After sundown Friday, a new crack appeared in the wall of America’s rule of law. A wall that protected us for two and a half centuries, but that’s showing signs of strain. It is axiomatic that corrupt governments eliminate those responsible for policing corruption. The Friday night massacre of over a dozen inspectors general across the executive branch lays the groundwork for taking over that government from within. The job of an agency or department’s Inspector General is to independently root out corruption, fraud, and abuse in the executive branch and report on such to the legislative branch. They are embedded within these agencies to accomplish this task.

This is a modern adaptation to achieving the checks and balances the Framers of our Constitution intended when they created the federal government. But if the designated watchers aren’t watching, because they’ve been purged by the very abuse of power they were installed to prevent, then the way is open for more abuse and corruption to flow. Absent independent institutional whistleblowers, a significant check on power is now missing.

Twice stymied in his first term from asserting unfettered control over the federal government (first, by his own political appointees and career civil servants who refused to bend to his will, second, switching from internal to external forces, by using a mob to foment the January 6, 2021, insurrection – which failed), President Donald Trump clearly has resolved not to be so stymied in his second term. This time, his accomplices include, with the exception of Marco Rubio, an array of loyalists unqualified to hold their cabinet positions from outside government who are committed (1) to him, and (2) to disrupting and then dismantling any dissent within their realms of power. Those within these agencies who might protest these moves, DEI officers, or block them, inspectors general, are eliminated. Within five days of his presidency, Trump’s Project 2025 has hit the ground running. All of which was telegraphed to Americans well beforehand during the general election.

Not surprisingly, in carrying out the first purge of his second term, Trump broke the law. Amended in 2022, in the wake of his first term where he similarly flouted it to fire an inspector general pushing back on his downplay of COVID, this 1978 law codified at 5 USC Ch. 4 notes in Section 403 that:

An Inspector General may be removed from office by the President. If an Inspector General is removed from office or is transferred to another position or location within an establishment, the President shall communicate in writing the reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress, not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer.

According to the President Pro Tempore of the Senate, Chuck Grassley (R-IA), who refers to himself as the “patron saint of whistleblowers,” no such notice of removal was received by Congress. This statutorily required communication was to not only be sent a month prior to termination, but also contain the reasons therefore. Thus, the very provision inserted into the law to constrain Trump, was ignored by him.

What happens when presidents break the law in this way? Congress has very little recourse beyond holding hearings or impeachment – neither of which a Republican Congress would be willing to undertake. The courts could hear cases on the matter should plaintiffs with standing successfully mount them. But again, the ultimate arbiter is the Republican dominated Supreme Court – also unlikely to do much in the wake of its presidential immunity decision last term. That decision, which offers Trump broad immunity from criminal prosecution over official acts undertaken in exercising his control over the executive branch, would likely be expressly extended to civil immunity, which was already more robustly supported, when exercising that same control. However, should the Court rule the other way, perhaps on a Fifth Amendment deprivation footing, what are the consequences for the president not complying with the Court’s ruling? As noted in the Wall Street Journal, Vice President JD Vance put his advice to Trump this way: “Fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people. And when the court – ’cause you will get taken to court – and when the courts stop you, stand before the country, like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.'”

While not much might happen to Trump for not following the law, either politically or legally, accepting and normalizing such behavior by our chief executive has enormous consequences for the nation. Previously, modern presidents paid prices for not following the law in a rule of law society. Those prices were expressions of a self-correcting government, whether it was Nixon leaving office or Reagan and Clinton both deflating their second terms by breaking restrictions on selling weapons to Iran to support the Contras with respect to the former and committing perjury with respect to the latter. Trump’s relationship with the law, however, is something we haven’t seen before. On the one hand, he likes to make a show of complying, such as showing up in court and glowering at everyone, yet on the other hand, he ridicules the process and all the people involved as corrupt for calling him out on his own corruption. This formula apparently works. It helped get him elected.

If what Trump learned to do by successfully ignoring or outrunning the law in the abbreviated version of his “wilderness years” – the interregnum between his terms – is tolerated and allowed to take root in the Oval Office, America is in much bigger trouble than anyone realizes. This is the path to full autocracy, acquiesced in by passive supporters in the other two federal branches, and supported by a new digital oligarchy – which showed up en masse at the inauguration it literally paid for. Democracies only function if they are rooted in the rule of law. Absent that, they are fleeting. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East European democracies moved quickly to shore up their rule of law societies by rooting out entrenched Soviet corruption schemes because they knew their democracies would be short-lived if they failed in this task. Some like Slovenia and the Czechia were more successful, others like Serbia and Albania less so – and they are still struggling. Of the 15 new states that emerged from the USSR, only the Baltic Republics could sustain their democracies because they rooted them in rule of law foundations. Ukraine is in the throes of an existential battle to save its own democracy by fighting the Russians without and fighting corruption within.

America’s rule of law is now crumbling before our eyes. Can our democracy save it? There’s a chance, in two years, if we decide to use the ultimate self-correcting device bequeathed to us by the Framers: our next election. Although decades of gerrymandering have hobbled the effectiveness of this device as well, nevertheless, it may well be our only shot. It may well be our last shot.

Professor Michael J. Kelly holds the Senator Allen A. Sekt Endowed Chair in Law at Creighton University School of Law where he directs the Kaiman Center for International Criminal Justice & Holocaust Studies.