Plenty of criminals are stupid and contemptible. Among the lowest of the low are the ones who hate police officers and prosecutors personally. They are too dim to comprehend an honest officer who is just doing his job. And so they sometimes seek revenge in ways that make no sense even from the standpoint of heartless self-interest. President Donald Trump’s administration evidently has a ...

Trump supporters try to force their way through a police barricade in front of the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, hoping to stop Congress from finalizing Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election.

Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times/TNS

Plenty of criminals are stupid and contemptible. Among the lowest of the low are the ones who hate police officers and prosecutors personally. They are too dim to comprehend an honest officer who is just doing his job. And so they sometimes seek revenge in ways that make no sense even from the standpoint of heartless self-interest.

President Donald Trump’s administration evidently has a similar mindset. It has fired personnel in the FBI, the Justice Department and the military who, in previous administrations, followed lawful orders that Trump doesn’t like.

America needs trustworthy and nonpolitical police, prosecutors and military members. An attack on the nonpartisanship of these institutions is an attack on America.

Republicans in Congress have quietly watched this happen without so much as complaining, much less trying to interfere. It has been a gross dereliction of duty. In normal times, members do not blindly obey a president of the same political party. Democrats objected to Lyndon B. Johnson’s policies in Vietnam. Republicans helped force Richard Nixon out of office. Trump has faced little of that. If your senator or congressman is a Republican seeking reelection, you should ask them to explain their passivity.

The Republican Party once stood for law and order. It could again. But that won’t happen until it is given a painful lesson at the ballot box.

When Trump took classified documents home and then tried to hide them from investigators, he committed a felony. The FBI ordered its agents to find out what he did. It also investigated his efforts to overturn the 2020 election. After Trump was reelected, those agents were fired en masse. There was no reason to think that they had anything against Trump. A good many of them no doubt voted for him. They had not chosen him as a target. They followed orders. The FBI Agents Association objected: “An Agent simply being assigned to an investigation and conducting it appropriately within the law should never be grounds for termination.”

In the Justice Department, the administration has fired dozens of prosecutors who worked on the Jan. 6 riots and the special counsel investigation of Trump, again including those who were assigned to that work.

Joe Biden’s administration told the military to pursue diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility, and those orders were carried out. Trump’s defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, said before his nomination that any “general, admiral, whatever — that was involved in any of the DEI woke s‑‑‑ has got to go.” Officers who carried out those orders were purged.

Columnist and Iraq veteran David French reports that one of the fired generals told him of his fear and writes: “Well, does that then set a precedent that if you are a general officer and you follow the orders of an administration, that the next administration will come in and purge you, replace you with general officers who have to then follow their orders, who will then only be purged by the next administration?” French observes that the administration is “setting a precedent that, given enough time under the current administration, could be catastrophic for the idea that merit matters as much as political fidelity.”

Any discussion of criminals who hate cops should also mention that more than 130 prisoners who had been convicted of assaulting police during the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol were released after Trump pardoned them or commuted their sentences.

This pattern of acting out against officials for doing their jobs is different in kind from Trump’s familiar corruption, lying, cruelty and incompetence. At least all of that exhibited a malign cunning, a kind of instrumental rationality. Not this.

I once saw a toddler close a door on his fingers. He started crying and ran away, then came back and smacked the door because he was angry at it. These purges follow a similar logic.

Civilization depends on honest, apolitical police, prosecutors and military members. Trump’s obliviousness to the harm he is doing is what we have learned to expect from him. So is his making of policy on the basis of petty spite. The irony is that many of the people he got rid of were capable professionals who would have helped him achieve his goals. But what excuse do his enablers in Congress have?

After the election, he will have two years left in his term. A responsible Congress will have plenty of damage control on its hands. One should at least vote for members who will understand that that is their job.

Trump has asked that voters act as though he were on the ballot this November. It might be the wisest thing he has ever said.

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Andrew Koppelman is the John Paul Stevens professor of law at Northwestern University and author of “Burning Down the House: How Libertarian Philosophy Was Corrupted by Delusion and Greed.”

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