One of the first things President Donald Trump did was fire all the lawyers. Perhaps he and his minions have not read Shakespeare recently, but they intuited the role of a Shakespearean villain, nevertheless.
In Shakespeare’s Henry VI: Part 2, Dick the Butcher says to his compatriots, “The first thing we do is, let’s kill all the lawyers.” Over time, the jape has become commonplace, reflecting how much people have come to dislike lawyers. And so, some have welcomed Trump’s recent decision to fire the military’s top three lawyers, known as judge advocates general, as a justified comeuppance.
One can understand the general instinct. Lawyers can seem like nothing but a cost, enforcing rules and telling people no when they want to hear yes. Anyone who has been in a court dispute can understand the viewpoint.
But the sentiment is the wrong message to take from Shakespeare. The context in which Dick speaks makes clear that Shakespeare, at least, thought that lawyers were a bulwark against evil and that the rule of law was essential to a just and fair society. Dick and his co-conspirator Jack Cade—anti-intellectuals who wanted to burn all the books and kill anyone who could read—were leading a rebellion. They wanted to create an ignorant population, unaware of its rights and easily led.
And so, in the context of the play, Dick’s admonition to kill the lawyers is a plan to eliminate the protectiveness of the law, by removing those who guard it and enforce its protections. Or, as Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said in a 1985 decision: “As a careful reading of that text will reveal, Shakespeare insightfully realized that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government.”
It is clear that Trump’s team has the same reading of Shakespeare, minus the pejorative view of totalitarianism. With well-planned steps, the administration has moved to take full control of the federal bureaucracy and eliminate opposition. Consider Trump’s efforts to assert control over the leadership of the military apparatus. Although his decision to fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the chief of naval operations (the only Black man and the only woman at that level) garnered many of the headlines, the most insidious step he took was his decision to fire the top judge advocates general of the Army, Navy, and Air Force. Each had hundreds of lawyers working in his command.
JAGs are the military’s lawyers. Like lawyers in civilian life, a significant portion of what JAGs do is prosaic. They review procurement contracts and handle military personnel complaints. They prosecute and defend criminal cases involving service members accused of crimes (think Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men). They even have a role in ensuring the military’s compliance with domestic environmental laws.
But far more notable, they have a unique function in articulating the legal standards that are relevant to combat operations. They don’t command any troops, but they do advise the commanders on the legality of their operations. This can mean limiting the tactics that the troops can use or the weapons that they might employ. It means setting the troops’ rules of engagement in a battle zone. It means attempting to ensure that unnecessary civilian casualties are avoided (think Helen Mirren and Alan Rickman in Eye in the Sky). It means, to cite one example with which I am familiar, that before U.S. CYBERCOM deploys a new cyberattack tool, the tool is reviewed to make sure that its deployment will be lawful under the laws of armed conflict.
In short, it sometimes means telling military officers or civilian military leaders no. A JAG might, for example, tell the president that he can’t deploy troops in Washington, D.C., with orders to shoot protesters in the legs, or deploy them to shoot unarmed migrants crossing the border.
But what lawyers see as enforcing the military rule of law, Trump’s loyalists see as efforts to emasculate true warriors. That’s why Pete Hegseth, Trump’s secretary of defense, has derisively called JAG officers “jagoffs” and contended that JAG officers enforcing the laws of armed combat put their own priorities ahead of “having the backs of those who are making the tough calls on the front line.”
The firing of the JAG leadership appears intended to cow JAG line attorneys and make them afraid to provide advice to military leadership that might run counter to the will of civilian command. The underlying laws won’t change, but now commanders are unlikely to get the frank legal counsel they need.
And that is a formula for disaster. In the past, the lack of legal oversight has led to significant errors, such as the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib. In the future, such a lack will mean that when the next unlawful order from Trump comes down (say, a direction to U.S. CYBERCOM to use its capabilities to collect information on domestic political opponents), JAG officers will be less well placed to say no.
And that is what Trump wants. JAG officers are sometimes called the “conscience” of the military. But Trump doesn’t want a military with a conscience. He wants a pliant military that does what he commands rather than what the law requires.
Firing the JAG leadership is the first step in securing this sort of control. Getting rid of the lawyers is, as Jack Cade says, an essential step on the road to “when I am king, as king I will be.” Continuing down this path will, almost inevitably, lead to a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.
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