Lawfare Forever

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There is a website called Lawfare, run out of Brookings, and for a decade it covered the legal wars of Washington the way a sports desk covers a long season: every filing a box score, every hearing a recap. The word has since escaped the masthead. Lawfare is the strategic use of courts, prosecutors, and process itself against political opponents, and it is now the central sport of American politics, played by both leagues, in the open, with the schedule published in advance. I have watched three innings of it and I can report the score, the injuries, and the only honest seat left in the stadium.

Bolos at the bull's legs

Gauchos bring down a running animal with boleadoras, weighted cords that fly at the legs and wrap them. The throws came in bunches. In Manhattan, Alvin Bragg took a bookkeeping misdemeanor past its ordinary life, attached it to an election-law theory, and dealt it out as 34 felony counts against a former president for payments every adult in America already knew about. A jury convicted in May of 2024. After the election, the sentence arrived: unconditional discharge. No jail, no fine, no probation, nothing. The sentence confessed the case. The conviction was the deliverable, and it was addressed to the campaign calendar.

In Albany and Manhattan again, Letitia James—who had campaigned for her office on the promise of suing this one man—brought the loan case under an executive-law provision that let her skip the victims. The banks had been repaid. The lead lender testified it wanted the business again. The state claimed fraud on behalf of counterparties who had profited, and the judgment ran past $350 million, swelling toward half a billion dollars with interest, until an appeals court voided the penalty as excessive and left the liability standing, a crusade with its meter confiscated. In Atlanta, Fani Willis filed a racketeering indictment the size of a phone book and then starred in a televised romance with her own special prosecutor; the courts removed her for the appearance of impropriety, and the case crawled off to die of spectacle. Add the federal pair, the documents case and the January 6 case, and the Fourteenth Amendment campaign to strike his name from state ballots, which a unanimous Supreme Court stopped cold.

Every filing had its clerks, its footnotes, its solemn paragraph about the rule of law. Together they had a calendar, and the calendar said November 5, 2024. And nothing worked. He was reëlected with the convictions pinned to his chest, and his voters wore them as medals the other side had minted for him. Each prosecution certified the story he had been telling since 2016: the system would use any instrument at hand to keep him from power. People are pissed. His people are pissed at having watched the attempt, throw after throw, in broad daylight. The other side's people are pissed at having watched every throw miss. A country where both electorates believe the courts were aimed, and aimed badly, is a country that has already agreed on the premise of the next round.

The reprisal, on schedule

He never takes the higher road. It is the most reliable fact about the man, stated by his enemies as an accusation and by his friends as a weather report. He promised retribution on the trail and he has governed as a man keeping an appointment. The legal arm came first. James Comey was indicted in September of 2025, days after the United States Attorney who had found no case was pushed out and a loyalist installed. Letitia James followed in October, indicted over a mortgage form by the same replacement. A federal judge dismissed both cases in November, ruling that the prosecutor who brought them held her job unlawfully. When the administration went back for James, grand juries declined to hand the case back at all. The machinery balked, and the balking is part of the story: round two keeps colliding with the same judges, juries, and statutes that round one treated as scenery.

Then there are the corpses that never saw a courtroom. USAID, an agency of some ten thousand people, was fed into the woodchipper in the administration's first weeks and formally buried by summer. The Corporation for Public Broadcasting lost its federal money and announced its own shutdown, taking the subsidy out of NPR and PBS with it. DOGE walked the departments with lists. Say what you like about the merits of any one target; the pattern is the reprisal pattern, scored against institutions identified with the other coalition, executed at a speed that dared the courts to keep up. National Review, which spent years documenting round one, named round two in real time and in its own pages: "Comey Indictment: Lawfare Forever." "The Trump Administration Is Really Bad at Retribution." "Trump Is an Appalling Hypocrite When It Comes to Lawfare." When your own referees are booing, you are not draining anything. You are refilling it.

Next season, already scheduled

The midterms land a week from tonight, on November 3, and the only live question is whose hands hold the gavels in January. If the Democrats take a chamber, the subpoenas are already drafted in the imagination of every committee staffer in Washington, and the party has stopped pretending otherwise. Here is Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaiʻi, on the record this month: "I'm not very worried about congressional overreach if the President of the United States is Donald Trump." Read that sentence twice. Overreach used to be the charge each side leveled and denied. A sitting senator now campaigns on the promise of it, and the promise polls as honesty.

This is the ratchet, and it only turns one way. Every norm retired in round one stays retired; every prosecutor who reached teaches a prosecutor who follows; every base that watched its champion dragged through process learns to demand process in return, as a deliverable, the way it demands tax cuts or judges. Standing down reads as surrender, so nobody stands down. The Hill publishes essays arguing that lawfare is a myth, debunked by unanimous juries, and the essays miss the point the dockets make daily: a jury can be unanimous, a statute can be real, a signature can be genuine, and the campaign can still be a campaign. The instrument is legitimate. The aim is the tell, and the aim is now printed on the schedule.

Popcorn

My own feeling in all of this is bemusement. I am 56 years old. I have friends on both sides of the docket, clients who cheer each throw and clients who duck them, and one life in which to watch the republic convert its courtrooms into its colosseum. Rome gave the crowd bread and circuses. We get indictments and livestreams, boleadoras and woodchippers, a senator promising overreach and a president who never once in his life has taken the higher road, and the season never ends because the schedule is the product.

So I take my seat. There is horror available in this story for anyone who wants it, and sermons, and fundraising emails written in the imperative mood. I find I am mostly grateful: to be alive and upright for the shitshow, to get to see it with my own eyes instead of reading about it in somebody else's century. The bucket is full. The show is renewed. Nobody is changing the channel. 🍿

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