To the regime's troops

Donald Trump, our domestic Dear Leader, is gutting the federal government without rhyme or reason. The one thing he can be counted on not to gut, though, are the security forces.

In the U.S. we're not accustomed to thinking in terms of "security forces". That term is reserved for other nations, covering the gamut of police, intelligence, and military personnel. In the U.S., when someone is arrested or federal property must be protected, we speak of the specific responsible agency: the FBI, the Park Service, ICE, etc.

However, those agencies and all the others operated by the federal government, like the CIA (which legally cannot operate domestically), the NSA, and the forces under the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense, can be thought of as the "security forces" of the U.S. government — and right now, they all answer to our domestic Dear Leader. He can behave like the tinpot dictators he so adores because when literal push comes to literal shove, he can call on hundreds of thousands of members of the security forces to do the dirty work.

So I address myself to you members of those security forces, because you are in a difficult moral position.

I'm sure you tell yourselves that your job is to follow orders from your superiors. So long as you do that, you say to yourselves, you aren't morally or even legally responsible for your actions.

That only gets you so far, though.

Admittedly, you almost certainly don't have enough information to judge whether the person you're hustling into your SUV off a quiet street is actually a criminal, or even a threat. You assume your bosses — the whole chain of command, in fact — are acting in good faith.

However, you do have enough agency — that is, enough free will and moral responsibility — to judge how valid that assumption of your superiors' good faith is.

You don't live under a rock. Can you defend the deportation of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, which even this administration admitted was an "administrative error"? Can you believe Trump's claim that his administration has no power to bring him back to the U.S., when this administration is paying El Salvador to hold prisoners there? Isn't it obvious that the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, would have Abrego Garcia back on a plane to the U.S. in a heartbeat if Trump asked?

Given that Trump lies so brazenly about his ability to get Abrego Garcia back to the U.S., how much confidence can you have that he acts in good faith about, well, anything? How confident can you be that Abrego Garcia is an isolated "error", that there aren't more innocent victims?

Remember, too, that Abrego Garcia has been ordered returned to the U.S. by the U.S. Supreme Court so he can be given due process, which neither he nor anyone else deported to that El Salvadoran prison has gotten. In leaving Abrego Garcia to rot in El Salvador, Trump is defying the Supreme Court.

If he doesn't consider himself bound by the orders of the Supreme Court, then what constrains him? "The law" doesn't constrain a ruler if he claims the right to say what the law is, which is what Trump has done.

How is he different from a dictator?

Your orders ultimately derive from Trump's wishes. How confident can you be that what you're doing is consistent with the actual law, much less with morality and true justice, when the man at the top no longer respects any of those things?

Trump has claimed power for himself that no man has ever claimed in this country's history, because claiming it would be unconstitutional.

You swore an oath to the Constitution, not to any one man. Whatever problems you hoped to alleviate by becoming a sworn peace officer or member of the military, can you in good conscience be part of a regime that no longer respects or abides by the Constitution?

A regime that tolerates no dissent and uses you to crush it?

A regime whose security forces, including you, abduct people off the street without identifying themselves?

A regime that uses you to deport legal residents without trial? (Those people wouldn't comply if they weren't being held at the point of your gun.)

Only you can decide whether this is a regime you can support.

Only you can decide whether you can do more good by resigning now, or by resisting from within for as long as the regime allows.

Only you can decide whether you will be able to look your children and grandchildren in the eye, and tell them that you fulfilled your Constitutional oath by following the orders of a man who betrayed his own, and know whether you're telling them the truth.

You cannot avoid making this decision every day you help to keep the regime in power.

If enough of you honor your oaths and your consciences, you can render a lawless, faithless president impotent to subvert the consitutional order further.

You are not solely responsible for restoring that constitutional order: we all have a part to play. But you will be singularly responsible if you help this lawless, faithless president to become a tyrant, ending our republic.

Trump is not the country

It would be too exhausting to go through every incoherent burble, distortion of the truth and outright falsehood in Dear Leader's remarks Monday (the ones that were supposed to focus on the administration's contemplated response to the reported chemical-warfare attack against Syrian civilians), but one demands close attention.

Among many other claims by our Dear Leader in his lengthy rant against the FBI (and his own Justice Department, and special prosecutor Robert Mueller, and yes, Hillary Clinton, too) for its unannounced raids on his personal lawyer Michael Cohen's office and home, he said the raids were "an attack":

It’s an attack on our country in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.

No.

It.

Is.

Not.

If you nod approvingly at Trump's argument, you either

• buy into the "deep-state" conspiracy against him, or
• have as little understanding of our Constitution and our laws as he.

Conspiracy theories are seductive little beasts but they generally suggest a lot more than they actually prove. That's why I treat them with great skepticism, often shading into suspicion. If you don't, I think you're showing more credulity than wisdom.

Now, a raid on an attorney's office and the seizing of his files is a very big deal. We all know about attorney-client privilege. (You don't? Well, attorney-client privilege means that your attorney can't reveal what the two of you discussed — at least, not when she was acting as your attorney.)

Even so, the FBI got a warrant to raid Cohen's office and living quarters. The warrant allowed the bureau to seize his files, which ordinarily would be off-limits due to privilege.

That was extraordinary. However, it wasn't illegal.

If a lawyer is suspected of working with her client to commit a crime, or to cover one up, a judge can decide that the attorney-client privilege is moot — that is, that communications between the attorney and client are not protected.

Defeating attorney-client privilege requires compelling evidence. Most attorneys have the knowledge, connections and financial means to counterattack if it turns out the suspicions of criminal behavior were unfounded. Plus, most judges were attorneys themselves, and as the morbid joke goes, sharks don't bite lawyers out of professional courtesy. So no judge is going to grant a warrant to seize client files without damned good reason.

In spite of plenty of lawsuits to his name, Dear Leader doesn't know the principles of our legal system: he only knows the grubby details that he has personally encountered. More to the point, he doesn't give a damn about those principles. He has no clue that the legal system is supposed to treat everyone equally. To the contrary, his self-obsessed little mind is convinced that since he's THE PRESIDENT, the Justice Department is supposed to be his personal attack dog and legal shield.

The Justice Department exists to uphold federal law. It's not the president's stormtroops.

Has DoJ misbehaved in the past, sometimes egregiously? Yes. J. Edgar Hoover treated the FBI much the way Dear Leader would like to, and the result was decades of misconduct and decades more of mistrust by elements of the public. Note, however, that those with the greatest reason to mistrust DoJ or the FBI are black and brown people — just like those Jeff Sessions is going after with today's DoJ, in fact. Rich white men like Trump simply have never been a priority for DoJ. (A lot of them got off scot-free after the 2008 financial collapse, remember?)

No, the FBI and DoJ came after Michael Cohen because they strongly suspect he has committed major crimes — and the evidence they have convinced a judge to sign a no-knock warrant that permitted them to seize his files (and his phone, apparently).

That's not an attack on our country. It's a vindication of our laws. It's a demonstration that the system, at least for now, and in spite of Dear Leader's corrosive attacks on the rule of law, still works.

From the standpoint of the rule of law, the raids on Dear Leader's lawyer's office and home were deeply disturbing — but not because they were an "attack" on anyone, but because they suggest something quite foul is going on with Mr. Cohen. If Dear Leader is feeling attacked, perhaps it's evidence of a guilty conscience. Or, well, no, not conscience, a mental faculty our Dear Leader has convincingly demonstrated he lacks. More like consciousness of guilt.

"L'etat, c'est moi" ("I am the state") is a long-discredited sentiment attributed to one of the more despotic rulers of France. Modern democratic states don't allow their executives to hold such autocratic powers. Yet that's what Dear Leader is claiming when he calls the raids "an attack on our country". News flash, Donnie: you're not the country. Your ego is that big, but you aren't.

Nor were the raids "an attack on all we stand for". What they were was evidence that the rule of law still holds, however tenuously. That's what we stand for. What about you, Mr. President?