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The legal lesson of 2025? Thank God for the swamp
Turns out the court system makes democracy really hard to get rid of.
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One of the silver linings of 2025 was watching Trump do exactly what he set out to do, but having it prove the opposite point.
There is perhaps no greater example of this than the US legal system. Trump and his cohort have long lambasted it as the heart of “the swamp” they claim must be drained. And to be fair, the US legal system is far from perfect. It is a cumbersome, sprawling behemoth full of arcane procedural requirements, and it takes an expert lawyer — preferably a whole team of them if you can afford it — to navigate successfully. Even then, it often takes months, if not years, to get the legal system to serve the purpose it’s intended to serve.
In short: the US legal system is hardly a model of efficiency. And thank God for that.
Because what Trump never understood, and what this past year demonstrated quite resoundingly, is that the US legal system was never supposed to prioritize efficiency above every other value.
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Rather, what the US legal system is set up to do — what all those finicky legal requirements are doing by making everything so complicated — is to make sure the structure and fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution endure, even in the face of a direct assault on those values like the one Trump is leading.
In other words: the legal system’s inefficiency is exactly the point. Because it’s that same inefficiency that prevents Trump and company from steamrolling the Constitution entirely.
Revenge of the swamp
When you look at the “bottom” of the legal food chain in the US — that is, the lowest levels of the courts, as well as the administrative officials who are actually charged with executing the nation’s policies and laws — it becomes very clear that this is where the Trump administration’s boundary-pushing policies are likely to encounter the most difficulty.
One excellent example from 2025 was Trump’s assault on the functioning of the Department of Justice itself. The DOJ is effectively the primary legal arm of the federal government, charged with enforcing the laws of the United States. It oversees not only the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies but numerous divisions of lawyers whose responsibility it is to represent the federal government in day-to-day civil litigation.
Trump has been on a singular mission to reshape the Department in his image, which basically means he put a bunch of incompetent people in charge and fired many of the career lawyers who displeased him. This has unsurprisingly created a terrible work environment, which it turn has prompted many more people to leave, further shifting the DOJ from effectively carrying out its traditional functions.
But the thing that Trump never seemed to understand is that one of those functions is helping him actually carry out his agenda in court. Perhaps the splashiest example of this was the giant flameout that was the appointment of Lindsay Halligan as US attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia.
