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His internal and external policies – ranging from the effort to overturn the election five years ago to recent moves and warnings – erode both national and global law. The implications are broader.

These actions threaten the very concept of civilization itself.

A moral purpose of a functioning society is to prevent the more powerful from harming and taking advantage of the weaker. Otherwise, we would be permanently immersed in a brutish war where survival of the strongest wins.

This concept is central of America’s founding documents. It is equally the core of the modern framework of international relations supported by the America, emphasizing collective action, democracy, individual liberties, and the rule of law.

However, it is a fragile principle, easily violated by those who seek to abuse their power. Maintaining it necessitates that the influential have enough integrity to refrain from seeking temporary advantages, and that society hold them accountable if they don't.

Unfettered might is not right. It makes for turmoil, disruption, and conflict.

Each instance individuals, companies, or nations that are advantaged attack and exploit those that are not, the framework of our shared norms frays. Should such behavior are left unchecked, the fabric unravels. If not stopped, the world can descend into instability and violence. We have seen this pattern previously.

Today, we live in a society and world grown vastly more unequal. Influence and wealth are more concentrated than ever before. This creates conditions for the elite to take advantage of the less fortunate because they act with a sense of untouchable.

The fortunes of a handful of ultra-wealthy individuals is difficult to fathom. The reach of big tech, big oil, and large defense contractors spans a vast portion of the world. AI is likely to centralize economic and political clout even more. The offensive capability of the leading countries is without parallel in human history.

Enabled by complicit legislators and a pliant supreme court, the presidency has been transformed into the supreme and answerable-to-none instrument of state power in the modern era.

Combine these factors and you grasp the danger.

An unbroken thread links earlier lawless actions to ongoing menaces. Both were founded upon the hubris of invincibility.

There is much the same in the actions of other powers: in military conflicts, in coercive diplomacy, and in the rampant monopolization by industrial titans.

Yet, raw power does not create right. It makes for fragility, upended order, and war.

History shows that frameworks designed to constrain the influential also shield them. If these guardrails are removed, their insatiable demands for more power and wealth in time bring them down – and with them their corporations, nations, or empires. And risk global conflict.

This blatant contempt for legal order will cast a long shadow over the nation and the world – and indeed civilization – for a long time.