Had you time-traveled back to 2023, and started telling people that President Donald Trump’s Justice Department would soon be trying to imprison a woman who had accused him of rape, most would likely have dismissed it as a paranoid #resistance fantasy.

Yet now, it appears to be reality. Reporting in both CNN and the New York Times suggests that the DOJ has opened a criminal inquiry into E. Jean Carroll, the journalist who successfully won $88.3 million in damages from Trump after federal juries determined he sexually abused her in 1996 and later defamed her. The allegation now under investigation, per reporting, is that Carroll committed perjury during a deposition for the case.

This is, without a doubt, an authoritarian abuse of power: the president weaponizing the Justice Department to go after one of his most prominent and effective critics. It is the kind of thing that you expect in a country like Turkey or Venezuela, where the justice system has been transformed into an enforcement mechanism for an authoritarian regime.

But the comparison also suggests why the case is less scary than it appears.

Unlike in those countries, where those targeted by the state have little plausible chance to fight back, Trump’s track record for prosecuting his opponents has been exceptionally poor. Due to a combination of his own attorneys’ incompetence, the jury system, and the genuine independence of America’s lower court judges, they’ve repeatedly failed to secure indictments — let alone actually imprison anyone.

The administration has repeatedly failed to present a credible case against former FBI Director James Comey, with its most recent indictment revolving around an allegedly threatening picture of seashells. In February, a grand jury rejected both its efforts to prosecute six Democratic lawmakers over a video calling on the US military to disobey unlawful orders. A criminal investigation into then-Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell backfired when senators threatened to block his replacement and was later halted. Just this week, federal judges threw out both a case against anti-ICE protesters in Chicago and the administration’s latest effort to imprison Kilmar Abrego Garcia.

“They seem to be choosing targets without the evidence to back convictions,” says Barb McQuade, a law professor at University of Michigan and former US attorney. “In the case of Carroll, a jury has already spoken on her credibility, and they believed her. It’s absurd to think that prosecutors would be able to reach a different result when this time the government, and not she, has the burden of proof, and by the much higher standard of guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.”

This pattern illustrates one of the central dynamics of the Trump administration over the past year: that they are clearly intent on building an authoritarian state, but lack both the competence and the strategic vision to overcome American democracy’s institutional barriers to true power consolidation.

And with the midterm election looming, they are running out of time.

Why the Carroll investigation is a sham

In September 2020, Carroll’s attorney told her that an outside source was helping fund her lawsuit against Trump (that source was Reid Hoffman, a Democratic mega-donor). Over two years later, during a trial deposition, Carroll was asked whether someone was “presently paying” her legal fees — and she said no.

The Justice Department’s case, per both CNN and the Times, centers on the theory that Carroll’s answer was perjury: that she knowingly lied in 2022 given the 2020 funding.

There are several glaring problems with this theory, but the biggest one is that a court has already decided this question in Carroll’s favor.

“Ms. Carroll plausibly represented that she had forgotten about the limited outside funding counsel obtained in September 2020 when this question was first posed to her in 2022, and the additional discovery did not indicate otherwise. Rather, it showed that Ms. Carroll simply was not involved in the matter of who was or was not funding her litigation costs,” the Second Circuit ruled in an unanimous decision denying an appeal from Trump.

And the burden of proof would be even higher in a criminal case, which is what federal prosecutors are reportedly pursuing. The Justice Department would need some kind of smoking-gun evidence that Carroll had knowingly lied about the funding, and there is no reason to believe that any such evidence exists.

“A conviction is just not going to happen,” McQuade concludes.

That the Justice Department would even bring such a weak case is, in her assessment, evidence of just how corrupted the process has become. Trump’s attorneys have to know that this case, like the repeated attempts to indict Comey, are not going anywhere legally — but they are filing them anyway because the president wants his opponents prosecuted and publicly humiliated.

“Ordinarily, DOJ policy prohibits prosecutors from indicting a case just because they have probable cause. The standard is that prosecutors should believe it probable that the evidence is sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction,” McQuade says. “Filing criminal charges just to shame someone without the evidence to back it up is a violation of ethical standards and abuse of the Justice Department’s power.”

The wages of “haphazardism”

One could, theoretically, read the Carroll case in two opposed ways.

One could, by focusing on the basic impropriety of bringing the case in the first place, see it as evidence of the damage Trump has done to America’s democratic institutions. One could also focus more on the exceedingly high likelihood that the case will fail, and treat it as evidence of American democracy’s resilience in the face of an authoritarian chief executive.

These perspectives are not opposed, however, but actually two sides of the same coin. Trump’s second-term governing approach is best defined as “haphazardism,” a style of rule characterized by repeated and sustained individual attacks on America’s system of government that are legitimately dangerous, but also so poorly executed that they’re often self-undermining. 

Trump is succeeding in wrecking elements of the American system: destroying the separation of powers and the norms of nonpartisan governance that defined the modern US civil service. But the wreck is incomplete — Trump has not demolished every barrier standing in his path to untrammeled power — which leaves democracy intact, if severely diminished in quality.

The Carroll case fits this pattern exactly. Trump has successfully demolished the norm of DOJ independence that would, in the post-Watergate era, have constrained the president from vindictive prosecution of a woman who proved in court that he assaulted her. Yet he has not been able to take the next step, of an Erdogan or Putin, and turn the courts into a rubber stamp that would translate prosecution into conviction.

This is because of the haphazardist character of Trump’s governance. Caring more about optics, with little attention to long-range planning, Trump demands that people immediately do what he wants — and hires the yes-men who will do it. He does not have a real plan for long-term power consolidation, a way to turn individual indictments into an actual effort to cow the political opposition. He just wants an indictment, and so he gets one — regardless of legal competence.

Few good lawyers are willing to follow this kind of rule, and it has shown. In a recent article, the New York Times’ Alan Feuer documented the extraordinary string of screw-ups by Trump’s DOJ that have led to an unprecedented number of grand juries, long seen as rubber stamps for federal prosecutions, failing to deliver indictments. Feuer sees these failures as a direct outgrowth of Trump’s push for political reprisals: The more petty and poorly argued cases he brings, the more grand juries and judges come to expect petty and poorly argued cases, and the more confident they feel in rejecting them.  

The Trump effort to prosecute his enemies is simultaneously authoritarian in intent and weak in execution. Understanding this as an example of the general haphazardist pattern helps clarify just what Trump is doing to the American system of government — and how far-reaching the consequences will truly be.

Donald Trump’s self-dealing and profiteering from high office, a longtime subtheme of his presidency, has just become its defining story.

Consider the following list of news and revelations, all from roughly the past week:

1. Trump created a $1.776 billion “anti-weaponization fund,” supervised solely by him, as part of a “settlement” for a bogus lawsuit against the IRS.
2. As part of the settlement, Trump has formally immunized himself, his family, and his business interests from IRS audits.
3. Trump made 3,700 stock trades in the first quarter this year, with trades often happening just before a major policy decision affecting the companies in his trades. 
4. The Trump family has made a staggering $1.55 billion from its crypto vehicle World Liberty Financial since late 2024. 

It is not hard to see the problem with this behavior. Most people intuitively know it’s bad for politicians to abuse their positions of power for profit.

Yet what Trump is doing is something far more than “ordinary” corruption. He is, very intentionally, attempting to transform the very operating logic of the American political system: to replace a political order structured by rule of law to one where major decisions ultimately come down to whether you have the personal favor of the president. 

This is a fundamental transformation — one far more sweeping than widely appreciated. Once you understand it, you understand not just what Trump truly wants, but the deepest ways in which his presidency could affect us all.

The breaking of American order

In their book Violence and Social Orders, the political scientists Douglass C. North, John Joseph Wallis, and Barry R. Weingast sort advanced human societies into roughly two buckets: the “natural state” and the “open access state.”

The natural state, so-called because it was the dominant one for most of recorded history, operates on behalf of self-serving elites. These elite groups aim, first and foremost, at profiting via rent-seeking — which is to say, using their control over power and resources to extract money from others. Think European nobles owning land in perpetuity, taking tributary fees from peasants living under their rule, and ensuring these extractive rights were passed to their children.

In the natural state, the entire social order is bent toward preserving this unequal relation. Justice is not a matter of impartial laws, but rather dispensations handed out to friends or favored groups.

“The essence of a natural state is personal relationships,” North et al. write. “The legal system cannot enforce individual rights if every individual is different, if every relationship between two individuals depends uniquely on their identity within the dominant coalition.”

The “open access order,” by contrast, is an arrangement defined by formal neutrality. Access to power and privilege are not determined primarily by personal relationships or inherited advantages, but from a set of legal rules that apply to everyone. While there are still wealthy, rent-seeking elites, membership in that class is not static; legal equality allows people to challenge entrenched interests and outcompete them in the marketplace. The politics of personal relationships is replaced by an impersonal politics where neutral rules apply to all, regardless of class or identity.

He has bent his office’s immense powers toward personal profit in extraordinarily blatant ways.

This is, at least on paper, the basic framework for a modern liberal democracy like the United States.

While one can point to any number of ways in which contemporary America falls short of the open access ideal, from declining social mobility to continued race-based inequality, the system is still qualitatively different from natural states like those of feudal Europe or the Jim Crow South — or even modern developing nations marked by weak rule of law and endemic corruption. 

One way to look at the Trump administration is as a project of reversing the American transition from natural state to open access order. He is trying to erode the impersonal rules that govern the way the state is supposed to work, and replace them with a logic of favoritism based on personal access to the president.

Traditional corruption, in the sense of literally profiting from the presidency, is the most obvious example. He has bent his office’s immense powers toward personal profit in extraordinarily blatant ways — treating the country in much the same way that a medieval noble treated his fiefdom.

Trump’s personalist mission is equally obvious when you look at his approach to the Justice Department. His successful effort to strip its traditional independence and turn it into a tool for pursuing his interests — including prosecuting his political enemies on flimsy pretexts — represents the replacement of an open access justice system with one more closely resembling that of a natural state.

You can see natural state logic at work in his approach to taxation, where countries and companies get tariff exemptions if they manage to personally curry favor with Trump. You can see it in his approach to regulation, where Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr is encouraged to try and censor comedians who mock the president. You can see it is in his management of the US military, where he has deputized Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to fire generals deemed politically unreliable (these generally happen to be women or racial minorities). You can see it in his foreign policy, a “neo-royalist” mixing of personal and public that puts the interests of ruling cliques ahead of public writ large. You can even see it in something as marginal as the Department of Transportation, where Secretary Sean Duffy used his office as an excuse to go on a bizarre family road trip funded by direct donations from Toyota and Boeing.

Many of these policies are authoritarian, in the sense that they attack basic rights and freedoms that allow for fair and healthy political competition. But all of them, even the ones that might seem like “ordinary” corruption, work to erode the essential impersonal logic of American governance — and, in its place, stand up a new system of government by personal access and rent-seeking.

The dangers of the American natural state

Obviously, Trump himself doesn’t think about his objective in such abstract terms. But the North et al. framework is nonetheless useful — as it helps us see the furthest reaching implications of both his corruption and his broader personalization of the government. 

What’s happening is probably more subtle than a full-scale overthrow of the old order; the Trump administration appears too incompetent, too haphazard to effect something so grandiose. Rather, his rule is blending the two systems — integrating natural state logic into institutions still nominally built around open-access principles.

The real-world implications of this shift are likely to be profound.

For the next few years, everyone in corporate America and the legal world knows that the best way to get what you want from the White House isn’t to make a persuasive case on substantive or even political grounds. Instead, it is to bribe and flatter the people in charge of making the decision, most of all the president. If you can make him richer, or even feel important, you will become exponentially more likely to get that payout or regulation you might otherwise have lobbied for through normal channels.

This breaks the incentive structure that underpins open access societies. In other countries that have gone on similar trajectories, such as Hungary, these specific kinds of corruption have led to economic disaster. Growth stagnates, as companies succeed based on connections rather than profits. Public services degrade, as they are administered not for public benefit but to make the administrators wealthy. Even the arts and culture suffer.

In one passage, North et al. describe the political differences between open access orders and natural states in some uncomfortably familiar terms:

In the open access orders, legislation provides details about how laws are administered; for example, that a person recently unemployed is to receive benefits of a certain amount for a certain duration. In these states, impartial, rule-of-law courts impose penalties on the executive for failing to implement the laws according to the provisions specified in the law. Not so in the typical natural state. Instead, corrupt courts do not constrain the executive; moreover, the legislature rarely — and rationally — undertakes the job of writing detailed provisions to constrain the executive, leaving the executive great freedom to allocate the funds as desired. Evidence from Latin America suggests that social programs serve immediate political goals, such as reelection, rather than their intended purposes.

One shouldn’t expect Trump to, say, ensure that only Republicans get Social Security payments: The open access logic of the US welfare state remains too strong for that. 

But you can see versions of it already playing out where Trump has more discretion, like turning disaster relief into a political favor doled out to red states. And the passages about legislatures abandoning their jobs and courts deferring to Trump ring far too true.

We should expect more of this in the years to come, even if Trump experiences a major defeat in the 2026 midterms.

Trump wants to rule without constraint, to turn the presidency into an all-consuming office where he can decide on policy purely based on whim and personal interest. In doing so, he is breaking a fundamental part of the American social order — one that underpins nearly every element of how our society functions. It is impossible to predict all of the likely consequences, but there is little doubt that they will be profound.