When he’s not coaching basketball for a community league, our grandson is waiting to hear from the law schools he’s applied to. He is ambitious, with hopes for a top school and plenty of grant money. He thinks about a clerkship and then possibly a job in academia. For more than a year he studied for, took and retook the LSAT exam until he got the grade he expected from himself. His family looked on amazed at his gritty persistence.

Now I worry for him. The profession he will surely enter has been compromised by our lawless president. To instill fear and gain power, Donald Trump has ruthlessly used the tools he learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn: attack, counterattack and never apologize. Congress is frozen in place with the Democrats in a minority and the Republicans supine, just following the boss’s orders. The only force that seems capable of restoring some form of sanity is the courts, and they move slowly while the executive has been moving fast, slashing and burning, even reaching out to arrest a judge. How do you stop a plane full of alleged criminals headed for El Salvador? A court order? Too late for those people who never had the chance for due process. “Oops,” says El Salvador’s president, cutely, already cozying up to Trump, who has offered cash for imprisoning these and perhaps future deportees.

Meanwhile, some prominent law firms under attack have bent the knee, acceding to the president’s demands. Others not so much, refusing to provide millions of dollars of pro bono work for the regime’s favorite projects. The same pattern begins to appear with universities under this mafia-style bullying. So far Harvard is the only big name that has said no, but my hope is that others will take heart and follow.

The story of the abduction of our country’s residents sends shivers up my spine. The Alien Enemy Act of 1798 was invoked to spirit these 200 Venezuelan immigrants out of the country, after claiming that the country was experiencing a wartime “emergency.” During World War II the same law was invoked against people of Japanese descent. Some 120,000 of them were imprisoned without trial or sent to internment camps. It was also used, I realized, against my parents, immigrants from Hungary, who were designated enemy aliens because Hungary had allied itself with Hitler. The video of the young Tufts graduate student being accosted and taken into custody by masked men makes me think of the roundups of Jews and others in Europe during that war. It can’t happen here, we’ve been telling ourselves. The phrase is the title of a 1935 political novel by Sinclair Lewis that imagined the rise of our country’s first dictator. Closer in time to us is Phillip Roth’s 2004 novel, “The Plot Against America,” which envisions an American dictatorship in which Jews are forcibly relocated, mostly to the South and Midwest to “Americanize” them. Now, in this real-life phase, the people being targeted tend to be Muslims or people who speak Spanish. Who’s next?

As our grandson enters this profession — he is bilingual in Spanish and English, a gift from his Ecuadorian mother — my hope for him is that he will make use of his big heart as well as his very smart head, that he will stand up for the right, for the rights of all people living in our country to fair treatment. Due process is not just an option but a commitment, an obligation guaranteed by our Constitution. This is the document all members of the government take an oath to preserve, protect and defend. Let them do it then, instead of delaying, denying and destroying. For now, the courts and the lawyers that protect and defend our rights are our only bulwark against a ruthless would-be king.

Marietta Pritchard lives in Amherst. She can be reached at mppritchard@comcast.net.