Everybody Out

My metric for judging whether a second Donald Trump presidency is successful or not is whether it delivers what Americans deserve for reelecting a coup-plotting demagogue. So far, it’s beaten expectations.

Of the two issues that won the election for Republicans, the White House is already downplaying one and bumping up against hard realities on the other. Instead, most of the political energy in the president’s first weeks back in office has been spent on a legally dubious cultural jihad Elon Musk is waging on federal agencies, with Musk and Trump tossing out wild allegations of fraud involving spending they dislike and conspicuously ignoring chicanery closer to home.

The new Cabinet is as sleazy, crankish, and unfit as anyone could have reasonably hoped. (Almost.) The ethical corruption to which the administration has stooped is almost operatic in its lavishness. Less than a month in, a new world order in which small liberal powers like Ukraine are expected to supplicate to authoritarian behemoths like Russia is being built.

There have even been surprises. A small one: Jack Posobiec, a notorious alt-right social media troll known for conspiracy theories and assorted sinister postliberal mutterings, was invited to accompany our new secretary of defense on his first overseas trip for some reason. (Pentagon officials were reportedly “alarmed” by his presence.) A big one: Befitting his fascist instincts, Trump appears serious about trying to annex countries in America’s near-abroad. And not-so-near-abroad—no one saw the Gaza City Trump Hotel and Casino on the geopolitical horizon, did they?

Meditate on this: On the very day that news about a measles outbreak in Texas was circulating, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was confirmed by Senate Republicans to lead the country’s health bureaucracy. To quote the poet James Carville, “We are flooded in sh—.”

And Americans seem to love it. If you define “democracy” as H.L. Mencken did, we’ve rarely seen a democratic triumph as stirring as the first three-plus weeks of this presidency.

But no administration is perfect. One problem for the Trump White House as it goes about trying to give America what it deserves is that, despite its best efforts, it’s ended up with some smart people who take seriously their oath to the Constitution working for it.

And frankly, I don’t know why.

Quid pro quo.

On Thursday, Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney in Manhattan, resigned. Her resignation letter is a master class in how to call your boss, in this case the No. 2 lawyer in the Justice Department, a corrupt scumbag … without using the term “corrupt scumbag.”

The allegedly corrupt scumbag in question is Emil Bove, who worked as Donald Trump’s private attorney during the interregnum and now serves as presidential enforcer against the “deep state” as acting deputy attorney general. A few days ago, Bove sent Sassoon a memo directing her to dismiss the federal corruption charges pending in her district against New York City Mayor Eric Adams—but not because the DOJ wasn’t confident in a conviction.

“The agency’s justification for dropping the case was explicitly political,” the New York Times explained. “Mr. Bove had argued that the investigation would prevent Mr. Adams from fully cooperating with Mr. Trump’s immigration crackdown. Mr. Bove made a point of saying that Washington officials had not evaluated the strength of the evidence or the legal theory behind the case.”

I’m not dropping the charges, a defiant Sassoon declared in her resignation letter, which was addressed to Attorney General Pam Bondi. To do so under the circumstances would be unethical: The Justice Department is not in the business of doing legal favors for a politically powerful defendant just because the president’s agenda might benefit from that defendant’s cooperation. Prosecutors are told to apply the law impartially, without fear or favor. Cutting Adams a break in exchange for his help in boosting Trump’s deportation numbers would be the definition of a favor.

That wasn’t all.

She claimed that more charges against the mayor were in the works, alleging that “Adams destroyed and instructed others to destroy evidence and provide false information to the FBI.” And she noted that dismissing the indictment against him without prejudice, as the DOJ had instructed her to do, would allow the White House to coerce the mayor going forward by threatening to refile charges if he ever stopped complying with its political demands.

Here was the showstopper, though:

I attended a meeting on January 31, 2025, with Mr. Bove, Adams’s counsel, and members of my office. Adams’s attorneys repeatedly urged what amounted to a quid pro quo, indicating that Adams would be in a position to assist with the Department’s enforcement priorities only if the indictment were dismissed. Mr. Bove admonished a member of my team who took notes during that meeting and directed the collection of those notes at the meeting’s conclusion.

Nothing says “Trump lawyer” like warning others present not to make a written record of some scumminess they’ve just witnessed. A fun fact courtesy of the Times: Adams’ counsel includes Alex Spiro, who represents Elon Musk in other matters, and William Burck, an outside ethics adviser to, er, Donald Trump’s company. Not only is justice not blind in this case, the lawyers on both sides are all basically on the same team.

The corruption is so brazen that, the day after Sassoon’s resignation letter was published,  Adams and Trump’s immigration czar appeared together on Fox News to joke about the pressure the mayor would face to help the White House meet its immigration goals. They needn’t worry: Adams seems to understand quite well what this quid pro quo requires of him.

Danielle Sassoon wanted no part of it. Three weeks into her prestigious new job as acting U.S. attorney, she quit on principle rather than participate in Trump’s effort to turn American law into a patronage system. At least one prosecutor working under her followed her out the door. On Thursday night, Bove took the Adams case away from the Manhattan office altogether and handed it to the DOJ’s Public Integrity Section in Washington with orders to dismiss the charges—and then the head of that department resigned in protest, as did three of his colleagues.

Question: What on earth were these people doing working for Donald Trump to begin with?

Integrity and its enemies.

To appreciate the magnitude of the sacrifice Sassoon made, you need to understand that her professional credentials aren’t gold-plated, they’re platinum-plated. 

She was educated at Harvard and Yale Law. She clerked for two of the most eminent conservative judges of the last 50 years, Antonin Scalia and J. Harvie Wilkinson. At the tender age of 38, she already has one red-letter conviction to her name and was held in high enough esteem to have been placed in charge of the most prestigious U.S. attorney’s office in the country, albeit temporarily.

Take it from me, a (failed) lawyer: That’s as good as it gets. That’s the résumé of a future attorney general or appellate judge, possibly a Supreme Court justice. Given her youth and intellect, my guess is that Sassoon stood a real chance of landing on the federal bench before Trump’s term was up. All she had to do was follow the example of J.D. Vance, Elise Stefanik, Marco Rubio, and a million other soulless Republican lowlifes by agreeing to prioritize his interests over her commitment to liberalism.

She refused. Because she refused, and because she further insisted on exposing Bove’s and Trump’s attempt to turn federal criminal law into an instrument of political leverage, her professional aspirations are up in smoke. Neither the president nor whatever creature succeeds him as head of the GOP will consider her for a high-profile job after this. On the contrary: In his own letter accepting her resignation, Bove informed her that the DOJ intends to investigate her and her colleagues for insubordination.

A talent like her will presumably land a high-paying partnership at some white-shoe law firm eventually, but even that isn’t as certain as it would have been five years ago. We live in a culture of fear now; if your firm has business with Trump’s government, would you want the White House to know that you’d gone and hired that prosecutor who burned him and Emil Bove publicly?

Her willingness to place liberal principle over her own ambition is like a long drink of water during an endless trek through the desert. Amid a national pandemic of moral cowardice, she and the others who resigned rather than carry out Bove’s drug deal turned out to be immune. They lit their careers on fire because they deemed that preferable to being derelict in their ethical duties. However much you admire them, it’s not enough.

Having said all that, though, I … don’t know what any of them expected. How did they see their careers during a second Trump presidency playing out, exactly? What was their endgame?

They can’t possibly have believed they’d be left alone to do their work conscientiously.

Case in point: Lost in the hubbub over Sassoon resigning on Thursday was the fact that Apple and Google have quietly restored TikTok to their respective app stores. “Isn’t that illegal?” you might say. It is. The law that banned the app makes clear that steep fines will be imposed on companies that offer TikTok for download in a “marketplace” until the platform has been sold to an American firm. Trump, who took an oath less than a month ago to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has said that he won’t faithfully execute that one.

Even so, Google and Apple made TikTok unavailable for download. What finally convinced them to bring it back, it seems, was a letter from Pam Bondi assuring them that the law wouldn’t be enforced in this case. “In essence, then,” law professor Steve Vladeck wrote, “the Attorney General of the United States has put her name to legal conclusions that (1) she was directed to reach by the President; and (2) are laughably wrong. … It is the epitome of politics over law from the federal officer who ought to be most committed to the latter.”

That’s not the first time a president and his Justice Department have declined to enforce a statute, of course. But typically when they exercise discretion, their reasons are more substantial than that the target of the law has a “warm spot in his heart” and that one of his donors has money at stake in the matter.

As with the letters to Apple and Google, Bove’s letter to Sassoon also boils down to the idea that when the president wants the Justice Department to do something, the Justice Department should do it. There’s some argle-bargle in there about the Eric Adams indictment having been “weaponized” when the former U.S. attorney touted it to promote his willingness to take on celebrity defendants, but as Sassoon noted in her letter, many prosecutors in the office have reviewed the Adams charges and found them strong. What Bove really means to say is that, when Trump’s political needs bump up against the ethical qualms of his subordinates, he expects those subordinates to lay those qualms aside on flimsy pretexts and follow the chain of command in Article II.

That’s the entire point of his second administration, where hires are being screened aggressively for “loyalty” before even being offered a job. Someone as brilliant as Danielle Sassoon surely understood it. So why did she join in the first place?

What Americans deserve.

After January 6, after Trump’s endless threats of “retribution” during the campaign, after multiple federal indictments, there are only two reasons a smart young conservative should want to work for him.

One: Said conservative is a sociopath who will, in the name of getting ahead, light the Constitution on fire if Donald Trump tells him or her to. Two: Said conservative is a patriot who fears that others will light the Constitution on fire if Trump tells him or her to and they want to be in the room to stop it when it happens. Ethical Republicans must fill vacant positions if only to block unethical ones from filling them instead.

I assume that second reason is why Sassoon and her colleagues gave it a go. They knew their office would be asked to do something unconscionable eventually (read: three weeks) and intended to make it painful for the White House when it happened. And Sassoon did make it painful: At one point in her resignation letter, she argued that dropping the charges against Adams would be so corrupt that the judge presiding over the case should simply tell the DOJ “no.”

Working for the Trump administration in hopes of revealing or sabotaging its corruption is a noble impulse. But it’s very 2017.

We’ve been over that before. Well-meaning Republican staffers like Sarah Isgur who went into the government during Trump’s first term and protected Americans from some of his worst impulses may have accidentally convinced voters that bringing him back for a second term was less risky than it truly was. And most of the Sarahs are gone now: Apart from a few Danielle Sassoons, the deputies with whom Trump has surrounded himself this time are there because they won’t restrain him. Emil Bove probably wouldn’t have behaved as ethically as Jeff Sessions and Rod Rosenstein did with the Russia investigation, and I suspect that’s precisely why Donald Trump likes him.

The logic of “good Republicans” filling positions in the government to keep “bad Republicans” out also grows weaker by the day. That logic arguably explains why Sen. Bill Cassidy, facing a primary from a Trump sycophant, chose to vote for the dregs of Trump’s Cabinet nominees this month. By doing so, he’s shoring up his electoral position and making it harder for MAGA to unseat a sane conservative like him.

But if the sane conservative is voting the same way that a MAGA senator would on figures like Kennedy, Kash Patel, and Tulsi Gabbard, then why does it actually matter who holds that seat? Why is reluctantly voting to confirm terrible postliberal nominees any better in practice than doing so enthusiastically?

The most one can say for the likes of Cassidy is that he’s keeping his powder dry, hoping to remain in the Senate so that one day he can cast a big vote against Trump in an important spot. (Cabinet confirmation votes aren’t big enough, apparently.) In fairness, he’s done so once before. And … it didn’t matter in the end. There weren’t enough sane conservatives in Congress left to restrain Trump in 2021 and there sure as hell aren’t enough now. The ones who are still sane, more or less, sound less sane every day.

Sassoon and her colleagues deserve immense moral credit for drawing a red line and enforcing it, but the bitter truth is that practically no one’s going to care. The prosecutors who stood on principle in this matter will be blackballed by the government and by Trump-friendly outfits in the private sector. Eric Adams will be pardoned if the White House can’t muscle anyone at the DOJ into dismissing the indictment against him, and he will probably work in Trump’s administration eventually. Bove will end up as attorney general or as a federal judge and Senate Republicans will vote to confirm him, probably unanimously.

It is far too late in 2025 for honest, civic-minded people to go to work for federal institutions in hopes of protecting them from an administration bent on operating those institutions like a racket. The effort will not succeed. At best, having decent, talented employees in the ranks carrying out its work will lend Trump’s government a patina of respectability that it doesn’t deserve. At worst, some of those decent, talented people will become less decent as the culture of Trumpism infects them and rots their souls.

“I expect you will eventually find someone who is enough of a fool, or enough of a coward, to file your motion [to dismiss the Adams charges]. But it was never going to be me.” That’s what Hagan Scotten, another prosecutor in the Manhattan U.S. attorney’s office, wrote in his own resignation letter to Bove on Thursday. Those words are stirring, but the truth is grim: There are plenty of fools and cowards around Trump who’ll do his dirty work, including in this matter. Scotten and his colleagues won’t stop him.

And so the best thing for those who admire Danielle Sassoon’s show of principle to do would be to follow her example and resign from the federal government themselves if they can afford to do so financially. Everybody out. If that means the DOJ loses 50 percent of its staff overnight and hundreds of criminal cases grind to a halt, that’s what it means. If that means Trump starts hiring sleazebags by the thousands and installs them in powerful law enforcement positions, that’s fine too.

In the end, we come back to where we started, with what Americans deserve. Despite the best efforts of sane conservatives like Sarah Isgur to keep Trump from melting down during his first term, we still got January 6. Voters knew well enough what they were voting for this time, even if they didn’t know the full extent. They deserve the kind of government they elected. Everyone with a drop of integrity who’s left: out.