The approach of separating the presidency from the individual president evolved for a good reason: The vision of the man inextricable from the office he holds tips quickly into monarchy. Again and again during his presidency, Trump did his best to transform executive power into a resource from which to extract personal benefit. He likewise sought to use that power to extend his own time in office—either by seeking damaging information to harm the political chances of an opponent, as in the Ukraine scandal that led to his first impeachment, or by attempting to overturn an election outright on January 6. That tendency to collapse the institutional presidency into a reflection of his own desires often took the form of clashes between Trump and federal law enforcement, as officials tried with varying success to resist Trump’s efforts to turn the Justice Department and the FBI into a Praetorian Guard tasked with going after the president’s political enemies and protecting his friends.

The idea that law enforcement cannot and should not be the tool of the leader’s individual whims is central to the divide between the president and the institutional presidency, and therefore to the idea of “rule of law.” The concept’s roots trace back to the origins of liberal political theory: As John Locke wrote, governmental power “ought to be exercised by established and promulgated laws, that both the people may know their duty, and be safe and secure within the limits of the law, and the rulers, too, kept within their due bounds.” Authority, in this view, stems not from the person of the ruler but from the broader structure of law and the consent of the people.