swapped our toothpaste for Glister. I rode with my mother to upline distributors’ houses to pick up the boxes that had been shipped from headquarters in Michigan. My mother and stepfather sponsored people into the business, who in turn came to our house to pick up their own orders: makeup, hair spray, a liquid soap you could use to clean anything, a portable medicine case of expensive daily vitamins called Nutrilite Double X.

My stepfather, who ran a local charity, began to introduce himself as a businessman. My mother was even more smitten with the beautiful future that Amway offered. Everywhere we went—the mall, state parks, grocery stores—she’d ask people whether they could use a little more money each month. “I’d love to set up a time to talk to you about an exciting business opportunity.” The words should have seemed suspect. Yet people almost always gave her their number. Her confidence and professionalism were reassuring, and her enthusiasm was electric, even, at first, to me. “What would you do with $1 million?” she’d ask, spinning me around the kitchen.

My mother and stepfather stayed out late on weeknights and weekends, bringing new recruits to see “the plan.” They paid to go to meetings and rallies. I had no idea at the time that these events were hosted not by corporate Amway but by high-level distributors, who were technically independent business operators. We bought books and cassette tapes by the Amway personalities Doug Wead and Dexter Yager, with titles such as Tales of the Super Rich and Becoming Rich: Eleven Principles of Material and Spiritual Success. Wead had been an evangelical minister before gaining a higher profile with Amway. Yager had sold cars and Utica Club beer before becoming one of a handful of top distributors. Their wives wrote a book together. We bought that, too.

We ended up collecting more “motivational tools” than cleaning supplies. A few people sold soap or makeup to their friends at parties, Mary Kay–style. But for us, the business mostly meant recruiting people to sign up and buy products they would use themselves, while earning points toward advancing to the next level and higher bonuses.

We became students of success, advised to set goals of a bigger house and more expensive cars, as if wishing alone could make it happen. But by this point, whatever cash we had was spent on Amway. I had a pair of bell-bottom jeans with three bright satin stripes sewn diagonally across one knee. They were the only pants I owned.

One weekend during the summer of 1980, we packed jars of peanut butter, loaves of bread, and fruit into our car, then drove 300 miles east for a rally at the Washington, D.C., Hilton. On the road, my mother and I imagined what we would do when we reached the Diamond level of the business, when true wealth would arrive.

After we checked in, my brother and I were left to our own devices, running the halls and playing in the elevators. I read a pamphlet about how John Lennon’s “Imagine” threatened America as a Christian nation, which introduced me to the (dangerous) phrase secular humanism. I listened as leading Amway distributors denounced public schools for brainwashing children.

In the hotel ballroom, distributors sang along to songs like “Rut Job Blues,” about how stupid it was to work a regular job: “I feel so D-U-M-B / I’ve got a J-O-B.” Cheers went up at any mention of Ronald Reagan, who had embraced Amway for years—and would soon be president. (A few years earlier he’d told a crowd of Amway distributors that “for me to come here and talk to you about free enterprise is like saving souls in heaven.”)

We went to more rallies—in Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and other faltering Rust Belt cities where people were laid off and looking for hope. We ate up testimonials to God’s grace and to his desire that everyone should become as rich as possible. High-ranking distributors encouraged low-level distributors like us to Drop that stinkin’ thinkin’ and Fake it till you make it.

At one rally, my brother and I ran into Doug Wead’s son, who was about our age. After walking around the hotel, the three of us sat in our room and talked. I said how great it would be when our mother and stepfather became Diamonds, so we would be rich, too.

He told me I had it all wrong. His dad didn’t make serious money through Amway products. Most of what he earned came from writing books and recording talks. That was how people got rich in Amway—selling motivational books and tapes to distributors like my parents. Didn’t I know?

He spoke honestly, without malice, and the words rattled around in my brain for the rest of the trip. I picked at the upholstery on the seat of the car on the ride home. We would never be rich. There was no other plan. We were doomed.

What was it about Amway that so captured a bright, extroverted woman like my mother? Abandoned as a child when her own mother ran off to become a nightclub singer, she’d been raised by her grandparents. She graduated high school with a journalism scholarship to college, but met my father that summer and never left town. She became a stringer for the local paper, later working as a lunchtime anchor and interviewer for our local television station. When I was a preschooler, she took night classes and earned a bachelor’s degree in social work. By the time she discovered Amway, my mother had divorced and remarried. My stepfather had a more fundamentalist view of religion than I had been raised with—a view that dovetailed with many Amway leaders’ emphasis on biblical literalism and wives submitting to their husbands.

My mother couldn’t imagine life without a husband. More crucially, she believed herself destined for something extraordinary. But how could someone achieve greatness in Parkersburg, West Virginia? Amway promised to deliver what nothing else in our town could—or at least to give her a community that would pretend along with her.

For some Americans, joining the business might have been harmless. For us, it was not. Soon my mother and stepfather had no other job. Their bad decisions ricocheted in the echo chamber of Amway culture, where they were encouraged to dedicate themselves more deeply. Surely, any day now, we would make it. Within three years, we were living in a filthy house without electricity, eating food out of a cooler that we kept filled with ice. Then we were evicted, and my mother and stepfather declared bankruptcy. Ordinary people might have thought twice about sticking with Amway. But by that point, we had left the small dreams of ordinary people behind.

A few months later, we climbed in a van headed to New York to stay at another Hilton. It was New Year’s Eve. My parents went to see the Rockettes and to hear the same speakers they’d cheered on in other cities, singing songs, giving glory to God, and talking about his vision for America.

When I was a teenager and my mother was in her early 40s, she stopped talking to me about Amway. She filed for divorce from my stepfather and started a graduate-school program in behavioral psychology in hopes of becoming a therapist.

Despite being more than a decade older than her classmates, she was well liked and a good student. My brother and I had already escaped to college, thanks to cobbled-together loans, grants, and multiple part-time jobs. I didn’t talk to either of them often, because in 1988, long-distance phone calls were expensive. But my mother called one day to chat.

“Going crazy isn’t like being hit by a car,” she said in the middle of our conversation. “People make a small but conscious decision to give up. At some point, it’s easier than living in reality.”

She was deep in clinical work with the mentally ill at the time; I assumed she was drawing on that experience. Still, the line stayed with me. In recent years, I’ve wondered whether she was talking about herself, and whether there might have been some way to intervene that I didn’t see. Because, just two years later, in the last semester of her Ph.D. program, my mother decided to quit and marry a third husband, one who would do Amway with her.

Only much later would I hear stories about distributors like us who had declared bankruptcy and begin to understand how common our experience was. A 1980 study of tax returns conducted by Wisconsin’s attorney general showed that the top 1 percent of Amway distributors in that state had lost, on average, $900 in the business. In 1994, Dexter Yager and Amway faced a class-action lawsuit claiming that they had fraudulently misrepresented how much distributors were likely to earn and illegally pressured people to buy books and tapes. The case was settled with Amway promising compensation and changes that would require distributors to make clear that motivational tools were optional and didn’t guarantee success. The FTC had determined in 1979 that Amway was not a pyramid scheme, but the company continued to face allegations to the contrary. In 2010 it settled another class-action suit alleging that it operated a pyramid scheme. The company did not admit to guilt but did agree to pay plaintiffs $56 million, in the form of cash and Amway products.

In the years that followed, my mother and I would sometimes talk about real life—a birth, a death, a grandchild—and flashes of who she used to be would shine through. But she also shared long lists of people the Clintons had supposedly murdered, and continued to insist on Amway’s tremendous potential. She always sounded a little embarrassed by the things she said, as if she understood that they were hard to believe. I think she wanted me to see that she knew that the most cultlike aspects of the business were over the top, that she hadn’t been taken in entirely, that she wasn’t some kind of fool. But it didn’t matter. In the end, Amway owned her as fully as if she’d believed every word. Despite interventions my brother and I attempted, despite the money she continued to lose year after year, our mother never gave up on the business.

Illustration by Anthony Gerace

When I tell people how I grew up, I get a few different reactions. Sometimes I meet people who thought about joining Amway, and are relieved they never signed up. Sometimes they’re surprised that Amway still exists—they thought it disappeared decades ago. Most barely know what it is. And why should they? They themselves might never fall for such a hustle. But whether they know it or not, Amway has deeply influenced American politics for decades.

Amway supported Reagan’s candidacy in the 1980s. In the ’90s, a co-founder of the business, Rich DeVos, gave the GOP what was believed to be the largest-ever-recorded individual political donation. Less than a decade after I first listened to him on Amway tapes, Doug Wead became Vice President George H. W. Bush’s liaison to right-wing Christians. The Bush-era term compassionate conservatism may have been an Amway invention—Wead is said to have coined it. Dexter Yager, who had paid Reagan and Bush to speak at his events, reportedly mass-distributed voicemails pushing support for Republican candidates and accusing Bill Clinton of trying to “force the emergence of deviant lifestyles, of a socialist agenda.”

I grew up hearing rumors about the satanic influences motivating Procter & Gamble, which Amway considered a business competitor—stories that led to another lawsuit and required distributors to pay $19 million in damages. Amway didn’t invent the art of communal delusion via disinformation—the John Birch Society had already perfected it in the 1960s. The Birchers’ influence was in decline by the time we joined the business, but Amway’s culture helped carry their unhinged style into the digital era.

In 2021, Doug Wead died. At the time, he was under federal indictment—not for anything related to Amway, but for allegedly funneling Russian money into Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. In Trump’s first administration, he nominated Betsy DeVos as secretary of education. An advocate for school choice and religious education, she is married to Rich DeVos’s son, Dick, who was president of Amway himself in the 1990s, and whose family still co-owns the company. She said she’d be open to returning to the post, “with the goal of phasing out the Department of Education.” The rallies leading up to Trump’s latest election, with their euphoric resentments and tent-revival energy, recalled nothing so much as a 1980s Amway function.

My mother had fallen so deep into the delusional communities of Amway and religious extremism that I took a while to realize she was developing dementia. Her Alzheimer’s manifested in part as paranoid psychosis. Over time, as her memory failed and her sense of her own importance ballooned, she exchanged my actual childhood for one in which we’d been staggeringly wealthy. She had once been engaged to Trump, she told me. When a court-appointed attorney came to assess her legal competence, my mother threatened to have Trump fire her. For months, my mother believed she was working as Trump’s campaign director for Ohio and Michigan. They had met through Amway, of course.

It’s hard to leave a delusion behind. In the run-up to the 2024 elections, I noticed the ways in which Trump’s political followers likewise struggled to abandon him. Some prominent Trump supporters may see him as a means to wealth or power. Others find meaning and community—or even vindication—in accepting the lies he tells. Maybe, eventually, when they see what his second administration delivers, some voters will peel away.

That’s what happened with Amway. The company is still a multibillion-dollar, global enterprise, though its domestic profile is now so much smaller that it has a page on its own website answering the question: “Does Amway still exist?” In the end, more people left than stayed. Those who came to their senses or were unable to sustain the delusion eventually quit. But things can get bleak in the middle.

My mother was an outlier. As the illness devoured her mind, she stopped recognizing her friends. But she still remembered the business. At the beginning of 2020, just three weeks before the pandemic began, I brought her to live with me and my brother in Virginia. She set off the fire alarm and constantly announced that the belongings she’d misplaced had been stolen. But the hardest part was her insistence that we all inhabit her imaginary world—one where she lives in grievance and terror, a place of invented enemies.

When I cleaned out her old house for her, I found storage shelves in the basement filled with Amway binders, makeup tutorials, old catalogs, and hundreds of motivational CDs and cassettes. Like some ritual to release the dead, I emptied the binders one by one. I filled a dozen Hefty bags, and then more. When the outdoor bins could no longer contain the trash, I stacked the rest on the ground by the curb: relics that would help no one, souvenirs of a lost life.

Ever since Donald Trump emerged as a credible threat to return to the White House, the guardrails that seemed to restrain him in his first term—political, legal, psychic—have collapsed with astonishing speed. His nominees are sailing through their confirmation hearings, including some who are underqualified and ideologically extreme. Titans of business and media are throwing themselves at his feet as supplicants. He has obliterated long-standing norms, unashamedly soliciting payoffs from corporations with business before the government. (The Wall Street Journal reports that Paramount, whose parent company needs Trump’s approval for a merger, is mulling a settlement of one of his groundless lawsuits.) Steps that even his allies once dismissed as unthinkable, such as freeing the most violent, cop-beating January 6 insurrectionists, have again reset the bar of normalcy.

These displays of dominance have convinced many of Trump’s critics and supporters alike that his second term will operate in a categorically different fashion from the first. Where once he was constrained by the “deep state”—or, depending on your political priors, by the efforts of conscientious public servants—Trump will now have a fully subdued government at his disposal, along with a newly compliant business and media elite. He will therefore be able to carry out the sorts of wild policy objectives that failed to materialize during his first term.

The earliest indications, however, suggest that this might prove only half true. Trump has clearly claimed some territory in the culture wars: He is now dancing with Village People in the flesh, not merely to a recording of the group’s most famous track. And when it comes to getting away with self-dealing and abuses of power, he has mastered the system. But a politician and a party that are built for propaganda and quashing dissent generally lack the tools for effective governance. As far as policy accomplishments are concerned, the second Trump term could very well turn out to be as underwhelming as the first.

Trump has promised a grand revolution. At a pre-inaugural rally, he announced, “The American people have given us their trust, and in return, we’re going to give them the best first day, the biggest first week, and the most extraordinary first 100 days of any presidency in American history.” He branded his inauguration “Liberation Day,” labeled his incoming agenda a “revolution of common sense,” and boasted, “Nothing will stand in our way.” After being sworn in on Monday, he signed a slew of executive orders in a move that has been termed “shock and awe.”

[David A. Graham: The Gilded Age of Trump begins now]

Those orders fall into a few different categories. Some are genuinely dangerous—above all, the mass pardon of about 1,500 January 6 defendants, which unambiguously signals that lawbreaking in the service of subverting elections in Trump’s favor will be tolerated. Others, including withdrawing from the World Health Organization and freezing offshore wind energy, will be consequential but perhaps not enduring—that which can be done by executive order can be undone by it.

What’s really striking is how many fall into the category of symbolic culture-war measures or vague declarations of intent. Trump declared a series of “emergencies” concerning his favorite issues, just as Joe Biden had. His order declaring an end to birthright citizenship seems likely to be struck down on constitutional grounds, although the Supreme Court can always interpret the Fourteenth Amendment’s apparently plain text as it desires. He is re-renaming a mountain in Alaska—which, in four years’ time, could be renamed yet again, perhaps after one of the police officers who fought off Trump’s insurrection attempt. He has ordered the federal government to officially recognize only two genders, male and female. “You are no longer going to have robust and long drop-down menus when asking about sex,” an incoming White House official said. Ooooh, the federal intake forms will be shorter!

Meanwhile, Trump has already scaled back many of his most grandiose day-one promises from the campaign. Broker an end to the Ukraine war before taking office? He has “made no known serious effort to resolve the war since his election,” The New York Times reports. Ask again in a few months. Bring down grocery prices? Never mind.

Trump’s supporters probably realized that some of his campaign pledges were hyperbolic. Even by realistic standards, however, Trump seems unprepared to deliver on some of his biggest stated goals. Take his signature domestic policy. Trump loudly promised throughout the presidential campaign to impose massive global tariffs once he took office. And yet, even that proposal remains theoretical. Trump’s executive order on trade instructs, “The Secretary of Commerce, in consultation with the Secretary of the Treasury and the United States Trade Representative, shall investigate the causes of our country’s large and persistent annual trade deficits in goods, as well as the economic and national security implications and risks resulting from such deficits, and recommend appropriate measures,” and then proceeds to issue more solemn calls for study of the matter.

Presidents don’t always come into office with fully formed plans, but Trump doesn’t even have concepts of a plan, or any way to resolve fundamental tension between his belief that foreign countries should pay tariffs and the reality that tariffs raise prices for Americans. Another White House document announces, “All agencies will take emergency measures to reduce the cost of living.” What measures? We can be fairly sure that there is no secret plan waiting to be unveiled.

None of this is to say that Trump will accomplish nothing. At a minimum, he will restrict immigration and sign a regressive tax cut. But even his policy successes will likely sow the seeds of a thermostatic backlash in public opinion. Americans favor mass deportation in the abstract, but their support dwindles when they contemplate specifics. An Axios poll found that strong majorities oppose separating families, employing active-duty military to locate undocumented immigrants, and using military funds to carry out immigration policy. Even some high-level Trump allies have warned that mass deportations will cause immediate economic disruption.

Trump’s fiscal agenda is where the desires of his wealthy benefactors, the preferences of his voters, and economic conditions will clash most violently. The previous two Republican presidents to take office—George W. Bush in 2001, and Trump in 2017—inherited low inflation and low or falling interest rates. Both were able to cut taxes and raise spending without facing any near-term economic costs. In his second term, Trump faces an economy that, while growing smartly, is still plagued with high interest rates relative to the pre-COVID norm. If Trump revises the old playbook of cutting taxes now and worrying about the cost later, he may discover that “later” happens right away.

One answer to the dilemma would be to pay for tax cuts with deep cuts to social spending on the poor, a staple of past Republican budgets. Yet Trump’s strength with low-income voters turns that maneuver into another potential source of backlash. Last month, The Washington Post’s Tim Craig interviewed low-income Trump voters in a poor town in Pennsylvania who earnestly believe that he will not touch their benefits.

[Russell Berman: What Trump can (and probably can’t) do with his trifecta]

Meanwhile, some of Trump’s most prominent backers refuse to acknowledge that any tough choices await. In a recent interview, the New York Times columnist Ross Douthat presented Marc Andreessen, one of the Silicon Valley billionaires hoping to influence Trump’s domestic agenda, with concerns that Elon Musk’s plans to cut the budget would alienate voters. In response, Andreessen insisted that the very suggestion reflected “absolute contempt for the taxpayer,” repeating versions of the line rather than engaging with the problem. Musk himself recently reduced his goal of cutting $2 trillion from the budget to a mere $1 trillion. When the brains of the operation are picking arbitrary round numbers and then revising them arbitrarily, one begins to question their grasp on the challenge they face.

Whether Trump pays any political price for failing to deliver on unrealistic promises—or for succeeding at delivering on unpopular ones—is an open question. Political difficulties won’t generate themselves. They will require an energetic and shrewd opposition. And a major purpose of Trump’s maneuvers to intimidate corporate and media elites is to head off a backlash by gaining control over the information environment.

One of Trump’s greatest strengths as a politician is to constantly redefine his policy goals so that whatever he does constitutes “winning.” The success of this tactic reflects the degraded intellectual state of the Republican Party’s internal culture. The conservative movement rejected institutions such as academia and the mainstream media decades ago, building up its own network of loyal counterinstitutions that would construct an alternate reality. This has helped Republicans hold together in the face of corruption and misconduct that, in a bygone era, would have shattered a governing coalition. (Today, Watergate would just be another witch hunt.) But the impulse to disregard expertise and criticism has also disabled Republicans’ ability to engage in objective analysis. The past two Republican administrations accordingly both ended in catastrophe, because the president had built an administration of courtiers who flattered his preexisting beliefs, whether about weapons of mass destruction and Iraq or COVID and the economy.

[George Packer: The end of democratic delusions]

None of those pathologies has disappeared. To the contrary, the MAGA-era GOP has grown more cultlike than ever. The rare, feeble attempt to steer Trump away from bad decisions is usually buried in obsequious flattery. The Trump presidency will be, by definition, a golden age, because Trump will be president during all of it. But it is a measure of his allies’ decrepitude that, whatever positions he ultimately lands on, they are prepared to salute.

Trump has struck fear into his party and America’s corporate bosses. His inauguration was a display of mastery, a sign that none will dare defy his wishes. But a leader surrounded by sycophants cannot receive the advice he needs to avoid catastrophic error, and to signal that his allies can enrich themselves from his administration is to invite scandal. In his inaugural spectacle of dominance and intimidation, Trump was planting the seeds of his own failure.

No president has ever attempted to do what Donald Trump now proposes to do—assemble a small team of former personal attorneys and install it at the highest levels of the Department of Justice. The president-elect first named lawyers who have represented him in recent years to the key positions of deputy attorney general, principal deputy attorney general, and solicitor general. Then, with the quick death of the Matt Gaetz nomination, he announced a new attorney-general nominee, Pam Bondi, who was a member of his legal defense team in the first impeachment. The Justice Department’s responsibilities have always been subject to competing expectations: that it would keep politics out of law enforcement but, like other departments, would loyally serve the president in the implementation of his governing program. The results have been uneven, and at times disastrous, as with Richard Nixon and the Watergate scandal. But when problems arose, they were relatively localized: the product of poor appointments, or the failure of particular presidents in particular situations to respect institutional values and norms. What the DOJ faces now is different in kind: a vision of White House control achieved through the appointments of individuals the president has chosen because they have worked for him and demonstrated their loyalty. The pressing question now is whether these lawyers may be, as the president-elect likely hopes, the “president’s lawyers” in more than one sense.

The DOJ’s special status as “independent” is not provided for in the Constitution, but is also not solely a product of “norms” established in the post-Watergate era, as many standard accounts would have it. The office of attorney general was created by the Judiciary Act of 1789, and this context is meaningful. The attorney general’s function, which involved rendering legal opinions and representing the United States before the Supreme Court, was perceived to be quasi-judicial. The Senate version of the bill even provided that the Court would appoint this officer. The final bill called for the attorney general to be a “meet [fit] person learned in the law.” This language points clearly in the direction of expected professionalism, and historians have noted that legal opinions the attorney general rendered to executive-branch agencies were expected to be “impartial and judicial.”

The department’s history is not one of limitless glory, in which all attorneys general appointed to the office were the most “meet” and “learned.” But the understanding was that this officer would perform up to some professional standard. Edward Bates, an attorney general in the Lincoln administration, famously stated, “The office I hold is not properly political, but strictly legal, and it is my duty, above all ministers of state, to uphold the law and resist all encroachments, from whatever quarter, of mere will and power.” (Emphasis in the original.)

[Read: Judge Cannon comes to Trump’s aid, again]

In 1870, the Department of Justice was established, and the attorney general became its leader. Following the Civil War, the government’s legal work grew in volume and complexity, and much of it was hired out to costly private counsel. Additionally, various departments across the government hired their own legal representation, which resulted in a lack of consistency in the country’s legal positions.

But there was another motivation: One scholar, Jed H. Shugerman of Fordham University, has noted that the use of outside counsel presented risks of “sycophancy, cronyism, and lawlessness.” Reform-minded critics believed that a government department would enhance professionalism and efficiency, and therefore provide for the separation of law from politics in federal law administration and enforcement. It would stand for expertise and independence of judgment.

But because the DOJ was an executive department like many others, charged with supporting the president’s policies and programs, tension persisted between professionalism and fidelity to the president’s policy agenda—between “too little” and “too much” politics—and it has persisted to this day. “Too little” politics, and the president was denied a legitimate instrument for the achievement of his policy goals; “too much” politics, and the impartiality of law enforcement would be compromised.

Striking the right balance was always a challenge. Senator Alan Cranston of California, who was active in the debates after Watergate, acknowledged, “Even our best attorneys general have never been free from suspicions that because they are political appointees of the president, they will be loyal to him over any other call of duty.” And presidents did not always go out of their way to make appointments likely to assuage these concerns. Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan, for example, chose their attorneys general from the ranks of their campaign’s senior officials. John F. Kennedy nominated a former campaign manager—who was also his brother, was only 35 years of age, and had never practiced law.

So, the tale is not just about Watergate. That scandal, which implicated (and led to the imprisonment of) numerous senior lawyers in the Nixon administration, launched a cycle of concern about the dangers of federal law enforcement conscripted into a president’s personal and political (and, in Nixon’s case, also illegal) projects. The Nixon lawyers violated law in support of a crude scheme and cover-up to aid the president’s reelection effort. No plainer example of the contamination of law by politics might be imagined. But the “after action” analysis of what went wrong did not mark the advent of new norms, but instead another phase in the historic struggle to strike the balance between “two little” and “too much” politics.

The debate over this balance took a new direction when Sam Ervin, the former chair of the Senate Watergate committee, proposed legislation to turn the DOJ into an independent agency. Setting aside the constitutional question—whether the federal law-enforcement function could be entirely exempted from executive control—the proposal was found wanting on practical grounds. The president needed counsel of his own choice: The department legitimately owes the chief executive its principled fidelity to the achievement of the policy goals presumably mandated by the voters. Ervin held hearings on his proposal at which witnesses from both sides of the political divide testified against full DOJ independence from the president.

The testimony before Ervin’s committee included the warning that an independent department would further empower the White House counsel, a position appointed by the president without Senate confirmation. Presidents looking to exercise more control over the legal affairs of their administration than an independent DOJ might allow could rely on the White House counsel as the key source of legal advice, right there in the West Wing. This senior staff lawyer could quickly become the de facto, shadowy head of what one critic of the plan, the former counsel to President Kennedy, termed “a little department of Justice.” (Some of this came to pass anyway; the White House counsel would become highly influential in the president’s legal affairs in many administrations, and critics have argued that the office has encroached on the attorney general’s constitutional territory.) The American Bar Association came out against Ervin’s proposal.

Eventually, the Ervin plan failed, as did others like it. Soon, the question was how to adjust the balance between politics and nonpartisanship, between a commitment to the president’s governing program and independence in law-enforcement decisions. Congress passed a number of reforms designed to control the abuse of presidential power for improper political purposes, such as a 10-year term for the FBI director; restrictions on access to IRS records; the establishment of a special court to approve electronic law-enforcement surveillance; and the creation, in 1978, of the post of inspector general at agencies across the government, including at the DOJ. Additionally, in the years since Watergate, presidential administrations have routinely established policies restricting their staff’s communications with the Department of Justice in order to, as the version from the Biden White House puts it, “ensure that DOJ exercises its investigatory and prosecutorial functions free from the fact or appearance of improper political influence.”

But even with reforms, much will always depend on the quality of appointments to the DOJ’s top positions. Daniel J. Meador, a former assistant attorney general and respected legal scholar, concluded that “in the end it is the individual occupying the office that will determine, more than anything else, whether an ‘incompatible marriage’ [between politics and law enforcement] is consummated or prevented in the administration of federal justice.” The American Bar Association concurred, arguing that the confirmation process for an attorney general “should assume the same importance” as that for a nominee to the Supreme Court.

[David A. Graham: Trump’s DOJ was more dangerous than we knew]

Some post-Watergate presidents have chosen judges or lawyers with extensive department or law-enforcement experience to serve as attorney general; others have selected those with whom they’ve had a personal or political connection. A number of presidents appointed AGs from the senior ranks of their political campaign’s advisers, including their campaign managers.

But Trump has set himself apart from even these predecessors, viewing the Department of Justice in the most personal of terms as his own. He has not bought into the goal of a quasi-independent DOJ. He has openly questioned why he should not have complete control over the department. This is, he proclaims, his “absolute right.” He expects “loyalty” from his staff and appointments, the DOJ included, and the loyalty he apparently has in mind is the unhampered variety modeled by his personal counsel of many years, Roy Cohn. As Trump put it, Cohn “was vicious to others in his protection of me.” The loyalty owed to him, particularly from his lawyers, was what he understands to be “protection.” When his first attorney general, Jeff Sessions, previously co-chair of his 2016 presidential campaign, recused himself from all matters involving the campaign, including the investigation into Russian ties, Trump reportedly raged at him that his AG was supposed to protect him. The recusal, therefore, constituted an act of personal betrayal and not, as Sessions viewed it, a decision necessarily reached after consultation with senior DOJ officials.

Trump’s intent to nominate multiple members of his personal legal team—lawyers whose loyalty has been tested in attorney-client relationships of keenest importance to the client—indicates that he is looking to seal in the personal protection he was denied in his prior term. In recognizing the danger here, it is not necessary to minimize or dismiss the professional qualities and accomplishments of all the lawyers he has chosen. Some (Todd Blanche and Emil Bove) have criminal law-enforcement experience. The nominee for solicitor general (D. John Sauer) has had clerkships and other experiences shared by many leading appellate advocates. But, if confirmed, these lawyers would come to their positions on the basis of their close and recent service to the president-elect as his personal counsel. And these officials may be working under Pam Bondi, who also participated in the president’s personal legal defense in his first term. This would be a consequential shift in the understanding of where the line ought to lie between “too little” and “too much” distance between the DOJ and the White House.

Presidents anxious to have loyal support from lawyers close to them have put their hopes in the White House counsel rather than a politically vetted, personally loyal corps of DOJ officials, and placed those to whom they were close in that role. One former DOJ official, the late Justice Antonin Scalia, put the point in mild terms when he characterized White House counsels as sources of “permissive and congenial advice.”

The Trump nominations represent an incoming president’s choice to take a more direct route to that advice. There is a far higher risk that the president will expect from these government lawyers the loyalty a client believes is owed by personal counsel. White House counsels have no power other than the opportunity to advise on the law, and certainly none to initiate investigations or prosecutions. Attorneys general, and those supporting them at the most senior levels of the DOJ, have broad authority and discretion in law enforcement.

Reagan selected a personal attorney, William French Smith, as attorney general, and this choice drew attention—as well as very specific assurances from the nominee. Asked during his Senate confirmation process whether this history of professional service would compromise his impartiality, Smith began by minimizing the extent of his role as Reagan’s personal lawyer—evidently in the belief that it was best downplayed: “Actually, although I have been referred to as the president’s personal attorney, that relationship probably has been the least significant aspect of my relationship with him.” He then committed to a comprehensive recusal policy:

I would have to be very conscious of situations where it could appear that because of that relationship, a problem might be created. Certainly, if a situation arises involving the president or a member of his family or others in a sensitive situation, I would recuse myself from participating or handling any aspect which might develop out of that situation.

Recusals at the Department of Justice, considered in consultation with career ethics advisers, are not uncommon. The test, as Sessions stated in his own recusal, is a broad one, applicable to any matter in which an official’s “impartiality might reasonably be questioned.” Attorneys general have recused themselves when a former aide was involved in an inquiry, or an adult child was defense counsel to an officer of a firm under investigation, or the CEO of such a company had made a contribution to a political campaign the attorney general had run some two years before. In the case of Trump’s senior DOJ nominees, the recusal issues are plainly presented by their recent and extensive personal attorney-client relationship with the president-elect. Among those issues are these lawyers’ potential future involvement in plans Trump has announced for “de-politicizing” the department, and, relatedly, potentially advising on his interest in retribution directed against political enemies. In both cases, a source, if not the main source, of Trump’s concerns and plans is the criminal prosecutions in which these lawyers were his defense counsel. How recusal requirements play out for these lawyers remains to be determined—recusals are fact-specific—but numerous questions might develop about whether they can advise on changes to DOJ programs and policies that the president might be considering.

Another question for these nominees is their commitment, beyond appropriate recusals, to other tools and procedures in place at the department to protect against abuse of investigative and prosecutorial power. The risk of abuse is by no means conjectural. Even if Trump and his supporters could reasonably point to problems in the conduct of federal law enforcement, he has never stopped there, instead threatening retaliation in extreme terms against political adversaries. The president is not barred in any way from communicating his expectations directly and freely to DOJ officials about his retaliatory impulses or designs, and, as the Supreme Court recently held, he will be fully immunized from any legal consequences.

How, then, will these nominees manage the unique pressures they face—in which the president’s perception of their loyalty is grounded in service to him as personal counsel? At the least in the case of the solicitor general designate, John Sauer, the signs so far are not encouraging. On December 27, as personal counsel to President-elect Trump, he filed a brief with the Supreme Court in the pending TikTok case. The Court is preparing to decide whether Congress may constitutionally ban the platform’s domestic operations unless, by January 19, 2025, it arranges by divestments to end Chinese-government control. Sauer argues that the Court should take action to prevent the ban from going into effect, giving time for Trump to take office and resolve the issue through some unspecified form of negotiated settlement. The nominee’s personal representation of Trump in a case involving his second-term presidency is sufficiently troubling, but his brief also brims over with adulatory language about Trump’s personal skills and successes: his “consummate dealmaking expertise,” his “resoundingly successful social-media platform, Truth Social,” his “first Term … highlighted by a series of policy triumphs achieved through historical deals.”

[David A. Graham: Aileen Cannon is who critics feared she was]

This is the lawyer acting as a publicist, or perhaps just bending far in the direction of the personal client’s desire for plaudits—hardly the right posture for someone soon to come before the Senate for confirmation as the senior DOJ official to represent the United States in the federal courts. Even The Wall Street Journal, far from unfriendly to the new administration, flinched: “The SG isn’t supposed to be Mr. Trump’s personal attorney, and Mr. Sauer’s brief won’t help his credibility with the Justices if he is confirmed by the Senate. We trust the Justices will ignore this amicus sophistry.”

In the confirmation process, Sauer should be questioned about this choice of representation and what it suggests, or doesn’t, about his view of the solicitor general’s role. And all the nominees from the president’s personal legal team should be examined on their understanding of and commitment to other procedures and policies now in place at the DOJ to protect the appropriate degree of independence and impartiality. For example, what are these nominees’ view of the department’s Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG), which applies to “sensitive investigative matters” such as those involving a political official or political party, or a political ally or adversary of the president? The guide’s stated purpose is to “ensure that all investigative and intelligence collection activities are conducted within Constitutional and statutory parameters and that civil liberties and privacy are protected.” Also, in the past, the DOJ has adopted, and formally communicated to Congress, the position that politically motivated prosecution decisions might violate federal obstruction-of-justice law. Underlying this view is the department’s embrace of the principle that “undue sensitivity to politics” is inconsistent with “fairness and justice” and that “partisan political considerations [should] play no role in … law enforcement decisions.” In the upcoming confirmation proceedings, senators should ask for the nominees’ perspective on these principles and their conscientious application.

The hope now should be for a serious confirmation process in which these fundamental institutional stakes, not purely partisan differences, should be front and center. All too often in recent years, the debate over institutional questions of this kind has become a referendum on Trump himself. This is not altogether avoidable: These are Trump’s nominees, reflecting Trump’s plans for the presidency and for the DOJ, and the parties are deeply divided on his politics and governing program. But if the debate is framed in the simplest terms—for or against Trump—the larger implications for the institution of the Department of Justice will recede into the background, if they are not lost entirely, and the prospect for responsible bipartisan deliberation will be lost. The public deserves better than that.