Last year, in the months before the 2024 presidential election, the magazine surveyed 50 members of what might be called the Washington legal establishment about their expectations for the Justice Department and the rule of law if Donald Trump were re-elected. The group was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. They had worked as high-level officials for every president since Ronald Reagan.

A majority of our respondents told us they were alarmed about a potential second Trump term given the strain he put on the legal system the first time around. But several dissenters countered that those fears were overblown. One former Trump official predicted that the Justice Department would be led by lawyers like those in the first term — elite, conservative and independent. “It’s hard to be a bad-faith actor at the Justice Department,” he said at the time. “And the president likes the Ivy League and Supreme Court clerkships on résumés.”

Eight months into his second term, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to those beliefs. “What’s happening is anathema to everything we’ve ever stood for in the Department of Justice,” said another former official who served in both Democratic and Republican administrations, including Trump’s first term.

We recently returned to our group with a new survey and follow-up interviews about Trump’s impact on the rule of law since retaking office. The responses captured almost universal fear and anguish over the transformation of the Justice Department into a tool of the White House. Just as chillingly, the new survey reflects near consensus that most of the guardrails inside and outside the Justice Department, which in the past counterbalanced executive power, have all but fallen away. The indictment of James Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom Trump ordered the Justice Department to charge, represents a misuse of power for many of our respondents that they hoped never to see in the United States.

These respondents include former attorneys general, solicitors general and their deputies in the Justice Department and White House counsels, as well as former U.S. attorneys and retired federal judges from across the country. (Forty-two people who took the survey last year did so again, and we added eight more to replace those who did not. The group is again evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans.) Some of the former officials we surveyed, in both parties, are speaking out against the wrongs they see unfolding despite the professional and personal risks.

But many of them — more so than last year — don’t want to speak on the record. These are people with stature in their world, custodians of the American Bar who have represented clients of all stripes, taught law students, served on professional committees. But now they’re worried about retribution, for their law firms or their family members, if they draw Trump’s ire.

Our new survey channeled their collectively grim state of mind. All but one of the respondents rated Trump’s second term as a greater or much greater threat to the rule of law than his first term. They consistently characterized the president’s abuses of power — wielding the law to justify his wishes — as being far worse than they imagined before his re-election.

And every single one of the 50 respondents believe that Trump and his attorney general, Pam Bondi, have used the Justice Department to go after the president’s political and personal enemies and provide favors to his allies.

To measure the degree to which the Justice Department has changed in Trump’s second term, several people pointed to what happened at the end of his first presidency. Trump insisted that the department investigate “fact-free claims,” as Bill Barr, the attorney general at the time, wrote in his memoir, that Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election because of voter fraud. Until then, Barr had been Trump’s close ally. But in late December 2020, he resigned rather than give in to the president’s demands. When Trump continued to push for the baseless investigation, other remaining top officials said that they too would resign rather than use the department to seek to overturn the election.

Because of the lawyers in the room, the safeguards held. But if such a scenario were to play out in Trump’s second term, the same result is “unthinkable,” said Peter Keisler, who was an acting attorney general under President George W. Bush.

“No one in the room now will say no,” said the Justice Department official from Trump’s first term. The lesson Trump drew from his first term, the former official continued, is that the lawyers who talked him out of “bad ideas” were the wrong kind of lawyers. “The president has set it up so that the people who are there are predisposed to be loyalists who will help him do what he wants.”

That is not how things are supposed to work. Since Watergate, presidents have continued to nominate the attorney general and to set policy priorities for the Department of Justice. But the department’s case-by-case legal judgments “must be impartial and insulated from political influence,” according to the Justice Manual, the department’s bible, first written in 1953. “It is imperative that the department’s investigatory and prosecutorial powers be exercised free from partisan consideration.”

In the eyes of almost all our survey respondents, this post-Watergate structure is collapsing. “I still think we get through it,” said the former official who served in several administrations, “but I’m less certain of that each passing day.”

Several legal experts told us they began worrying on the day Trump retook office. One of the president’s first acts — granting pardons and commutations to the Jan. 6 rioters — unraveled the work of what prosecutors have said is the Department of Justice’s largest-ever investigation. Trump also fired lawyers who worked on the Jan. 6 cases.

Then, in February, Emil Bove, a former defense attorney for Trump who was appointed second in command at the Justice Department, ordered Danielle Sassoon, the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to drop an active corruption case against Mayor Eric Adams. Sassoon resigned, saying the administration was rewarding Adams for promising to help with Trump’s immigration-enforcement plan. It was a clear example of quid pro quo, Sassoon said.

At least 10 more career prosecutors resigned over the order to drop the Adams charges. Bove, in turn, took the unusual step of appearing alone in court to argue for the dismissal of Adams’s charges himself, presumably because no one else would.

In June, Trump nominated Bove for a lifetime appointment to a federal judgeship. The Senate confirmed him 50 to 49 in July despite a whistle-blower report from another prosecutor accusing Bove of suggesting that the Justice Department tell a judge “[expletive] you” and ignore a court order in an immigration case. Bove said he couldn’t recall making such a statement. (News of two more whistle-blower reports, corroborating parts of the first complaint, also emerged before the Senate vote.)

Several respondents raised Bove’s ascension as a sharp break from the past. Trump also stunned many of them when he issued a flurry of executive orders in March and April targeting big law firms perceived as being aligned with Democrats. Four firms sued and won injunctions against the president. But nine struck deals, offering nearly a combined $1 billion worth of pro bono work.

Just as notable, in the eyes of many of our respondents, is the work these firms and others are not doing for fear of Trump — their names, and the resources they bring, are missing from suit after suit challenging his executive orders. Thirty-three said that big firms as a group are doing little or nothing to constrain excessive uses of presidential power; another 12 said they were doing so only somewhat. “We’re off the playing field,” said an Obama administration official who works at a large firm. “Big law was so active right after the travel ban in Trump’s first term. He figured out he could make us all stop.”

More than any step the president has taken, according to a lawyer from the Reagan solicitor general’s office, Trump’s bullying of law firms has undermined the rule of law. “Whatever happened to the bedrock principle that everyone deserves the best lawyer they can find?” asked a former Republican-appointed judge. “My firm is scared to death.”

Six respondents lay blame on the Biden administration for posing similar, or even greater, threats to the rule of law as Trump. Some of them saw Merrick Garland’s decision to appoint Jack Smith as special counsel to investigate Trump as a fatal misjudgment. “Garland thought he was limiting himself by appointing Smith,” said the former Trump official. “But from Day 1 of Smith’s appointment, it was clear Trump would be indicted. In an alternate universe, there’s no Smith, no Jan. 6 case against Trump, which they didn’t have to bring, and maybe American politics looks different today.”

Another respondent, Richard Painter, who was chief White House ethics lawyer for President George W. Bush, faulted Biden for diminishing public trust at the end of his term by accusing the justice system of playing “raw politics” in prosecuting his son, Hunter Biden. “To lash out at D.O.J. when he knew that Trump was coming set a poor example,” Painter said.

But the prosecution of Biden’s son, along with the appointment of a special counsel to investigate Biden’s own handling of classified documents, demonstrated the Justice Department’s independence from the White House. Painter sees the opposite happening now. “We haven’t seen the president use the department to go after his enemies since Nixon,” he said, “and it’s frightening.”

In Trump’s Justice Department, in fact, retribution has been institutionalized. In February, Bondi created a “weaponization working group” to investigate “abuses of the criminal justice process.” She instructed the group to look into people who prosecuted Trump.

To the dismay of some of our respondents, the head of the working group, Ed Martin, promised to smear the reputations of any targets he couldn’t indict. “In a culture that respects shame, they should be people that are ashamed,” Martin said in May.

Martin’s promise, respondents pointed out, is a clear violation of Justice Department policy. “You prove your charges in court, or you walk away,” said the former official who served in multiple administrations. “There’s no third way. Nor should there be. What Martin is doing is disgusting.”

In September, Trump trampled whatever remaining hope prosecutors had of exercising their judgment independent of the president. Trump forced the resignation of Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney in Eastern Virginia who had concluded there wasn’t enough evidence to charge Comey, whom Trump blames for the F.B.I.’s investigation of whether Russia meddled in the 2016 election.

On social media, Trump ordered Bondi to take action “NOW!!!” against Comey, as well as against Senator Adam Schiff, who led the congressional investigation of Russian influence, and Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, who prosecuted Trump and the Trump Organization for fraud. The next day, news broke that Trump’s Justice Department closed an investigation into Tom Homan, Trump’s so-called border czar, who was recorded last year accepting a bag with $50,000 in cash in an undercover F.B.I. investigation.

“It’s disturbing,” said Stephen McAllister, who was the U.S. attorney in Kansas during Trump’s first term. “As a prosecutor, you gather evidence. You look at it. You think, Can we prove a crime beyond a reasonable doubt? If not, in the old D.O.J., that was it. You did not proceed. It looks to me like the U.S. attorney in Virginia was trying to do the job in the right and professional way. They pushed him out because he wouldn’t bring a case that probably isn’t there.”

Trump installed one of his personal lawyers, Lindsey Halligan, as Siebert’s replacement, even though she had never prosecuted a case. Halligan, an insurance lawyer, obtained an indictment of Comey from a federal grand jury a few days later. The charges, for allegedly making a false statement to Congress and obstructing justice, were among those Siebert and the career attorneys in the office had rejected.

The former Trump official pointed out that while Bondi and her deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, reportedly opposed appointing Halligan, they subsequently went along with it. “They apparently made their arguments, but then they were willing to be rolled,” he said. “They tweeted their support of having the president’s insurance lawyer prosecute Comey.”

“It is the ultimate hypocrisy to accuse President Trump of what Joe Biden actively did throughout his presidency: engaging in lawfare against his political opponents,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said in an email. “The indictment against Comey, by a grand jury, speaks for itself, and the Trump administration looks forward to fair proceedings in the courts.”

In late September, a lawyer in Blanche’s office directed several U.S. attorney’s offices to investigate the Open Society Foundations, a global grant network established by the liberal donor George Soros. Moves like these are “an attack on our most basic right — free speech,” said Vanita Gupta, the associate attorney general under Biden. “The president is using the D.O.J. as his tool to silence dissent and the work of nonprofits that challenge his administration or criticize his policies. That’s what’s happening. It’s unlawful and un-American.”

The firing of the Jan. 6 prosecutors, the resignations over the Adams case, Martin’s conduct and the indictment of Comey — each step corroded the Justice Department in the eyes of our respondents. “It’s all about dismantling the institution,” said the former official who served in multiple administrations. “And the message to everyone in the department is that if you speak up, something could happen that has never happened before. Maybe you’ll only be demoted or fired. But maybe it will be worse. Either way, you’d better bow to the emperor.”

Before Trump’s re-election, many of our respondents expressed faith in the government’s system of checks and balances to do what it historically had done: provide a necessary corrective to the potential overreach of any other branch. Now all 50 believe that Congress, which the framers intended to be the most powerful branch of government, is doing very little — or nothing at all — to fulfill its role of restraining the president.

“The greatest threat,” said Stuart Gerson, an assistant attorney general for President George H.W. Bush, “comes with the probability that the president is on the road to assuming autocratic powers and that the Congress has allowed its countervailing constitutional powers to wither.”

The lower courts have done more to push back against excessive uses of power by the president, many of our respondents said. But they also see the conservative majority of the Supreme Court, with three justices appointed by Trump, as kneecapping the lower-court judges by overruling them in a series of emergency orders in consequential cases — like allowing Trump to gut the Department of Education, or suspend hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of research grants by the National Institutes of Health, or refuse to pay $4 billion in foreign aid allocated by Congress, or fire the heads of federal agencies. (Biden, by contrast, had far less success on the emergency docket.)

Some former officials said the Supreme Court set the country up for disaster by ruling in July 2024 that presidents are immune from criminal prosecution for most of their official actions. “The Supreme Court has shocked me the most,” said Nancy Gertner, a retired federal judge appointed by President Bill Clinton. Gertner referenced the theory of some experts that the justices’ rulings are an effort to amass credibility with Trump so that he’ll abide by their order when they eventually rule against him. “I am more and more skeptical of that,” she said. “I believe that they are fully on board with enabling him.”

Respondents also have concluded that the Justice Department cannot effectively check Trump from the inside. Last year, nearly half of them thought it was possible or likely that the department’s career professionals, who are nonpartisan and work across administrations, would stand in the way of one of the worst abuses of power — a criminal investigation not based in facts or law. Such an event “would trigger mass resignations,” predicted Michael W. McConnell, a former federal judge and an assistant to the solicitor general in the Reagan administration. “Guess I was wrong,” he emailed recently.

Eight months into Trump’s second term, more than 4,000 of the department’s roughly 105,000 employees have left. A small number departed in public protest, like the prosecutors in New York who quit over the Adams case. Many more left in response to the Trump administration’s bid to purge the government ranks, receiving months of pay in exchange for their resignations. Hundreds have been fired, often for being perceived as out of step with the president’s agenda.

Our respondents worried about the message the firings and forced resignations send to those career lawyers who remain: Do whatever it takes to show you’ll carry out the administration’s wishes.

All but one of our respondents said they were concerned or very concerned about Department of Justice attorneys failing to tell the truth in court, which judges across the country have complained about. “It upsets me,” Judge William Alsup in California said in court in March, because he thought that a Justice Department lawyer was submitting sham documents and withholding a witness in a case about the mass firing of federal employees. “I want you to know that I’ve been practicing or serving in this court for over 50 years. And I know how we get at the truth, and you’re not helping me.”

The reactions of judges like Alsup signal how lawyers who used to uphold the standards of the legal profession are compromising them to adapt to the Trump era. “The D.O.J.’s loss of credibility is devastating to the rule of law,” said William Yeomans, an attorney in the civil rights division for a quarter century. “The legitimacy of the proceedings will be damaged in a way that will be difficult to repair.”

While our latest survey captured the reactions of experts to Trump’s second term so far, we also asked some respondents what they think the remaining years of his presidency may hold. If so many norms have been obliterated in nearly nine months, what will our legal landscape look like in a year? Or three?

The lawyer from Reagan’s solicitor general’s office predicted that the Trump administration would, at some point, push the Supreme Court past its limit in one major case or another — birthright citizenship or tariffs or trying to fire Lisa Cook of the Federal Reserve board, perhaps. Such a ruling against the president, he hoped, would restore the constitutional checks and balances. “Part of me sees a brighter future when the court says this has gone too far,” he said. “Once they say no, and the world doesn’t come to an end, my gut tells me the court will be more comfortable saying no more.”

But even if the court can be relied upon to hold the line at some point, Trump is cowing people and institutions in a way that could change the foundation of America’s system of government. “When people can’t trust law enforcement to be fair on the merits, many of them adjust their behavior — many more than are actually targeted,” said Keisler, the former George W. Bush official. “People self-censor. And then they don’t stand up for those who are really at risk.”

McAllister, the former U.S. attorney in Kansas, worries about the next administration. With another president like Trump, “D.O.J. could really be destroyed long-term. But I also fear, if the Democrats win, they’ll think, He did it, now it’s our turn to retaliate. Then you destroy what was the ethos of the department — that it’s not overtly partisan.”

“In my darkest moments, I think, maybe the premises on which our Constitution was founded are just not widely shared anymore,” the former Republican-appointed judge said. “What do we do then?”