Throughout Trump’s presidency, courts struggled with the question of whether and how Trump’s abhorrent personal behavior should inform judges’ handling of cases involving his administration. This quandary eventually reached the Supreme Court in the form of Hawaii v. Trump, the travel-ban case. The majority, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, took the view that the president’s repeated promises to prevent Muslims from entering the United States did not tar the entry ban for citizens of several majority-Muslim countries, ostensibly as a matter of national security, as unconstitutional. Dissenting, Justice Sonia Sotomayor argued that the policy had been “contaminated” by Trump’s stated desire to discriminate. In continuing to defend Trump from Carroll’s suit, the Justice Department is doing its best to wall off the institutional presidency, even retroactively, from what it portrays as Trump’s purely personal failings. If courts distrust an individual president, and incorporate that distrust into their rulings, the effect is a judiciary less inclined to give the executive branch the benefit of the doubt and more inclined to roll back otherwise acceptable uses of presidential authority. From the Justice Department’s point of view, this is a problem. But can those failings really be walled off?... It’s easy to see the department’s approach as cynical, a defense of presidential power above all. Viewed differently, though, it’s almost optimistic. On his first day at the Justice Department, Garland promised to “show the American people by word and deed that the Department of Justice pursues equal justice and adheres to the rule of law”—a quiet rebuke of the previous administration. Sticking to the government’s usual approach of maintaining legal positions across administrations, as the department would, following a less aberrant presidency, is one way of adhering to the rule of law. But the willingness to defend Trump also speaks to a perhaps unwarranted confidence that the 45th president will remain an aberration—and that a future Justice Department will not find itself in court defending the same abuses.