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$5.62The Story
How Donald Trump used threats, cooption, and conspiracy theories to bend DOJ and FBI officials to his will to a greater extent than publicly knownand how Merrick Garland, other prosecutors, and judges failed to hold him accountable before the 2024 election.Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials, from Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr to career public servants. He sowed public doubt in both agencies so successfully that when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he paid little political cost and, despite an unprecedented array of criminal indictments, easily won the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.In Where Tyranny Begins, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist David Rohde investigates the strategies Trump systematically used to turn the countrys two most powerful lawenforcement agencies into his personal political weapons. Rohde also reveals how, during the Biden years, Justice Department nonpartisan 1970s norms that Attorney General Merrick Garland reinforced inadvertently helped Trump, and could fail to deliver a trial and legal accountability by Election Day 2024.Where Tyranny Begins exposes how illsuited both the DOJ and FBI are to serve as checks on abuses of presidential power. The rise of hyperpartisanship and the Trump and Biden presidencies have uncovered core flaws in American constitutional democracy that Trump would exploit in a second term. A round of historic reforms equivalent to the postWatergate reforms that stabilized American democracy in the 1970s are immediately needed. A fiveword warning coined by the English philosopher John Locke in 1689 captures the stakes in 2024: Whereever law ends, tyranny begins.
Description
How Donald Trump used threats, cooption, and conspiracy theories to bend DOJ and FBI officials to his will to a greater extent than publicly knownand how Merrick Garland, other prosecutors, and judges failed to hold him accountable before the 2024 election.Over the course of his presidency, Donald Trump intimidated, silenced, and bent to his will Justice Department and FBI officials, from Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and William Barr to career public servants. He sowed public doubt in both agencies so successfully that when he tried to overturn the results of the 2020 election, he paid little political cost and, despite an unprecedented array of criminal indictments, easily won the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.In Where Tyranny Begins, Pulitzer Prizewinning journalist David Rohde investigates the strategies Trump systematically used to turn the countrys two most powerful lawenforcement agencies into his personal political weapons. Rohde also reveals how, during the Biden years, Justice Department nonpartisan 1970s norms that Attorney General Merrick Garland reinforced inadvertently helped Trump, and could fail to deliver a trial and legal accountability by Election Day 2024.Where Tyranny Begins exposes how illsuited both the DOJ and FBI are to serve as checks on abuses of presidential power. The rise of hyperpartisanship and the Trump and Biden presidencies have uncovered core flaws in American constitutional democracy that Trump would exploit in a second term. A round of historic reforms equivalent to the postWatergate reforms that stabilized American democracy in the 1970s are immediately needed. A fiveword warning coined by the English philosopher John Locke in 1689 captures the stakes in 2024: Whereever law ends, tyranny begins.
