John Adams famously wrote (quoting 17th-century political philosopher James Harrington) that a republic was “an Empire of Laws, and not of Men.” Donald Trump, if he has ever noticed that quotation or thought about it, thinks it’s a load of pious liberal crap. One of America’s big problems, at this moment of maximum existential and constitutional crisis, is that a whole lot of us believe, or suspect, that he isn’t entirely wrong.

Trump’s true genius, if we can call it that, lies in finding the weakness of his opponents — the chinks and crevices and loopholes through which he can force his greed, his hunger and his massive but fragile ego, like so much orange goo. Very often such weaknesses involve principles, since Trump has none, and so it is with his current opponent, the constitutional order of the United States of America, which was built upon a complicated set of interlocking principles that it only imperfectly upholds or, in many cases, does not uphold at all.

So many of us, perhaps most of us, recognize that Trump has at least half a point about the fragile or mythical nature of the rule of law, even if we wish it weren’t so. That includes many people who didn’t vote for him and never would, and have no desire to follow him into the savagely self-destructive land of MAGA fantasy.

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In that realm, Trump’s first law is that there is no law. It’s fair to say he has faithfully observed that creed or dictum throughout his career as a shameless cheat and hustler in business, a many-times-accused sexual predator in personal life and a pathological fabricator of sadistic lies in politics. He has inhaled from somewhere — certainly not from studying history — an immensely dumbed-down version of the philosophy that he imagines drove Napoleon and Hitler, and perhaps Alexander the Great and Peter the Great. (He’s probably not too clear on the difference.) Why doesn’t he get to be called “the Great”? If he changed the Gulf of Mexico’s name, he can change his own too.

For a deeper layer of irony, consider this 2017 article from the right-wing Claremont Review of Books, a consistent advocate of Trumpism, which further elucidates the Harrington quote above. The “empire of laws,” which Harrington (writing in the 1650s) imputed to ancient........

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