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, including Scooter 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.
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. ”
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.