Trump and the rule of law

An excerpt from a column in the Atlantic by Adam Serwer:

In one important sense, Jeff Sessions’s forced departure is alarming. Sessions, for all his flaws, envisioned the position of U.S. attorney general as an office that should resist political pressure from the White House, and one whose ultimate loyalty is to the constitution. It was that view that caused Sessions, under pressure, to agree to recuse himself from the Russia investigation.

This runs contrary to the central tenet of Trumpism, which holds that the highest loyalty is not to the public, the nation or the constitution, but to Donald Trump. The president was enraged that Sessions’s recusal meant that he could not control the investigation himself. He will not make that mistake with his next choice of attorney general.

Trump’s losses in the mid-terms will not make him more cautious; they will only make him more dangerous. Trump’s only true ideological commitment is to his racially exclusive vision of American citizenship.

His authoritarianism is more instinctive than ideological, closely tied to his desire to enrich himself and his allies without facing legal consequences.

With Democrats in charge of the House, the president is no doubt confident that he can blatantly break the law and still convince his supporters, sealed in an impenetrable bubble of pro-Trump propaganda, that he did no such thing. Protecting the rule of law will fall to a Republican majority in the Senate whose willingness to do so is deeply in question.