President Donald Trump has made “great progress” in his expanded attack on the federal judicial system only two months after returning to the Oval Office, according to The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols, who worried the assault could become the judiciary’s “last stand.”
Nichols, an anti-Trump conservative, began his latest opinion piece on Monday by telling readers that the president’s campaign against the rule of law “is already the most hostile and sustained political attack on America’s legal and law-enforcement institutions since the Civil War.”
Running through a list of Trump’s most recent strikes against federal judges and constitutionally questionable directives to Department of Justice lawyers, the ex-Republican declared: "The dismantling of America’s constitutional government is under way."
He also predicted that an “eventual showdown” with the federal judiciary was “practically inevitable.”
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“The center is not holding, and the flanks are collapsing,” Nichols wrote in his analysis. “Congress is fleeing the field. The voters, many of whom long ago became inured to warnings about Trump’s contempt for the law, may be anxious about his behavior, but millions are sticking with him.”
To achieve that reputation, Trump deployed an “authoritarian approach, undergirded by his legendary shamelessness, to break through every line of constitutional and moral defense—impeachment, elections, even the humiliation of arrest and conviction—that would otherwise restrain a rogue president (or, for that matter, any ordinary American felon),” Nichols told readers.
It all led the longtime writer to come to a stark conclusion.
“The judges now stand alone—but their courage may not be enough to stop Trump.”
“The president and his lieutenants still face one more set of defenses obstructing their march: the courts,” Nichols wrote Monday. “If he can overcome the federal judicial system, then America’s worst modern constitutional confrontation will be over and Trump will be its victor.”