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Donald Trump’s return to the presidency will mark an end to eight years of his critics’ hopes that he could be taken down through the legal process.

The Russia investigation, four criminal prosecutions, and a conviction at trial on 34 felony counts ultimately did not dissuade voters from handing Trump another term in November.

So what did all those investigations and prosecutions of the president-elect amount to?

Some would argue that the answer is: nothing. Because voters ultimately shrugged off Trump’s legal woes, he won the election. This will let him end the two federal prosecutions of him and avoid consequences for the two state ones. Meaning: He’ll get off scot-free.

The outcome may even be worse than that. For years, many in the country’s liberal and centrist elite argued that these investigations were righteous attempts to hold a corrupt figure accountable for his rampant lawbreaking. They argued that Trump posed an imminent threat to democracy and that the best way to defend the rule of law was by thoroughly investigating and prosecuting him.

And yet the most salient legacy of the Trump cases may be that they’ve helped trap the country in a destructive tit-for-tat spiral of politicized lawfare, or legal warfare.

Trump now will take office far more embittered with the Department of Justice that indicted him — and perhaps more determined to weaponize that department against his opponents — than ever before. The investigations did not make Trump a corrupt person: He was pledging to send the DOJ after his political rivals before he was even elected in 2016. But his personal peril may have focused his resentment, so that he’ll be more hell-bent on making sure the department serves his whims.

Perhaps more consequentially, he’ll now have much more cover from the GOP. Republicans at all levels of the party have increasingly accepted Trump’s argument that he was being unfairly persecuted by Democrats and a politicized “deep state.” They’ve become polarized and radicalized against federal law enforcement institutions — and perhaps more likely to confirm nominees who would have seemed unthinkably extreme a few years ago.

It is far from clear that investigators could have followed some alternate path that would have avoided this outcome completely. A confrontation between Trump and the rule of law was likely inevitable as soon as he was first elected — he is who he is.

Investigators were regularly faced with the no-win choice between ignoring potential Trumpian wrongdoing, and thoroughly investigating in a way sure to invite attacks and reprisals. Letting real malfeasance, like Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election, go unpunished would have been galling.

But, as the saying goes, if you come at the king, you best not miss. They missed — and now the country will reap the consequences.

The threat to democracy: It’s time for some game theory

Many Democrats, and at least some among the country’s nonpartisan elite establishment, conceived of the threat to democracy in the past eight years this way: Donald Trump is an unethical, corrupt, and dangerous figure — possibly even a budding dictator — who poses grave threats to democracy, the rule of law, and the United States of America.

Therefore, the way to save the country was to stop Trump, either at the ballot box or by disqualifying him, either legally or in the eyes of the public. He could be expelled from politics through investigations, impeachment, prosecutions, removal from the ballot, or even imprisonment.

Of course, practically no one directly involved in the many investigations of Trump would publicly say their true motivation was to stop him from winning (one potential exception came in an FBI agent’s text to his affair partner). Many defenders of the investigations argue that they were simply an attempt to make sure Trump was not above the law, and that they wanted to prevent an obviously lawless person from endangering the country.

This way of thinking provides helpful moral clarity, but has inherent tensions. For instance: Are you truly standing up for democracy if, in effect, you’re trying to unseat the presidential election winner, or to prevent him from running again? Is there ever a risk that the line could be crossed — so that the threat to democracy would be coming from inside the house?

In a 2023 paper, Rachel Kleinfeld, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, pointed out the irony that many efforts to “

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