IN 2015 Jeb Bush, who was competing with him for the top job, warned that Donald Trump would be “a chaos president”. In many respects he has been proved right. President Trump has failed to keep many of the promises he made on the campaign trail. The White House leaks like a colander. The administration has suffered rapid staff turnover while weathering scandal after scandal. Mr Trump often appears capable of remaining on-message for no more than 280 characters.

But ineptitude and inconsistency are not quite the same as inaction. Mr Trump is transforming the federal government—and one department in particular. With Jeff Sessions, the attorney-general, he has radically reoriented the Department of Justice (DoJ), undoing many changes made under his predecessor, Barack Obama. At the same time, he has relentlessly attacked Mr Sessions and the department for failing to protect him from Robert Mueller, the special counsel charged with investigating alleged links between Russia and Mr Trump’s campaign. The DoJ is both comprehensively Trumpified and deeply irksome to Mr Trump.

Though changeable in many ways, Mr Trump has consistently approved of harsh punishment and disliked due process. In 1989, after five black and Hispanic teenagers were accused of raping a white woman in Central Park (wrongly, it turned out), Mr Trump took out full-page advertisements in four New York papers that screamed, “Muggers and murderers should be forced to suffer, and, when they kill, they should be executed for their crimes.” After a terrorist attack in New York, he called for “quick…strong justice”. He believes America’s method of prosecuting terrorists—gathering evidence and building a provable case—to be “a joke, and…a laughing stock”.

He also believes that America is beset by violent crime. At a meeting with sheriffs in February 2017, Mr Trump claimed that America’s murder rate “is the highest it’s been in 47 years”. In fact, murder and crime in general are much rarer than they were in the 1990s. In 2016 just 21.1 per 1,000 people over the age of 12 reported being victims of violent crime, around one-quarter of the 1993 figure. In Mr Trump’s home town of New York, crime has fallen for 27 straight years, to levels not seen since the 1950s.

And throw away the key

Mr Obama took advantage of falling crime rates to make American criminal justice a little less punitive. His Justice Department allowed prosecutors to bring lesser charges against some drug offenders to avoid triggering mandatory-minimum sentences, and let them decline to prosecute non-violent marijuana offences if they complied with state law (marijuana is illegal under federal law, but several states have legalised it). Mr Obama called for an end to mandatory-minimum sentences and cut or commuted the sentences of nearly 1,400 people, most of whom were imprisoned for drug-related crimes. The federal prison population was smaller when he left office than when he entered—something no president had achieved since Jimmy Carter, four decades ago.

Mr Sessions, who as a senator was a fierce drug warrior and opponent of criminal-justice reform, has sharply reversed this course. In May 2017 he directed federal prosecutors to “charge and pursue the most serious, readily provable offence.” Last January he rescinded the previous administration’s guidance on marijuana, which he has called “only slightly less awful” than heroin. (In 2016 opioid overdoses killed more than 42,000 Americans; marijuana overdoses killed none.) These policies are likely to send more people to jail. Yet Mr Sessions’s budget aims to cut prison staff. His prison bureau wants to boost the populations of private jails—another reversal from practice under Mr Obama.

Another of Mr Trump’s core beliefs is that too many of the wrong sort of people are voting. After the election he claimed, without evidence, that “millions of people voted illegally”. Since he took office, the Department of Justice’s voting section has not filed a single voting-rights case. The department has, however, sent letters to 44 states inquiring about the accuracy of their voter rolls—something many fear implies a green light for states that want to make it harder for people to vote.

In two current voting-rights cases, the DoJ reversed its position after Mr Sessions took over. In February 2017 it decided that Texas’s strict voter-ID law was not enacted with discriminatory intent. Last August it sided with Ohio, which had purged its rolls of voters it deemed insufficiently active. The Obama administration, along with several civil-rights groups and a federal appellate court, believed the purge violated federal law. Agencies’ priorities often change, but a 180-degree shift in an ongoing case—as one longtime voting-rights lawyer puts it, “one day saying the law means X, and the next saying it means not X”—is unusual.

The department has also reversed its position on civil-rights protections for gay and transgender people. In 2014 Eric Holder, then the attorney-general, issued a memo determining that federal protections against workplace discrimination based on sex also applied to “gender identity, including transgender status”. Mr Sessions revoked it. This runs counter not just to the Obama administration’s position, but to a long-standing, bipartisan trend of expanding civil-rights protections. Both Bushes, for instance, expanded federal protections for the disabled.

Morale in the department has crashed. One lawyer who left in 2017 says that staff were instructed “to scrub words like ‘reform’” from their writing, because “anything that smacked of reform was too closely aligned with the previous administration”. Lawyers provided copious evidence that changes in sentencing had not caused violent crime to rise, but “it was like shouting into a vacuum,” says the lawyer. Fewer staff are now inclined to work late nights or at weekends.

Mr Trump’s attacks on the department do not help. He seems to think of the agency as part of his operation, as though he has been elected chief executive of America and the DoJ is the company’s legal department. It follows that, in failing to protect him from Mr Mueller, the department is not doing its job. He has never forgiven Mr Sessions for recusing himself from Mr Mueller’s investigation, and believes he has “the absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department”.

This contravenes long-standing norms, under which a president appoints an attorney-general and other top officials, then sets general policy direction, but otherwise respects the department’s independence—and certainly does not intervene in investigations. Susan Hennessey, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and former lawyer for the National Security Agency, believes the president “has no reference to the DoJ as an institution that has to be defended—it’s entirely personal for him”. The DoJ’s independence, and the rule of law that independence protects, are not features of the American system to Mr Trump; they are pesky inconveniences.

Yet the department has stood more or less firm against attacks from Mr Trump and his congressional supporters. House Republicans threatened Rod Rosenstein, the deputy attorney-general, who is overseeing Mr Mueller’s investigation, with impeachment for failing to surrender documents they wanted. Mr Rosenstein retorted that the Department of Justice “is not going to be extorted”, and is said to have told friends that he is ready to be fired.

As for Mr Sessions, Ms Hennessey posits that he puts up with periodic threats and public humiliation because he has an alternative agenda. As long as he is able to roll back criminal-justice reforms, reinstate mandatory-minimum sentences and stiffen punishments for marijuana dealing, she suggests, “he seems to have decided that this is a bargain worth making”. But, as with his boss’s efforts to undermine law enforcement, it is also a bargain for which America will pay.