The United States’ legal system and the notion of the law have long existed in a rarified air among its most celebrated practitioners, with decorated lawyers often seeing the discipline as something closer to part of the natural order than a man-made practice subject to human fallibility. We are currently in a frightening, albeit fascinating, time where the traditional posture of American law as a sanctified craft is under a complete assault from individuals with extreme financial and political power. If there’s an overriding theme of the American legal system in 2026, it’s the looming threat of foundational destruction due to the lawlessness and impunity of the wealthy and powerful.
In observing how Americans process information and current events, it is striking that a strong opposition to street-level crime runs in parallel with an apathy toward crimes committed by financial, political and social elites. Obviously, street crime is deleterious to societal well-being and should be handled as such by the law, but crimes committed by individuals in positions of extreme power are also extraordinarily harmful. Unfortunately, in America, we seem to have a massive blind spot when it comes to criminality among the elite, particularly in the financial realm. Notably, the level of impunity and rapaciousness in white-collar criminality is increasing to such an extent that it’s becoming difficult not to notice.
In April of this year, independent investigative reporters at ProPublica found that the Trump administration is shutting down criminal investigations, particularly white-collar cases, at a record pace. As ProPublica’s article details, “In the first days after Pam Bondi was appointed attorney general last year, the Department of Justice began shutting down pending criminal cases at a record pace. The cases included an investigation into a Virginia nursing home with a recent record of patient abuse; probes of fraud involving several New Jersey labor unions, including one opened after a top official of a national union was accused of embezzlement; and an investigation into a cryptocurrency company suspected of cheating investors. In total, the DOJ quietly closed more than 23,000 criminal cases in the first six months of President Donald Trump’s administration, abandoning hundreds of investigations into terrorism, white-collar crime, drugs and other offenses as it shifted resources to pursue immigration cases, according to an analysis by ProPublica. The bulk of these cases, which were closed without prosecution and known as declinations, had been referred to the DOJ by law enforcement agencies under prior administrations that believed a federal crime may have been committed. The DOJ routinely declines to prosecute cases for any number of reasons, including insufficient evidence or because a case is not a priority for enforcement. But the number of declinations under Bondi marks a striking departure not only from the Biden administration but also the first Trump term, according to the ProPublica analysis, which examined two decades of DOJ data, including the first six months of Trump’s second term. ProPublica determined the increase is not the result of inheriting a larger caseload or more referrals from law enforcement.
“In February 2025 alone, which included the first weeks of Bondi’s tenure, nearly 11,000 cases were declined, the most in a month since at least 2004. The previous high was just over 6,500 cases in September 2019, during Trump’s first administration.”
It’s important to note that even before the Trump administration’s aggressive shift away from DOJ prosecutions in numerous areas, the United States was remarkably gentle and conciliatory toward wealthy, white-collar criminals. It’s no secret that many countries fit this mold, but America is certainly at the front of the pack. An article from the BBC that explores the harms of white-collar crime offers a few possible explanations. Georgie Weatherby, a professor of sociology and criminology at Gonzaga University, argues in the article that the American public holds misconceptions about the seriousness of white-collar crimes. “The costs to society of white-collar crime are immense, but people don’t feel them directly,” she said. “How safe they feel in their homes, where they can walk at night, these are the issues people feel. They are tangible.”
As the BBC piece further outlines, “The FBI estimates that white-collar crimes cost the U.S. economy more than $350 billion per year and can have serious impacts on people’s lives. When companies or individuals illegally avoid paying taxes, there is less money for public services such as schools and infrastructure. In the U.S., white-collar crime also increases the cost of healthcare. The FBI predicts that ‘losses due to fraudulent activity approached 10% of the amount of money that we expend in healthcare.’ While Ms. Weatherby notes that some high-profile white-collar criminal cases have caught the attention of the American public, such as the Enron scandal, she suggests people have short memories, and any outrage quickly dies down. Weatherby adds that society romanticizes white-collar criminals and the money and power they often accrue, which affects the treatment they receive. She also told the BBC that white-collar criminals are conceptualized as the American Dream gone wrong, not as doing something intentionally illegal.”
One major cause of Americans’ apathy toward elite lawlessness and impunity is that, before our current era, such abuses were largely carried out behind the scenes by people intelligent enough to conceal their most egregious abuses. Prior to this era, we had extraordinarily wealthy people who, at a minimum, understood the give-and-take that must be conducted with a restless public. However, particularly over the past decade, America’s elite have adopted a different posture, one marked by defiance and the belief that they owe absolutely nothing to the society that enabled them to accumulate such enormous wealth. Their behavior has heightened the contradictions within our system and has made even ostensibly apolitical citizens aware that the rule of law, when one has enough money and power, can be manipulated to one’s own ends.
Ultimately, few conditions herald societal decay more than a collective loss of trust in the legal system and shared belief that the law applies only to some. Practitioners of the law need to be fully aware that this is an existential fight for the foundations of our legal system, not a high-minded philosophical discussion. There is a group of extremely wealthy, powerful people in this country who feel they are quite literally above the law, and if that isn’t rectified, then no theoretical defense of our legal system will matter. If the most powerful people in a society are allowed to run roughshod and commit crimes with impunity, that society has more in common with an organized crime syndicate than it does a democracy with a just legal system.
Increasingly, extremely powerful people are getting away with crimes beyond the financial realm and committing even darker abuses of the law. We have many intelligent, decorated legal professionals in this country, and it is crucial that they realize that some of the most powerful figures in society view the law not as a high-minded pursuit of philosophical virtue, but as something to be manipulated when convenient or discarded when not. If the legal community can unite with an increasingly informed and impassioned citizenry, we will be better positioned to defend our legal system and protect its promise of justice for all.
