Hello, and welcome to the David From show.

I'm David From, a staff writer at the Atlantic. My guest this week will be Mona Charon,

and we'll be discussing things we've

changed our mind about since our days as young Reaganites a long, long time ago. My book this

week will be an essay on a similar theme, My Early Beliefs by John Maynard Keynes, in which the

great English philosopher and economist discusses how his views had changed from the early 20th century

to the time in which he delivered this essay just before the Second World War. But before either

the dialogue or the book, some thoughts about a remarkable development in the week just past.

One of the defining characteristics of the Trump years has been the determination of President Trump and the people around them to turn into instruments of presidential will, federal agencies that were always thought of as more or less independent and apolitical.

The Department of Justice, well, it's an armament is part of the administration for sure, and the Attorney General is an appointee of the president.

But there had always been a belief that the actions of the Department of Justice, especially

the criminal enforcement actions, were not dictated for political reasons by the president.

Well, that idea has just gone up in smoke in the Trump years.

This has been the most nakedly political Department of Justice, perhaps since Warren Hardings in the 1920s,

and maybe the most in history because of the recent event where Janine Piro, U.S. Attorney for

the District of Columbia, supposedly acting on her own, but obviously acting at the command

of Attorney General Bondi, who was acting obviously at the command of Donald Trump,

when the U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia actually tried to indict six members of Congress,

four of them, members of the House of Representatives, two of them, United States senators,

for making a video urging U.S. military personnel to obey lawful orders and not to obey illegal orders, which you would think is something

that would be as basic as telling the President of the United States not to take bribes.

How could such a statement be controversial unless the President was taking bribes and unless the

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