Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Donald Trump is gearing up to politicize the Department of Justice. Again.

Donald Trump is gearing up to politicize the Department of Justice. Again.

President-elect Donald Trump, Wednesday, January 8, 2025.

(Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)

With his loyalists lining up for key law-enforcement roles, Trump is fixated on former Republican congresswoman Liz Cheney, who helped lead the January 6 congressional investigation. “Liz Cheney has been exposed in the Interim Report, by Congress, of the J6 Unselect Committee as having done egregious and unthinkable acts of crime,” Trump recently said. Then he added: “She is so unpopular and disgusting, a real loser!”

This accelerates a dangerous trend in American politics: using the criminal justice system to settle political scores. Both the Trumps and the Bidens have been entangled in numerous criminal law controversies, as have many other politicians this century, includingScooter Libbey,Ted Stevens,Robert Coughlin,William Jefferson,Jesse Jackson Jr.,David Petraeus,Michael Fylnn,Steve Bannon,Bob Menendez, and George Santos.


Some of these cases represent legitimate law enforcement work. Some don't. The overall trend is clear: the bloodlust to imprison political rivals is intensifying.

The implications are profound. First, criminalizing politics undermines the fundamental principle that the rule of law applies equally to all people. Entangling the passions and biases of politics with the criminal law leads to different prosecutorial standards depending on someone's political affiliations—instead of evidence regarding their guilt or innocence. In American politics, the messenger matters more than the message; the actor matters more than the act. With the rule of law, the opposite is true: all individuals must be treated equally, and their specific alleged misdeeds—alone—are what counts.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Second, criminalizing politics accelerates a disturbing trend toward ever more polarization. It ramps up the stakes from treating opponents as political rivals to treating them like personal enemies.

Hardball politics is, of course, nothing new. It's woven into the fabric of our democratic system. But ultimately, we are one nation in a dangerous world. Our internal disputes shouldn’t consume too much national bandwidth. According to Trump, “I always say, we have two enemies. We have the outside enemy, and then we have the enemy from within, and the enemy from within, in my opinion, is more dangerous than China, Russia, and all these countries.”

This is a dangerous perspective and he couldn't be more wrong. Trump's mentality undercuts Americans’ ability to respond to the myriad international threats we face together. If looked at from a global perspective, Americans’ interests overlap far more than they diverge. Our energy should be focused on understanding and addressing big global challenges, not sending officials we don't like to jail.

Finally, criminalizing politics deters quality people from even entering the political arena. The United States government already has a personnel problem. Look no further than the presidency. We will soon transition from a man with obviously declining mental facilities to a man who tried to reverse the previous presidential election. This is neither normal nor the way it's always been. We shouldn’t further dissuade talented people from entering government over concerns that imperfections and ambiguities in their past will be twisted into politically motivated criminal accusations. The downside of winning office should be losing the next election and not going to jail.

These concerns must be understood in context. It's, of course, true that entering government should neither absolve someone from past crimes nor serve as a license to commit new ones. And even-handed justice requires prosecuting not just the weak and anonymous but also the powerful and well-known.

Striking the right balance is hard. But there should be a strong presumption in favor of leaving politics—and its inherent passions and prejudices—outside the courthouse.

Politicizing the rule of law doesn't just undermine our government and poison our justice system. It imperils our nation as a whole.

William Cooper is the author of “How America Works … and Why it Doesn’t.

Read More

Understanding the Debate on Presidential Immunity

The U.S. White House.

Getty Images, Caroline Purser

Understanding the Debate on Presidential Immunity

Presidential Immunity: History and Background

Presidential immunity is the long-standing idea that the president of the United States has exemption from liability or legal proceedings for acts related to the duties of presidential office. Contrary to popular belief, presidential immunity is not explicitly enumerated in the Constitution; only sitting members of Congress are explicitly granted judicial immunity through the Constitution’s Speech or Debate Clause. Rather, the concept of presidential immunity has arisen through the Department of Justice’s longstanding policy against prosecuting presidents in office and the Supreme Court’s interpretation of Article II, which has developed through a number of Supreme Court cases dating back to 1867.

Keep ReadingShow less
Donald Trump
President Donald Trump.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Trump 2.0: Navigating the New Political Landscape

With Trump’s return to the White House, we once again bear daily witness to a spectacle that could be described as entertaining, were it only a TV series. But Trump’s unprecedented assault on our democratic norms and institutions is not only very real but represents the gravest peril our democratic republic has confronted in the last 80 years.

Trump’s gradual consolidation of power and authoritarian proclivities, reminiscent of an earlier era, are very frightening on their own account. But it is his uncanny ability to control the narrative that empowers him to shred our nation’s fabric while proceeding with impunity. His actions not only threaten the very republic that he now leads but overturn the entire post-WWII world order, which is now in chaos. Trump has ostensibly cast aside the governing principle with the U.N. Charter of Sovereignty. By suggesting on multiple occasions that the U.S. will “get Greenland one way or another,” and that Canada might become our 51st state, our neighbor to the north is now developing plans to protect itself from what it views as the enemy across the border.

Keep ReadingShow less
Free Speech and Freedom of the Press Under Assault

A speakerphone locked in a cage.

Getty Images, J Studios

Free Speech and Freedom of the Press Under Assault

On June 4, 2024, an op-ed I penned (“Project 2025 is a threat to democracy”) was published in The Fulcrum. It received over 74,000 views and landed as one of the top 10 most-read op-eds—out of 1,460—published in 2024.

The op-ed identified how the right-wing extremist Heritage Foundation think tank had prepared a 900-page blueprint of actions that the authors felt Donald Trump should implement—if elected—in the first 180 days of being America’s 47th president. Dozens of opinion articles were spun off from the op-ed by a multitude of cross-partisan freelance writers and published in The Fulcrum, identifying—very specifically—what Trump and his appointees would do by following the Heritage Foundation’s dictum of changing America from a pluralistic democracy to a form of democracy that, according to its policy blueprint, proposes “deleting the terms diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), plus gender equality, out of every federal rule, agency regulation, contract, grant, regulation and piece of legislation that exists.”

Keep ReadingShow less
Devaluing Truth Makes America Weak

Blocks with letters on them, spelling out "Fake" or "Fact".

Getty Images, Constantine Johnny

Devaluing Truth Makes America Weak

Truth matters. You wouldn’t know that from watching the president address Congress earlier this month. The assault on truth since January has been breathtaking. The removal of data from government websites, the elevation of science deniers to positions in charge of scientific policy, and the advancement of health policy that flies in the face of scientific evidence are only the tip of the iceberg. We are watching a disaster in the making: Our leaders are all falling in line with a program that prioritizes politics and power over American success. But, we ignore the truth at our own peril—reality has a way of getting our attention even if we look the other way.

As a philosophy professor, my discipline’s attention to truth has never seemed more relevant than today. Although, there may be disagreement about the ultimate nature of truth, even the most minimal theory agrees that truth requires alignment with the way the world is. It is neither negotiable nor unimportant. Devaluing the importance of truth is a fool’s game, and it is incompatible with American success. It makes us weak and vulnerable; epidemics, deaths, and unrest will follow.

Keep ReadingShow less