Of all the ways in which Donald Trump’s presidency has made America worse, nothing epitomizes it quite so fully as the elevation of Matthew Whitaker as acting attorney general of the United States. Intellectually honest conservatives — the six or seven who remain, at any rate — need to say this, loudly. His appointment represents an unprecedented assault on the integrity and reputation of the Justice Department, the advice and consent function of the Senate, and the rule of law in the United States.

How so? A first-pass list:

Unqualified. Until this week, perhaps the least qualified attorney general in living memory was Alberto Gonzales, who served unhappily in George W. Bush’s second term before he resigned under a legal cloud. Yet Gonzales could still be credited for service in the Air Force, a Harvard law degree, four years of service as White House counsel, and a two-year stint as a justice on the Texas Supreme Court.

That makes Gonzales the intellectual equivalent of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. next to Whitaker, whose legal credentials include a little more than a year at the Justice Department as Jeff Sessions’s chief of staff, a couple of unsuccessful political runs in Iowa, a stint as a U.S. attorney, and work at regional law firms. Never in the history of the Justice Department has so much rested on the shoulders of someone who can boast of so little.

Shady. Kudos to Brittany Shammas of the Miami New Times for breaking the story that Whitaker served as a paid board member of World Patent Marketing, which was shut down in May by a federal court in Florida and ordered to pay a $25 million settlement following a complaint by the Federal Trade Commission that it was a business scam. Whitaker wrote at least one bullying email to a customer who threatened to complain to the Better Business Bureau about the company’s business practices.