Matt Fowler: Personal Thoughts → No One Above the Law

The Numbers Behind the 2026 Election · Equal Justice Under Law · Part 3 of 5

Nov 2, 2026 · Matt Fowler

Carved over the entrance to the Supreme Court are four words: Equal Justice Under Law. Theodore Roosevelt said it plainly in 1903: “No man is above the law, and no man is below it.” That’s the whole difference between a republic and a kingdom — we fought a revolution to be rid of a man who was the law.

So here’s the one question under this whole election: when the most powerful person in the country decides the rules are for other people, what stops him?

Three places to look. Two ask whether the power is being abused. The third asks whether anything still checks it.

The sword and the shield

Picture a district attorney who charged the mayor’s critics and dropped the case against the mayor’s friends. You’d call that corruption, whatever the party. Here’s the national version.

The sword: the Justice Department has gone after the president’s critics — charging former FBI Director James Comey three times after two earlier attempts were tossed by a judge, indicting Attorney General Letitia James (dismissed), and indicting former national security adviser John Bolton. (Bolton’s classified-documents case is the strongest of the three — it began back in 2022 — which is why the others stand out.)

The shield: told to drop the corruption case against New York Mayor Eric Adams, seven prosecutors resigned rather than comply. The lead one, a Republican appointee, wrote she was being asked to trade the charges away for the mayor’s help on the immigration crackdown. Adams denied any deal, and a judge — openly skeptical — dismissed the case anyway.

The firms: the president signed orders punishing the law firms that had represented his opponents. Four judges, named by presidents of both parties, struck them down as unconstitutional.

Enemies charged, friends spared, opposing lawyers punished. One instinct, three directions.

The swamp he promised to drain

He ran against exactly this: foreign money in our politics, insiders cashing in, a government for the connected. Weigh the record against the promise.

Start with the one that’s hardest to wave off, because his own company filed it with the SEC. Trump Media — behind Truth Social, about 41% of it held in a trust for the president — now sells Wall Street a service called Truth API: a feed that delivers his posts to trading algorithms roughly 50 milliseconds before the rest of us see them, for $60,000 to $100,000 a month. He uses those posts to announce tariffs and foreign-policy moves that swing markets in seconds. More than ten firms have signed up, by the company’s own disclosure. In fairness, the company says everyone gets the post at the same instant and that firms pay for speed, not secret content, and no court has ruled it illegal. Grant all of it. What’s left is a business the president largely owns, selling insiders a head start on his official decisions — not a theory, a line in an SEC filing.

And it isn’t alone. Foreign buyers spent a reported $148 million on his personal cryptocurrency to win seats at a private dinner with him. His family opened a $500,000-a-head club in Washington that sells nearness to the administration. And he accepted a roughly $400 million jet from Qatar for use as Air Force One. Maybe it belongs to the government and not to him — that’s debatable, and the White House says so; whether it’s an illegal emolument is for courts and history. But a sitting president taking a nine-figure gift from a foreign government is without precedent, and the optics are exactly that bad.

Whatever you thought of the policies, this is the swamp — deeper than he found it. If you voted to drain it, you have standing to be angry.

The pardons — and let’s be fair

Only-one-side-does-it is a lie, so: Obama commuted Chelsea Manning and a militant many called a terrorist; Biden pardoned his own son after promising not to, then his siblings, Fauci and Milley, and a man who had killed two FBI agents. Both parties criticized those. They belong in the ledger.

This term: roughly 1,500 January 6 defendants pardoned, including hundreds who assaulted police; clemency for a crypto founder his family does business with, a fraudster who gave his campaign $900,000+, a man whose mother paid $1 million to dine with him, a sheriff convicted of bribery. Every president pardons friends — but the scale here, and how much of it tracks money or loyalty to the president, is what a House report and Forbes have flagged. Look at it beside the others and judge for yourself.

So — what stops him?

The reassuring part, whatever your side: something still does. More than 750 lawsuits have challenged his administration. Judges of both parties struck down the law-firm orders; in June the Supreme Court rejected the attempt to end birthright citizenship; and on October 29, a federal judge in California — citing a “mountain of evidence” that agents were stopping people for looking Latino — barred immigration stops based on racial profiling. The administration is appealing.

The guardrails hold, but they’re straining: on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket, the fast track, he has won far more than he’s lost, clearing the way to act first and litigate later. A president testing every limit and courts pushing back isn’t a crisis — it’s the design. The crisis is letting it go slack.

To be fair to the other view, these powers are real: the pardon is in the Constitution, prosecutorial discretion belongs to the executive, a company can license a data feed, and yes, other presidents bent some of these too. But “no one above the law” was never about whether the powers exist. It’s about whether they’re used for justice — or for the man who holds them.

Before you vote

No name from me — a yardstick instead. Ask the candidates three questions. Will you let the Justice Department charge and drop cases on the evidence, not on who the president likes? Will you keep the public office and the private fortune apart? And do you want a country where the law binds the powerful, or bends to them?

Then the part no poll measures. We tell our kids the rules apply to them — don’t cheat, don’t take what isn’t yours, earn it. That’s hard to say with a straight face while the most powerful man in the country treats the law as a thing for other people and the office as a way to get rich. Character isn’t a side issue in a president. For a lot of us it’s the whole job — because our children are watching what we reward.

Vote for whoever best lives up to the American idea that no one is above the law, and no one beneath its protection. That’s the ideal. Tuesday only asks who comes closest.

Check your state or local election office, or vote.gov, for how to vote on Tuesday, November 3.

Tomorrow, Part 4: The Price of Everything.

A More Informed America Builds a Stronger Democracy. Produced by mattfowler.com. General use permitted with citation.

The sword and the shield

The swamp he promised to drain

The pardons — and let’s be fair

So — what stops him?

Before you vote

Sources

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