Trump Dismantling the Rule of Law Will Destroy the Economy

On Tuesday, a Georgia court scored a victory for the rule of law and free and fair elections. Judge Robert McBurney issued an order stopping the enforcement of a Sept. 20 rule promulgated by the MAGA majority of the State Election Board. With early voting in Georgia about to begin, McBurney's order stated that the rule was "too much, too late" in the election cycle.

The rule would have required the hand counting of ballots in the Nov. 5 election and imposed a complex process for doing so. Enforcement of the rule would make certification of the Georgia election by Nov. 11, as required by state law , a virtual impossibility.

In a parallel ruling the day before, McBurney, an appointee of former Republican Gov. Nathan Deal, tossed out the 2024 election-denying lawsuit of uber-Trumpist Julie Adams . Like the hand-count rule, her action aimed to sabotage the election by delaying the certification of any Harris-Walz victory in the state. And with the presidential contest likely to turn on a razor's edge, chaos in Georgia might mean chaos across the nation.

Meanwhile, on Monday in Stockholm the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to three Americans—Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson—two of whom wrote the bestseller, Why Nations Fail .

That award and the two state court rulings in Georgia may seem unrelated, but there is a through line worth attending to as Nov. 5 approaches. Nations fail without the rule of law, and in America, Trump and his allies have the rule of law under relentless attack. Nobel Prize–winning economists are telling us that we cannot continue to be great and prosperous if Trump and his followers succeed.

Their warning builds on the insights of Milton Friedman, the famous free-market economist who "believed the limitations on government concentration of economic power, adherence to the rule of law, respect for property rights and enforcement of contracts, was central to the prosperity of the free world."

The Nobel Prize, according to the Washington Post, was awarded for the laureates' work showing that "societies with a poor rule of law, in addition to institutions that exploit the population, do not generate growth or change for the better." Countries with institutions that uphold law create predictability for investors and "inclusiveness"; even-handed legal institutions support equal opportunity for the many and encourage the innovation necessary for a society to thrive.

By contrast, countries that develop "extractive institutions"—ones that squeeze resources from the wider population "to benefit the elites"—experience persistently low levels of economic growth and a reduced standard of living.

The journey from those high-level, macro-economic insights to this week's election law rulings in Georgia is shorter than you think. That's because the State Election Board's hand-count rule and Julie Adams' lawsuit are both part of a full-bore MAGA assault on the rule of law. Republicans have filed more than 100 preelection lawsuits. Their overarching point, and that of the hand-count rule, is to bolster the narrative that is surely coming if Trump loses: that "the election was rigged" and must be overturned, including by violence.

In Adams' case, she is a MAGA member of the Fulton County (that's Atlanta) local election board. She has already refused to certify one election. As is typical of Trumpists' right-wing court efforts, Adams' legal complaint in McBurney's courtroom was sheer nonsense. It claimed that local election board members have the discretion to vote against certifying the election.

Georgia election law is crystal clear about their duty to certify elections. It says that a local board member " shall " certify her jurisdiction's election returns "not later than 5:00 P.M. on the Monday following the date on which such election was held." That language leaves no room for doubt about what officers like Adams have to do.

McBurney pulled no punches about what was at stake:

The certainty of the electoral process that these laws have long brought to Georgia's voters has begun to unravel as key participants in the State's election management system have increasingly sought to impose their own rules and approaches that are either inconsistent with or flatly contrary to the letter of these laws.

As he explained:

While the [local election official] must investigate concerns about miscounts and must report those concerns to a prosecutor if they persist ... the existence of those concerns, those doubts, and those worries is not cause to delay or decline certification.

Adams was represented by the Trump-aligned America First Policy Institute . The institute and its adherents are not really committed to the law. The ends, they believe, justify the means of ignoring clear legislative language.

That is the MAGA world's current and abiding worldview accompanying Trump's unremitting campaign to end legal constraints on him. A key early step of fascists like Viktor Orbán was to take control of the law by taking control of the courts .

But what Trump, Orbán, and their ilk don't tell us is that their plans enable them to enrich themselves and their cronies and to rule without guardrails. But it is and will be unendurably costly to everyone else.

Professors Nisha Bellinger and Byunghwan Son argue that "When a one-time democracy turns toward authoritarianism ... the economic effect is often negative. That's because, in a democracy ... [l]awmakers check impulsive decisions by presidents."

Impulsive decision-making is Trump's signature style . Without the rule of law and checks on his power, the pain will, sooner or later, be felt in our wallets.

McBurney's two Georgia rulings show that we still have jurists of integrity able to maintain the law's guardrails on a would-be authoritarian's power. And the Nobel Prize in economics is a reminder that the rule of law is not just about maintaining those constraints on dictatorship. It's also about our economic well-being. Let's hope that Americans can connect the dots by Nov. 5.