One of the ugliest elements of the 2024 presidential race was the Republican ticket’s campaign against Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio. This famously included Donald Trump falsely accusing people of eating house pets, but there was another angle to the story that mattered just as much.

In September, then-Sen. JD Vance condemned the Haitians as “illegals.” Reminded that the immigrants were in the United States legally, the then-senator replied that because he disagreed with the existing legal process, “I’m still going to call them an illegal alien.”

In other words, American laws were all fine and good, but as far as the future vice president was concerned, a Trump/Vance administration would be free to decide who is and is not in the country legally — not based on laws, but rather, on their whims.

Three weeks later, without a month to go before Election Day, Trump echoed his running mate’s sentiment: Haitian migrants, he said, who’d been given Temporary Protected Status and were in the U.S. legally, were “illegal immigrants as far as I’m concerned.”

But it wasn’t a matter of opinion. Trump’s baseless assumptions were irrelevant. In a system rooted in the rule of law, questions about illegalities aren’t supposed to come alongside politicians using the phrase “as far as I’m concerned.”

All of this came to mind anew on Tuesday when Attorney General Pam Bondi briefly spoke to reporters outside the White House.

When NBC News’ Peter Alexander asked Bondi, “Should those individuals who followed the rules as they existed at the time be forced to leave the country now?” the nation’s chief law enforcement official replied, “Well, Peter, the rules at the time weren’t fair. The rules were dangerous to Americans.”

It’s worth appreciating the implications of such an argument. To hear the attorney general tell it, those hoping to enter the United States might have followed the law, played by the rules, and done everything right, but the Trump administration has decided that it no longer cares.

The United States government told these people, “If you follow this legal process, you can have confidence that you’ll be safe on American soil.” And now the United States government is telling the same people, “Never mind what you were told before.”

It’s the Republicans’ Springfield, Ohio, pitch all over again: You’re an “illegal alien,” not if the law says so, but if Team Trump says so.

This approach is rooted in the idea that the United States is led, not by laws and institutions, but by a mercurial ruler who’ll tell us what’s true, until he changes his mind, at which point everyone will be expected to keep up.

At a congressional hearing yesterday, Democratic Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada asked a Trump nominee, “Why would any country want to do business with us, much less negotiate a trade deal, if we don’t even honor our ongoing agreements?”

The senator was referring to the White House’s trade tariffs, but it’s a question with broad applicability. The credibility of the United States is taking a beating, and thanks to Trump and his team, it’s difficult to know when, or if, it will recover.