The Hill reports that President Trump, speaking on the National Mall on the nation's 250th birthday, told the assembled crowd that he 'wasn't treated that well' — a reference to his legal battles and felony conviction — even as he invoked the American right to equal justice under law. One sentence. Two things that cannot coexist without tearing the republic.

I helped design this government on a single premise: no officer of the executive, however energetically invested with power, stands above the law he is charged to execute. The energy of the executive I always defended was energy within the law, not energy deployed to escape it. A vigorous president enforces the courts' judgments; he does not campaign from the podium against them.

There is a particular danger when the first officer of the republic conflates his personal legal situation with a systemic claim about justice. The argument is seductive: I was treated unjustly, therefore the system is unjust. But that is precisely the argument every faction leader in history has made to justify dismantling the institutions that inconvenience him. The logic, if accepted, gives the executive a warrant to nullify every verdict he dislikes. That is not a republic. That is, at minimum, the architecture of a faction.

I grant — and mark this clearly as inference, since I cannot have witnessed these proceedings — that no legal system is perfect, and that criticism of courts is entirely lawful. The press may say it; citizens may say it; even the president may say it. What I argue is the occasion and the framing. The Fourth of July address from the National Mall is not a press conference; it is a civic ceremony. To use it to prosecute one's personal grievance against the judiciary is to subordinate the republic's birthday to the president's biography. It corrupts the ceremony and diminishes everyone who came to honor the nation, not the man.

Public credit — and I mean this in the broadest sense, the credit of our institutions, not merely our bonds — depends on the confidence of the governed that the rules apply equally. The moment markets, foreign creditors, or citizens conclude that law bends to power, they price in the risk. They price in the instability. That cost is real, compounding, and paid by everyone who is not at the podium.

My recommendation is plain. Congressional leaders of both parties, and the officers of the courts, should say clearly and without partisan coloring: the president's legal situation is a matter for the law, not for civic ceremony. The Fourth of July belongs to the republic. Use it to honor those who built and defended it — as The Hill notes the speech also did, in its better passages — and leave the grievance at the door. A nation that cannot hold that line on its own birthday is a nation whose next fifty years will cost it dearly.