For me, the most disturbing thing about the Trump presidency is the way each week, like a steady drip of acid, Donald Trump tries to erode the thing that truly makes us great as a country and the envy of so many around the world - the independence and nonpartisan character of our courts, our military, our FBI, our Border Patrol and our whole federal bureaucracy.
No modern president has been more willing to use U.S. service members or border police as props for his politics, to blithely declare without evidence that most of the 800,000 federal workers going unpaid during the government shutdown are Democrats, to refer to the Pentagon leadership as "my generals" and "my military," and to denounce different federal judges who have ruled against him as a "so-called judge," an "Obama judge" and a "Mexican" judge (even though he was born in Indiana).
Why is this so important? Because America's core governing institutions were not built to be "conservative" or "liberal." They were built to take our deepest values and our highest ideals and animate them, promote them and protect them - to bring them to life and to scale them. They are the continuity that binds one generation of Americans to the next and the beacon for how we work together to build an ever more perfect union.
At their best, these institutions have created the regulatory foundations and legal and security frameworks that have made America great - that have enabled innovation to be sparked, commerce to flourish and ideas to freely blossom. Rather than serving any party or person's whims, these institutions have promoted and protected enduring American values, laws, norms and ideals.
The independent, nonpartisan quality of our institutions is one of the biggest reasons so many people want to immigrate to America and why some people are even ready to build rafts out of milk cartons to get here. So when an American leader denigrates those institutions, tries to erode their independence or turns them into political props, he damages the very core of what makes our country unique.
And that's why today I would like to give a shout-out to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts for having the integrity and courage to call Trump out for this behavior, to draw a red line around the judicial branch and to signal to Trump - politely but firmly - to keep his hands off its independence and nonpartisan charter.
Roberts did so in November, after a federal judge in San Francisco put Trump's asylum policy on hold and the president denounced him as an "Obama judge."
Responding to a query made by The Associated Press, Roberts said: "We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges. What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them."
Roberts added, on that day before Thanksgiving, that an "independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for."
That brushback pitch by Roberts - a high fastball right under Trump's chin - was highly unusual, but an important example to others. Of course, our judges are appointed by politicians with the hope that they'll reflect their own or their party's ideological bent on issues that come before them - and they often do.
Roberts knows that. But what he also knows is that central to our system is that every American is able to expect an impartial hearing before those judges, who, once they assume their place on the bench, should be loyal only to the Constitution and their interpretations of it.
What a contrast with the silence of the lambs - how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan bent their institution, their branch of government, to Trump's will.
I've spent four decades reporting from countries with weak institutions - like Russia, China, every Arab state, Turkey, Iran, Venezuela - where the arbitrary whims of the leader or his party are the basis of all decision-making, not the rule of law, built on independent institutions.
But Trump appreciates none of this. It would be easy to attribute it all to malevolence. But I think a lot of it is sheer ignorance. I don't think Trump ever took civics. I don't think he ever understood the separation of powers or the meaning of independent agencies. That's why the shutdown doesn't bother him. His instincts are those of a banana republic dictator.
You cannot exaggerate how unusual it is for our chief justice and retired senior military officers to challenge Trump's excesses the way they have. They were bred to keep themselves and their institutions out of politics at all costs. But they understand the greater costs of what Trump is doing.
We owe these people a debt for their civic courage, because the biggest national security threat to our country today is from within (and it is only going to get worse in the next two years).
That threat is from a president without any shame or respect for the impartiality of our core institutions, who is backed by a party without any spine and by a network, Fox News, without any integrity.
This is not a test. This is a real, live emergency for our democracy.
The New York Times