IN SYNTHESIS
By Alfredo Cuéllar
WHAT DOES HISTORY SAY?
In the history of the United States, nothing remotely similar had ever happened. No administration—neither Nixon’s in the worst days of Watergate, nor Andrew Johnson’s during Reconstruction, nor Warren Harding’s with Teapot Dome—had ever turned the Department of Justice into such an overt extension of the president’s personal power.
The report published yesterday by The New York Times, based on testimonies from more than sixty career prosecutors and attorneys (many of them conservatives and several appointed during Trump’s first administration), is not a political opinion: it is the death certificate of the independence of the U.S. Justice Department as we knew it for 155 years.
EVIDENCE
The facts are so brutal that listing them almost sounds like caricature:
mass pardons for Capitol attackers on Inauguration Day; dismissal of hundreds of prosecutors for having investigated the president or his allies; direct orders to close corruption cases against friendly mayors and to open them against political enemies; pressure to withdraw historic civil-rights lawsuits; use of the FBI for immigration raids at the cost of abandoning terrorism and corporate-fraud investigations; lawsuits against doctors treating trans minors; subpoenas to universities over “antisemitism” issued from above with demands for billion-dollar fines…
The list is so long it seems invented. It is not.
One of the prosecutors interviewed summarized it this way: “I never thought I’d see this in my country. I never imagined I would have to choose between my career and my conscience.”
THE DAMAGE
The institutional damage is likely irreparable in the short and medium term.
When more than two hundred experienced prosecutors and thousands of career attorneys are fired or forced to resign, one does not simply replace names on an organizational chart: institutional memory is lost; the transmission chain of legal and ethical judgment that allowed the DOJ to function with real independence from political power is broken.
That human capital takes decades to rebuild. Some interviewees put it bluntly: “The Department of Justice will survive, but it will never be the same.”
MICROPOLITICS
And here is where Micropolitics comes in—that field that studies how small acts of everyday power end up shaping grand politics. Chapter 9 of my recent work on Micropolitics focuses on Ethics and Values, reminding us that the legitimacy of a system depends less on its written laws than on daily respect for three elementary principles: impartiality, transparency, and the rejection of private use of public power.
All three are absent today in the United States Department of Justice.
When a career prosecutor must choose between signing a document he knows is false or being fired; when a section chief is demoted for refusing to pursue a president’s enemy; when the ethics office is eliminated because it “annoys” people—ethical culture is destroyed from below, and with it the foundation of any democracy.
This is where the Hybris Complex becomes visible: the ruler’s conviction that power has no limits and that no one can hold him accountable.
THE PROBLEM IS NOT JUST TRUMP
Many will say—rightly—that the problem is not only Trump: it is the simultaneous failure of constitutional checks and balances.
The Republican congress has abdicated its oversight role to grotesque levels; the Supreme Court, with its expanded presidential-immunity doctrine, eliminated the last rational fear a president might have before abusing power; and the ordinary court system, terrified or co-opted, “looks the other way.”
The ballot box remains every four years… but patiently waiting for 2028 is no solution: the damage will already be done and—worse—normalized. The next administration, whoever it is, will face the temptation to repeat or seek revenge, and the pendulum of political retaliation will become the new norm.
THE GLOBAL VIEW
The international effects are equally devastating.
The Department of Justice was the global spearhead in the fight against transnational corruption (FCPA) and money laundering by kleptocrats. Its weakening sends a clear message to dictators and oligarchs worldwide: the United States will no longer be an obstacle if you know whom to donate to—or whom to flatter.
Countries that had begun institutional-strengthening processes inspired by the U.S. model now watch in disbelief and are beginning to reverse course.
LATIN AMERICA
In Latin America, where we were so often warned about “the strongman” and “authoritarian populism,” the spectacle is particularly bitter. We now see the hemisphere’s strongest institutional framework crumble in a matter of months by the simple will of a charismatic leader and a party that decided winning was more important than the rules.
It is tragic confirmation that no system is armored when political incentives reward loyalty over law.
MORAL — AND A DOOR TO HOPE
There is no easy happy ending. Ethical and institutional damage has already been done.
But even amid deterioration, there is a point of light. In the New York Times report itself appear dozens of prosecutors who resigned out of dignity, lawyers who documented abuses at the risk of their careers, young officials who refused to sign illegal orders.
That silent minority—often defeated but not extinguished—reminds us that democratic culture can be rebuilt because there are still people who embody it.
History shows that institutions recover not by decree but because citizens defend them when it is no longer popular to do so. The Department of Justice can be reborn precisely from that ethical core that refused to yield. Reconstruction will be slow—perhaps generational—but not impossible: every republic that has risen again has done so by leaning on those who knew how to say “no.”
If this can happen in Washington, it can also be repaired in Washington.
And if it can be repaired there, it can be repaired anywhere.
