Editorials of The Times

As 280-character brain-squirts from America’s thumbiest commander in chief go, the one President Donald Trump emitted late Tuesday night appeared harmless enough.

Earlier in the day, a U.S. District Court judge in San Diego handed Trump a victory in his efforts to build a wall along the nation’s southern border. In a detailed 101-page opinion, the judge rejected a challenge by the state of California and several environmental groups to the administration’s waiver of environmental laws that could have held up the wall’s construction.

“Big legal win today,” Trump tweeted around 11:30. “U.S. judge sided with the Trump Administration and rejected the attempt to stop the government from building a great Border Wall on the Southern Border. Now this important project can go forward!”

So far so good. Trump is entitled, no less than other presidents, to celebrate his administration’s victories in court — even if he does so in a bathrobe. What he failed to mention, though, was the name of the judge who issued the ruling: Gonzalo Curiel, of the Southern District of California.

Curiel, you may recall, was on Trump’s radar in May 2016, soon after Trump became the presumptive Republican nominee for president. At the time, Curiel was presiding over a long-running class-action lawsuit against Trump University, which had been accused of defrauding customers who spent $1,500 for three-day seminars that promised to reveal Trump’s real estate secrets.

Trump, who refuses to be held to account for anything he has ever said or done, was irked that a federal judge would dare to entertain litigation against him. At a rally in San Diego, Trump called Curiel “very hostile,” “a very bad judge” and a “hater of Donald Trump,” and said he “should be ashamed of himself. I think it’s a disgrace that he’s doing this.”

He added that Curiel “happens to be, we believe, Mexican.” Not true: Curiel was born and raised in Indiana. But the implication, of course, was that Trump, who had begun his own candidacy with derogatory comments about Mexicans and had been pushing a border wall with Mexico throughout the campaign, could not get a fair trial from a “Mexican” judge.

Less than two years later, in a case involving the border wall itself, that same judge ruled in Trump’s favor. He is no longer a “very bad judge,” apparently.

It’s possible that Trump simply forgot who Curiel is. More likely, he knows full well and doesn’t care. What he cares about is protecting his delicate ego and repairing any damage to it inflicted by people who don’t show a sufficient degree of respect or self-abasement. This all-consuming self-interest leads him to change his opinion of people and institutions, depending on how he thinks they are treating him at that moment.

Laws and norms, ethics and principles? Meaningless concepts. In Trump’s world, nothing is sacred and everything is transactional. This is a man who is so much more interested in winning than in governing that he filed for re-election the same day he was inaugurated. It’s the core of who he is, as almost anyone who has had even a glancing dealing with him over the years — especially in real estate, where nothing matters but the sale — will attest. If you help him or say nice things about him, you’re the best. If you get in his way or criticize him, you’re unfair, dishonest, terrible. Failing, even.

Ask “Liddle” Bob Corker, the Tennessee senator who earned Trump’s outrage by criticizing the Republican tax bill, then seemed to get back on the president’s good side with a few empathetic words. Or Sen. John McCain, who is dealing with terminal brain cancer even as Trump keeps mocking him for his vote last year against repealing Obamacare. Or Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who was Trump’s first and most ardent supporter in the Senate but who has secured a spot in the president’s doghouse after recusing himself from the Russia investigation. On Wednesday, Trump fired yet another broadside at Sessions, complaining that his failure to investigate alleged abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is “disgraceful” — in all caps, naturally.

None of this is remotely surprising anymore, but even so, Trump’s tweet about Curiel’s border-wall decision revealed once again the depths of the president’s own self-interest and his utter lack of principles. When this is the driving force of the commander in chief, and it is aimed at our governmental and social institutions, it is profoundly destructive.

Shortly after the 2016 rally where he disparaged the competence, integrity and ethnicity of Curiel, Trump was asked why he did not just settle the Trump University case and be done with it. After predicting that he would win outright, he said: “I could settle that case. ... I don’t want to settle the case. Because you know what? Because I’m a man of principle.” (In November 2016, days after he won the election, Trump settled, eventually paying $25 million.)

Fortunately, as this tale reveals, there are in fact still people of principle in public service, and they’re doing important work every day to preserve our institutions and counteract this president’s worst impulses.

Curiel, for one, has continued to do his job, carefully applying the law to the cases that come before him, no matter how obnoxious the litigants might be. In his ruling Tuesday, the judge acknowledged the “heated political debate” surrounding the border wall and quoted a passage on the role of courts by Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. — who, he slyly noted, is a “fellow Indiana native”: “Courts are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

That is what being a public servant in America sounds like, and it requires a level of selflessness and devotion to democratic ideals that are alien to Trump.

Since coming to power in Poland in 2015, the nationalist Law and Justice party has enacted one outrageous measure after another, placing the nation’s courts under political control, trying to do the same with the news media, purging the civil service and, most recently, criminalizing any suggestion of Polish complicity in the Holocaust. Behind these moves runs a concerted and dangerous rewriting of history to create a narrative of heroic Polish victimhood — under the Nazis and communists, of course, but also as a maligned defender of traditional values against a degenerate and controlling European Union.

There is more than a little irony in the way Poland has turned on the European Union. Billions in the union’s funds have been used to build Poland’s highways and roads, sewage systems, kindergartens and other facilities. Poland’s exports, largely to other member countries, have boomed, and young Poles travel and work all across Europe. The countryside, where support for Law and Justice is particularly strong, has been among the biggest recipients of the union’s largess. Biting the hand that feeds it is a gentle way of putting it.

Nonetheless, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, the real power behind Law and Justice, has built his populist appeal on resisting what he describes as the EU’s effort to dictate cosmopolitan cultural terms (and immigrant quotas). To portray the bloc’s policies as oppressive is ludicrous, but as Steven Erlanger and Marc Santora of The Times recently wrote, Law and Justice has thrived on contrasting a “conservative, Catholic Poland and its family values with a godless, freethinking, gender-bending Western Europe.”

There has always been a dollop of victimhood in the Polish national narrative, largely for sound reasons, given Poland’s history of partitions. But for Kaczynski — as for some other populist leaders in Eastern and Central Europe, most notably Hungary — the purpose of rewriting history in this way is to gain power.

The Holocaust law is meant to enforce the image of Poles solely as martyrs, never collaborators; when the president signed the laws bringing the courts under political power, the current defense minister, Mariusz Blaszczak, proclaimed it the official end of communism in Poland. And throughout the narrative, Law and Justice, under Kaczynski and his late twin brother, President Lech Kaczynski, is seen as the bastion of real Polish democracy.

In fact, what the Polish government is doing is eroding democracy, and Europe must do what it can to defend its founding principles of “democracy, equality, the rule of law and respect for human rights.” The union has already taken the unprecedented step of warning Warsaw that it could lose its voting rights in the organization if it carries on.

It may not be easy for the European Union to follow through on that threat, since Hungary, for one, has vowed to veto any such sanction. But it cannot back down. If Hungary does cast a veto, the bloc could divert some of the aid that flows to Poland, and diplomats from other members could minimize contacts with Warsaw. Kaczynski will no doubt scream “diktat,” but it will come with a price.