"Everything she writes," Mary McCarthy famously said about playwright Lillian Hellman, "is a lie — including 'and' and 'the'." Historians wrestling with how Americans permitted their democracy to be so badly debased during the President Donald Trump era will have to first assess why so many millions of us consumed patent falsehoods so eagerly, not merely eagerly but hungrily, not merely hungrily but voraciously. So very much of what Trump asserts isn't just false, but the precise opposite of the truth.

In their new book "Injustice: How Politics and Fear Vanquished America's Justice Department," journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis eviscerate Trump's relentless claim that former President Joe Biden "weaponized" the Justice Department to bring criminal charges against him. "Almost every step of Trump's march (to the election in 2024)," they write, "included him falsely and repeatedly accusing his political enemies of wielding the Department as a 'rigged' and corrupt political tool." Like so much of what Trump claims, this is a lie.

First, of course, two of the four sets of criminal indictments against Trump were not brought by the federal government at all, but rather by local grand juries entirely independent of the federal system. The 34 felony counts on which a Manhattan jury convicted Trump were brought by a local district attorney over whom the Biden administration had no control. The same is true with the Fulton County, Ga., indictments against him for election tampering, based in part on Trump's openly felonious demand that the Georgia Secretary of State "find" some 11,000 phony votes in order to fraudulently tip that state's balloting in his favor.

But as Leonnig and Davis recount, the two sets of federal indictments against Trump, for defrauding the United States and violating the Espionage Act, were indictments that Biden had absolutely nothing to do with. They were presented to grand juries by a Special Counsel reluctantly and belatedly appointed by an ethically fastidious Attorney General who long resisted acting on the evidence inculpating the then former president lest anyone criticize him for acting for political reasons. There were career law enforcement professionals in Merrick Garland's Justice Department who were tearing their hair out at their boss's inertia in the face of the mountain of evidence that Trump had committed federal crimes. Surveying the evidence that he had willfully pilfered classified documents, veteran federal prosecutor Julie Edelstein remarked to her colleagues, "If it was anybody else, we would arrest him tomorrow."

The delays in initiating and completing the investigations into Trump helped ensure that the American public would never see the massive evidence of his criminality and, with a big assist from the Supreme Court that he had packed during his first term, helped ensure that he would avoid trial. Put another way, Trump ought to thank the Biden Justice Department for bending over backwards not to weaponize prosecutors against him, rather than accuse it of weaponization.

It's Trump who has in just the first 10 months of his second presidency, destroyed the reputation for honor that the Justice Department had preserved during Republican and Democratic administrations alike. And it's difficult to see how the damage, this grievous, whitewashed by the entirety of the Republican Party and yawned at by half of our citizenry, can be fully repaired. The president's instructions that those who've opposed him be criminally charged are brazen, less subtle than in the totalitarian regimes to which we profess superiority. He orders that former FBI director James Comey, New York State Attorney General Letitia James and U.S. Senator Adam Schiff be indicted and — before you can say "Tinpot Despot' — the indictments of the first two are handed down, with the indictment of Senator Schiff reportedly not far behind.

On Wednesday, a federal judge overseeing the threadbare case ordered up by Trump against Comey rebuked the Justice Department lawyer handling it, saying that the Department's "indict first, investigate later" approach created "procedural challenges." That is an understated way of describing what Donald Trump is doing to the rule of law, and the challenges it is posing to the country are a lot worse than procedural.

Jeff Robbins' latest book, "Notes From the Brink: A Collection of Columns about Policy at Home and Abroad," is available now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple Books and Google Play. Robbins, a former assistant United States attorney and United States delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva, was chief counsel for the minority of the United States Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. An attorney specializing in the First Amendment and a longtime columnist, he writes on politics, national security, human rights and the Middle East.

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