Donald Trump reacts as he speaks to members of the media on board Air Force One en route from Scotland, Britain, to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., July 29, 2025. REUTERS Evelyn Hockstein
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is repeatedly losing key legal cases such as its attempted prosecution of six Democratic legislators and veterans who criticized him. Now, according to a conservative commentator, this means Trump himself is unraveling.
“It is embarrassing for our Department of Justice to sink resources into such obviously frivolous cases, and this only further contributes to the general sense that President Donald Trump's administration has the wrong priorities,” wrote Dace Potas, a columnist with USA Today Opinion and President of the student-publication Lone Conservative.
He added that, in addition to harming Trump’s reputation, his “lawfare” is also “eroding the prestige of the Justice Department as a core American institution.”
Lawfare is the strategic use of legal systems and litigation as a weapon to achieve political or competitive goals, often involving frivolous or politically motivated lawsuits designed to damage opponents rather than seek justice.
To illustrate this point, Potas pointed out that out of 155,000 cases in 2016, federal prosecutors only failed to secure an indictment on six occasions. By contrast, “thus far in Trump’s second term, his DOJ has failed to secure dozens of indictments.” These include not only those against the six Democratic legislators but also two attempted indictments against New York Attorney General Letitia James twice (a third succeeded but was tossed due to an improper appointment). Trump also “failed to indict a man who threw a sandwich at a federal officer on felony charges before then failing to even convict him on the accompanying misdemeanor case,” which is only one of many failed indictments against anti-Trump protesters throughout America.
“I thought plenty of the lawfare from the Biden administration against Trump was bad, and I criticized it at the time,” Potas wrote. “But what Trump has done in response far exceeds that. All of the legal arguments are so transparently pretextual that our federal law enforcement system hasn’t been this beholden to a president since at least when President John F. Kennedy nominated his own brother to be attorney general.”
He concluded with a warning that “Trump’s abuse of the DOJ gives license to other bad actors to do even worse later, moving the Overton window for what America accepts as far as a politicized Justice Department.”
Conservatives are splitting with Trump on a number of issues, suggesting there are cracks in his once-impregnable MAGA base. Merrill Matthews, the Texas state chair of Our Republican Legacy, recently wrote for The Hill that he supports the six Republican legislators who joined Democrats in opposing Trump's tariffs against Canada.
“They bucked their party and their leadership, and especially Trump, to do the right thing," Matthews wrote.
William Kristol, another conservative pundit, recently wrote for The Bulwark that Trump’s foreign policies and immigration policies do not reflect the spirit of the American people.
“The American people are better than our current government,” Kristol argued. “Civic spirit and enlightened patriotism are by no means dead in the United States. As the people of Minnesota have again reminded us,” referring to the anti-ICE protests that recently pervaded all over Minnesota.
