Dear MAGA, Where Is All That Rule Following You Like?
- john raymond
- 36 minutes ago
- 4 min read
You have said it for years: “If you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear.” You have told the rest of us to respect the process, obey the law, trust the system, and stop whining when prosecutors come knocking. That is rule-following taken to its harshest edge.
Now the courts have just enforced the rules against your side, and the question in front of you is brutally simple: do you actually believe in following the rules, or was that all just cult talk for punishing enemies?
A federal judge has thrown out the criminal cases against James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James because the Trump Justice Department itself broke the law. Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled that Lindsey Halligan—the handpicked loyalist who indicted both of them—was unlawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Because her appointment violated the governing statute and constitutional requirements, everything she did in that role, including the indictments, had to be set aside.
This is not a “technicality” cooked up by some liberal judge. Under 28 U.S.C. § 546, the Attorney General can install an interim U.S. attorney for 120 days; after that window closes, the authority passes to the district court, and the executive branch cannot just keep cycling in unconfirmed loyalists at will.
In this case, President Trump’s team removed the prior interim U.S. attorney after he refused to bring the cases they wanted, then tried to parachute Halligan into the same office long after the 120-day clock had run. Judge Currie found that when Halligan took the job on September 22, 2025, she was “unlawfully serving in that role,” so her indictments of Comey and James were “unlawful” and “ineffective.”
Look at the facts you are being asked to ignore. Halligan was not some seasoned career prosecutor; she was a Trump loyalist, a former White House staff secretary and personal attorney, with no prior prosecutorial experience, suddenly elevated into one of the most sensitive U.S. attorney posts in the country precisely because others had refused to bring these cases.
She signed the Comey indictment just before the statute of limitations ran, ignored internal DOJ doubts, and went after Letitia James on a theory that other experienced prosecutors in the same office reportedly thought was weak.
The judge’s ruling is not some mysterious act of mercy; it is a direct statement that the machinery President Trump used to target his enemies was itself illegal.
Here is where your own slogan comes back to haunt you. You told the country that innocent people should have no fear of aggressive prosecutors because “the law is the law.” Well, the law is the law for the government, too. The appointment rules exist for a reason: to keep presidents from bypassing Senate confirmation and turning federal prosecutors into private hit squads. When a judge forces the government to follow those rules, that is not “weaponization”; it is the bare minimum of constitutional order.
So what do you believe today, in this concrete case, with the facts on the table?
If you truly care about following the rules, you should be able to say the following sentence without choking on it:
President Trump’s Justice Department broke the rules for appointing a prosecutor, and the court was right to throw out the cases built on an illegal appointment.
If you cannot say that—if your instinct is to scream “rigged,” to smear the judge, to pretend the appointment statute is some unfair trap—then stop telling the rest of us that you care about law and order. What you care about is your leader winning, no matter how many legal safeguards he has to tear through to get there.
Notice what has not happened here. James Comey and Letitia James did not “get off” because of some secret deep-state favor; they got rid of cases that were brought by an unlawfully installed prosecutor whose very presence in the office violated the law you claim to revere. The court did exactly what you say you want courts to do: it read the law, applied it, and refused to bless a blatantly improper power grab.
This fits a wider pattern. Legal scholars have already flagged President Trump’s second term for a sharp politicization of U.S. attorney appointments—using interim designations and loyalist placements to evade the normal confirmation process and to target personal enemies.
The Halligan ruling is the moment when that project slammed into a wall: a judge saying, in effect, “No, you cannot rewrite the rules of appointment just because you are enraged at your critics.”
Which brings us back to you, MAGA.
You claim to love rules. You wave the flag of “law and order.” You lecture everyone else that if they “did nothing wrong,” they should welcome investigation and prosecution. Now the spotlight is on your own side of the table. Your president’s team broke the appointment rules. Your handpicked prosecutor had no legal authority to do what she did. The court shut it down, exactly as the law requires.
So the question is not complicated at all:
Do you actually believe in following the rules, even when it costs your leader a scalp?
Or are you so deep into the cult that you literally cannot recognize daylight when a judge points straight at it and says, “This was unlawful, and it must be set aside”?
If you are serious about rule of law, this is where you prove it: not by chanting about crime on Fox, but by accepting that President Trump’s own government has to obey the same statutes it uses to threaten everyone else. If you cannot cross that minimal threshold, then stop pretending this is about “rules” at all. It is about power, and you have chosen a man over the law.
That is the divide now—not left versus right, not Republican versus Democrat, but people who will accept rules when they restrain their own side, and people who will not.
So MAGA, decide which you are.