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His national and international initiatives – ranging from the challenge to the democratic process previously to recent moves and warnings – erode both national and global jurisprudence. The implications are broader.

They endanger the core idea of civilization itself.

The ethical foundation of any advanced culture is to forestall the more powerful from attacking and exploiting the weaker. Without this, we risk being trapped in a state of nature where might makes right prevails.

This concept is central of America’s founding documents. It’s also the foundation of the modern framework of international relations championed by the United States, built on multilateralism, popular sovereignty, fundamental freedoms, and the supremacy of law.

Yet, it is a delicate ideal, often broken by those who would exploit their influence. Upholding it requires that the influential have a sense of duty to avoid seeking immediate gains, and that society demand responsibility should they falter.

Absolute power does not make right. It results in instability, upheaval, and conflict.

Whenever entities that are advantaged target and use those that are not, the fabric of our shared norms weakens. If such aggression are not contained, the system fails. If not stopped, the world can descend into chaos and war. It has happened before.

Our current reality is a international landscape marked by extreme inequality. Authority and resources are held by fewer hands than in modern history. This encourages the privileged to leverage their position against the disadvantaged because they act with a sense of untouchable.

The resources of certain billionaires is staggering. The influence of big tech, big oil, and large defense contractors extends over a vast portion of the world. AI is likely to further concentrate economic and political clout further. The military might of the world's largest nations is without parallel in human history.

Supported by complicit legislators and an accommodating judicial body, the presidency has been transformed into the most powerful and unaccountable entity of government in history.

Put it all together and you grasp the danger.

An unbroken thread links past transgressions to current menaces. Each were based on the hubris of omnipotence.

You see parallel dynamics in other global contexts: in military conflicts, in coercive diplomacy, and in the global depredation by massive conglomerates.

But, unfettered might does not make right. It fosters uncertainty, upheaval, and bloodshed.

The lessons of the past reveal that rules and conventions to constrain the influential also shield them. If these guardrails are removed, their insatiable demands for increased control and resources in time cause their collapse – and with them their enterprises, countries, or domains. And threaten global conflict.

Such contempt for legal order will plague the nation and the world – and the very idea of a rules-based order – for a long time.