For Americans who care about the rule of law, these are tough times. Every day, the Trump administration shows its contempt for democratic norms. Just this month, we’ve seen the White House seemingly manufacture corruption charges to remove Federal Reserve board member Lisa Cook, a vindictive effort to deport Kilmar Ábrego García to Uganda, Donald Trump’s flooding of DC with National Guard troops from Republican states, and the suspension of the FEMA whistleblowers for contradicting the president on the dangers of cutting disaster-preparedness services.

We’ve also seen an extraordinary degeneration of the language of politics within the halls of power. This week’s cabinet meeting was an exercise in sycophancy the likes of which the world saw with mid-century totalitarian regimes but which the United States has never previously witnessed. It was so fawning, so lickspittle-y, so grotesquely despotic that one can only hope every participant in this charade spends the rest of their miserable lives having nightmares about those three hours on August 26, 2025, hours during which they collectively fed their souls into a paper shredder.

These didn’t sound like cabinet secretaries speaking frankly in a democratic, pluralist environment; rather, it was as if these minions desperately hoped to avoid being sent to Alligator Alcatraz or having their toenails forcibly removed or whatever other sadistic vision the Dear One might conjure up. These were fearful, little people, more akin to Saddam Hussein’s enablers than to United States’ great statesmen of yore. It was the quintessence of pathetic, the purest distillation of mediocrity.

Trump, the toxic fungus on the American Dream that he is, is on the warpath against any individual, organization, or state that he sees as standing in the way of his fever dream of total, unlimited power. To this end, he has repeatedly had California in his sights: He has deployed a federalized National Guard and the US Marines into Los Angeles and called for the National Guard to go into Oakland. He has repeatedly lain into “Governor Newscum” on social media, demanded the University of California system pay a $1 billion extortion fee in order to get federal research dollars flowing to UCLA again; and pushed the US Justice Department to sue California for its redistricting plan—which was, of course, only triggered by Trump’s preposterous and explicit demand that Texas and other GOP-led states do their own redistricting to rig the results of the 2026 midterm elections. Escalating his assault on all-things-environmental, he has also gone after California’s growing wind-farm infrastructure and has intensified his assault on the state’s green transportation plans.

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It’s tempting to look at all of this and say, “Game over, the nasty, increasingly incoherent, orange man has won.” But California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who is using the courts to try to rein in the administration, is surprisingly optimistic. His department has already sued the administration 39 times, putting California on course to nearly double the number of lawsuits it files against Trump 2.0 as compared to during Trump’s first term. In the lower courts, it has gotten favorable rulings in the great majority of these cases (19 of the 21 where rulings have been issued), including the one challenging Trump’s efforts to end birthright citizenship. And this week, California declared victory in its lawsuit aimed at preventing the Department of Education from withholding billions of dollars in already allocated spending from the states. The administration released the first portion of these dollars in July and has now agreed to release the remainder by October 1.

For Bonta, who sat down with me to talk about the state of things earlier this week at a café near his downtown Sacramento office, it’s a vindication of California’s strategy of going on the offense and filing lawsuits every time the administration steps outside the bounds of the law or the Constitution. “Unfortunately, we have a lawless federal administration, where Trump is blatantly and brazenly, consistently and frequently breaking the law,” the attorney general told me. “And our commitment is: If and when he breaks the law or tramples over the Constitution, we’ll take him to court.”

Cumulatively, Bonta estimates that the lawsuits have resulted in the unfreezing of $168 billion that the administration has attempted to withhold from California—a stunning rate of return on the $5 million that the state’s Justice Department has so far spent on putting these cases together. While the US Supreme Court has pushed back against some of California’s filings or has ordered Bonta’s team to refile in other courts than the ones they initially filed in, in many cases the Trump administration has simply caved once California and other blue states made clear that they would sue.

Like any bully, it turns out the administration is wary of a fair fight. “That happened when we challenged Department of Homeland Security grant funding that was conditioned on assisting in federal immigration enforcement and the anti-immigrant agenda,” Bonta said. “It also happened on the Department of Education formula grant-funding case,” in which the Trump team simply tried to ignore the funding formula passed by Congress to fund such things as ESL classes and after school and summer school programs. California’s attorney general, along with 22 other Democratic attorneys general and two states, sued. That’s the case that has now been resolved entirely in California’s favor.

Bonta said he believes that, to date, however ugly the administration’s actions have been, by and large the courts are holding firm—and, albeit reluctantly, Team Trump is abiding by court rulings. But, he said, he’s clear-eyed about the threats. Senior administration officials, from the president on down, are railing against judges whose rulings they disagree with and calling for their impeachment; meanwhile, “enablers or cooperators” are going out of their way to raise the decibel level of the political discourse. “They’re trying to socialize this idea that not all court orders should be followed—and that’s very dangerous,” he said. “It’s been talked about more than it’s been done. But could it be done? It takes a number of people to allow it to be done, but I’m not naïve [enough] to think that defiance of court orders could not be possible down the line.”

Bonta is particularly scathing in his criticism of the administration’s deployment of National Guard members and Marines into Los Angeles. It was, he said, in response to a manufactured crisis, and by involving the military in domestic law enforcement, it clearly violated the Posse Comitatus Act. “They were involved in traffic enforcement and immigration enforcement with ICE. They were embedded and participated in 75 percent of the ICE raids and immigration enforcement operations in the days after they were deployed.”

By threatening to deploy the military to Democratic-run cities around the country, Bonta argued that Trump “is saying the quiet part out loud.” The president is, the attorney general told me, “saying he will violate the Posse Comitatus Act. He will get slapped down with a court order within minutes if he tries to do that; he just can’t do it.”

In Trumplandia, that through-the-looking-glass place inhabited by those degraded cabinet members, the Great Leader is infallible. In reality, he is a dimwitted, aging thug. The more that states like California push back against his agenda, the more he is shown to be an emperor lacking any clothes. The damage he is doing is immense, but the outcome he seeks—a quiescent America lain prone at his feet—is as far from being realized today as it was during his first cruel and incompetent go-around at the White House. And that, in these dark, dark days, gives me a sliver of hope that the country can survive this full flowering of MAGA fascism.