Nothing that’s happening is normal. None. Of. it.

This next stretch of time would likely be hard enough for many folks to get through if nothing else troubling was going on in our nation. This is the stretch of time where we will be reminded time and time again of the five-year anniversary of events that changed, for many irrevocably, our lives because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Here in the U.S. though, the PTSD isn’t just the pandemic itself, but the fact that, when it struck, we were being governed by a historically incompetent Trump administration.

Unfortunately, and mostly inexplicably, as these five-year anniversary events arise we are again being governed by the same incompetent Mr. Trump, but now, unlike then, he also has been fully unleashed to be as corrupt and authoritarian as he wishes largely because of the Supreme Court’s ruling granting extensive, essentially absolute, immunity to the President for “official acts.” In a world in which our government ethics standards have plummeted so quickly that we had an automobile commercial on the White House lawn yesterday, what constitutes an “official act” of this President can apparently be anything.

The actual parade of horribles that is coming about as a result of electing such a man to the presidency again is nearly too long to try to catalog thoroughly and certainly so long as to be soul-crushing to attempt to list out completely. The first time in history that a felon has been elected to be President of the U.S. has brought about attacks on transgender people, women, people of color, immigrants, the press, the educational system, and even sitting members of Congress.

Additionally, our social safety net has come under full-bore attack, even including things that “normal” right-wing types haven’t ever before thought were part of this safety net, like the CDC, the NIH, the NOAA, and the FAA). In addition to all of that, we’ve alienated our traditional allies on the global stage and, instead, aligned ourselves with nations run by authoritarian dictators such as Russia and launched pointless trade wars with Canada and Mexico.

In the midst of all of these abnormal acts, this same regime is now also unleashing itself to attack all aspects of the mechanics involved in the rule of law that keeps a democracy healthy including lawyers and law firms. The firm actually attacked by name in the most recent Executive Order, Perkins Coie, has filed a lawsuit to fight back. A fellow APRL member, Mike Downey, has compiled a page with links to that lawsuit and its supporting materials, which you can get here. A number of bar associations and other such entities have recently put out statements attempting to explain why the attack on lawyers and legal institutions is such a grave threat to the rule of law and democracy itself. The ABA — which of course the cult of Trump is now attacking as a “leftist” organization — put one of the first such statements out into the universe. You can read that here.

There are other bar groups that have issued public statements along the same lines. But today I’d rather have you read something put out not by a group. Because it does such a good job of explaining why the kind of unprecedented attacks coming from The White House directed at lawyers and law firms are so troubling because they are designed to make it impossible for all of the other various groups I mentioned below to fight against authoritarianism, I would ask you to read this recent article written by Mike Masnick: Trump’s Latest Weapon Against Critics: Destroying Their Lawyers | Techdirt

One reason I think (and hope) it will resonate not just among lawyers who understand the importance of the oath they took when they got licensed, but also with the public at large, is that it is not fettered by the need in drafting to try to keep a coalition of folks together which might include some lawyers who have fed their professional reputation willingly (or in response to being afraid of retribution) into the cult.