I woke up excited to write about the day’s most important political news—before remembering that I said most of what I wanted to say on the subject a few weeks ago.
Never Trumpers who work in media will face that problem every day for the next four years. Good luck finding something new and interesting to say as the president vindicates your arguments against him again and again and again.
So let’s start today on a different note, with a crowd-pleasing opinion that’s also neither new nor interesting but on which all Americans now agree: Democrats are incompetent.
They’re definitely politically incompetent. The hole that the party dug itself by adopting radically left-wing cultural attitudes over the last decade is so deep that even California’s uber-woke governor, the modern face of establishment progressivism, has belatedly begun trying to climb out of it. Nothing says “we screwed up” like Gavin Newsom confessing his skepticism of letting trans women play women’s sports … to Charlie Kirk.
But Democrats are also tactically incompetent, as Tuesday’s feeble spectacle in the House chamber demonstrated. It was designed to please no one. If you’re a diehard Trump-hater, watching “the Resistance” wave cutesy little signs at the tyrant felt pitiful. If you’re center-left, disruptive outbursts during the speech from the likes of Rep. Al Green made Trump seem like an adult by comparison.
In an age as polarized by partisanship as ours, you know it’s bad when even Democrats are voting to censure Democrats. Put it this way: The single most memorable act of “resistance” by a party leader since Inauguration Day was Chuck Schumer chanting “We will win!” at a rally last month, and that was memorable for all the wrong reasons.
Democrats truly are incompetent.
And yet, there’s a distinct whiff of cope to the “Democrats are incompetent” takes among the commentariat.
America does desperately need an opposition party that’s politically and tactically capable of rising to this moment. But even a serious Democratic Party that’s up to the task of restraining Trump will remain almost completely powerless to do so until a new Congress is seated 22 months from now. And when that new Congress is chosen, Tuesday’s antics during Trump’s speech won’t matter. They’re ephemera, destined to be forgotten as quickly as the speech itself as they’re buried beneath news about tariff mayhem, DOGE layoffs, and the backstabbing of Ukraine.
“Democrats are incompetent” is a way of reassuring oneself that American politics is still basically normal, that undoing Trump’s transformation of public life into a culture of fear can and will be undone with little more than a bit of brains and gumption by the out-party. All they need is a smart strategy—except there is no strategy, and realistically there can’t be one until January 2027 at the earliest. If you want someone to stop the president from trying to terrify his domestic and foreign opponents into submission, the Republican congressional majority is the only game in town.
And if the answer to that is “Republicans are too terrified themselves to try”—and it is—then America has a much bigger problem than Democrats being incompetent.
Promises made, promises kept.
“You’ll be doing this with other firms as time goes by, right?”
That’s what the president said a few weeks ago to his advisers as he signed an executive order suspending security clearances for employees at Covington & Burling and directing that their contracts with the federal government be “evaluated.”
Covington is a well-known white-shoe law firm, esteemed throughout the profession. It landed on the enemies list because of some work its attorneys did for former Special Counsel Jack Smith in his prosecutions of Trump. That means they’re guilty of participating in the “weaponization” of government, never mind whether those prosecutions were meritorious or not.
Trump didn’t want to stop with Covington, though, as he made clear when signing that order. So on Thursday, he issued another executive order aimed at the firm of Perkins Coie, suspending its security clearances as well, barring its attorneys from federal buildings (which may or may not include federal courthouses) if access would somehow threaten national security, and directing federal agencies not to hire former employees of the firm without permission from the top.
The ostensible reason for this draconian presidential intervention is Perkins Coie’s diversity, equity, and inclusion program, a successor to the racial hiring quotas that the firm instituted in 2019 and later abandoned under legal threat, per the executive order. Those DEI practices are “unlawful,” Trump’s staff secretary asserted when presenting him with the order to sign. “Wait, it’s illegal now for a private company to have DEI policies?” you might ask. Why, no—or at least, no court has yet said so.
But DEI isn’t why the firm is being punished. The real reason is laid out in Section 1: “In 2016 while representing failed Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, Perkins Coie hired Fusion GPS, which then manufactured a false ‘dossier’ designed to steal an election.” The two attorneys who led the firm’s work on Fusion GPS are long gone, but no matter. If it’s possible to fail a Trump loyalty test more spectacularly than Covington did by working with Jack Smith, Perkins Coie managed it by spearheading the so-called “Russia hoax.”
And so Trump has decided to try to wreck its business, at least to whatever degree his presidential authority empowers him to do so. He’s been vowing “retribution” against his enemies for the past two years. Promises made, promises kept.
Watch your step.
Why has he made law firms a prime target for the culture of fear he’s building, though?
Two reasons, I think, one of which should be obvious: Going after lawyers is an efficient way to signal to wider American society that no one who crosses him is safe.
The courts are Trump’s weak spot, after all, the one institution left (besides the stock market, I suppose) that might successfully restrain him. And attorneys are uniquely suited by training to prevail in a court battle, especially elite ones like those at Covington and Perkins Coie. They’re exactly the sort of people you might think the president would avoid messing with, preferring to focus on softer targets instead.
Instead, he’s gone right at them. If you’re a corporate officer, business owner, media proprietor, or anyone else whose livelihood depends directly or indirectly on the goodwill of the federal government and its leader, you watch the grief being visited on America’s best lawyers and think, “If they can’t escape trouble for antagonizing Trump, what hope would I have?”
This isn’t hypothetical. On the same day that the order targeting Perkins Coie was signed, the New York Times published a long story by Elisabeth Bumiller on America’s spreading culture of fear. “People on both sides of the aisle who would normally be part of the public dialogue about the big issues of the day say they are intimidated by the prospect of online attacks from Mr. Trump and Elon Musk, concerned about harm to their companies and frightened for the safety of their families,” Bumiller noted. One longtime Trump critic approached for comment not only wouldn’t speak to the Times on the record, he asked not to be mentioned in the story at all lest Trump’s lunatic fans start threatening him again.
Covington & Burling can afford to wage a long legal battle over its security clearances with a reasonable chance of success. Can you?
It should go without saying that a culture of fear is also one highly prone to paranoia. Amid political purges of agencies and haphazard cuts to the bureaucracy, for instance, federal workers have reportedly grown anxious about their ability to tell friend from foe. Some fear that “malign foreign actors” have begun reading their communications as DOGE has wormed its way into government databases, but most of their worry has to do with saying something critical of the king in front of some MAGA informant that’s secretly infiltrated the agency.
“Many workers say they live in a constant state of fear, unable to trust their colleagues, unable to speak freely, reflexively engaging in self-censorship even on matters they view as crucial to national security,” Karen Hao of The Atlantic alleged last month. “One team that works on issues related to climate change has gone so far as to seal itself off in a completely technology-sanitized room for in-person meetings.” Even our secretary of state allegedly has a “minder.”
Watch your step or you might be next: It’s all very Soviet. Which brings us to the other reason Trump is keen to intimidate lawyers.
Avoiding the courts.
In a way, a culture of fear is like any other investment: You put resources into it up front to get it off the ground and then as it grows more successful it begins to pay for itself.
That’s Trump’s strategy with Covington and Perkins Coie, I think. Ideally, he won’t need to keep picking fights with individual law firms who’ve made legal trouble for him. At some point, the rest of the profession will reach the desired conclusion that it’s better for them not to make legal trouble for him to begin with. Watch your step or you might be next.
We may be at that point already. After Trump signed his order targeting Covington last month, Bloomberg Law reported that some firms had begun getting cold feet about representing the president’s enemies. Attorneys who are willing to represent Justice Department employees fired by Trump told the news outlet that their bosses feared letting them do so would hurt the firm’s “brand.” Other lawyers worried that their clients who have business with the DOJ would find the department less willing to cooperate if the firm also happened to be defending some disfavored deep-stater.
If it was that bad after Trump went after Covington, it’ll be worse now that he’s gone after Perkins Coie. Good luck finding quality representation if you end up on the president’s enemies list.
And that’s the point. By intimidating lawyers, Trump isn’t primarily interested in intimidating lawyers. He’s interested in stopping their prospective clients from challenging him in court. The surest way to prevent the judiciary from restraining him as president is to prevent his critics from filing suit against him in the first place—or, failing that, to give America’s most talented lawyers good reason to refuse to take those cases.
“Meaningful access to lawyers is vital to the separation of powers,” law professor Steve Vladeck wrote last month, paraphrasing an opinion by former Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy, “because courts depend upon a robust bar in order to play their role in holding the other branches of government accountable; they can’t go out and find cases on their own.” Poor legal representation or no representation at all: That’s the endgame Trump is after for his enemies.
If it works, it would amount to an end-around the courts’ power to limit his executive authority. Which feels familiar, no?
After all, an end-around was also his strategy for intimidating the media when he took office in January. He couldn’t directly infringe newspapers’ First Amendment rights to compel more favorable coverage, as that would have been a heavy lift legally and politically and all but certain to fail. But he didn’t need to. The culture of fear ensured that the owners of those newspapers understood that his administration would target their other financial interests if their outlets went too hard on him, so those owners “chose” to meddle in their coverage on his behalf. Problem solved, no First Amendment violations required.
You don’t need to throw journalists in jail for exposing one of your scandals if fear of being fired leads them not to expose it in the first place. You don’t need to defy Supreme Court rulings if fear of losing business keeps the lawyers who might have beaten you in court from bringing those cases to begin with. Trump, the “transactional” politician, understands that threatening people’s wallets is almost always sufficient to gain their compliance.
And in fairness to him, his form of pressure is a hell of a lot more subtle than demagoguing conscientious judges or barking about judicial impeachments. By the standards of his own movement, the president is a relatively elegant gangster.
Political capital.
This is the point at which I should marvel at how foolish it is for the White House to normalize a practice that can and will be exploited by those incompetent Democrats once they regain their bearings and eventually the presidency. Every act is a precedent, and the only constant in politics is change. The harassment Covington and Perkins Coie are experiencing today will be felt by Republican-friendly firms in time.
But I understand why Trump and his movement aren’t worried about that. A government refashioned into a weapon for right-wing authoritarianism will not be graciously transferred to the partisan left in 2029 simply because a narrow democratic majority says so. The whole point of the right’s “Flight 93” catastrophism is to reimagine politics as a life-and-death struggle of dire urgency, like war. Well, in a war, you don’t hand over your gun unless you’re captured.
This administration isn’t ceding power if the GOP loses the next election, or not willingly anyway. So, no, in their minds there’s no precedent that’s being set by hassling enemy law firms. It won’t be used in the future against Republican lawyers because in the future Republicans will still be in charge.
But if that’s too grim a note to end on, here’s something cheerier: The more political capital Trump continues to burn on idiocy like DOGE chaos, the tariff-palooza guessing game, and the repellent moral depravity of letting Ukrainians be slaughtered to strengthen Russia’s negotiating hand, the less fearful his skeptics should become.
A culture of fear run by a man with a solid majority of Americans behind him is a lot more intimidating than one run by a man whom, say, two-thirds of Americans are against. Lawyers who fear that antagonizing a popular president will be bad for business might conclude that it’s actually pretty good for business to antagonize an unpopular one. Newspaper owners who lie awake now worrying what he might do to their income streams if they oppose him might eventually lie awake worrying what the public might do to those income streams if they don’t.
So long as Trump remains the biggest threat to his enemies’ wallets, he’s in good shape. Petty harassment by his toadies in government will continue. But the moment he isn’t—uh oh. Frankly, we’re fortunate that he decided to fritter away a chunk of his popular support on postliberal Jacobin nonsense before his inevitable confrontation with the Supreme Court. The lower his polling sinks, the better the odds that Americans will take sides with the judiciary against him.
Until that moment arrives, America needs Democrats to be more competent—and everyone else, civic-minded Republicans above all, to be a lot more brave. If you’re not clear on which problem is more urgent, you’re coping.
