This is how the United States Department of Justice writes now.
/2 To get this, you have to get how DoJ has traditionally branded and seen itself. It’s long had a culture of [claimed at least] excellence — the idea that “we work for the government but our writing and research and argument will be overwhelmingly the best in the case.” Certainly it’s … /3..partially arrogance, but the work by US Attorneys Offices and DOJ has been very high quality and much better than the average for legal practitioners. Federal judges expect it and will absolutely chew your ass out as an AUSA if you submit mediocre work. /4 DoJ recruits selectively, trains fairly intensively, and demands a high level of writing. So to see DoJ product that looks like a YouTube comment is freakish and shocking. Even if all of that was a pretense (and I think it’s more complicated than that), abandonment of the pretense is horrifying. /5 The message is clear: excellence, quality, persuasiveness are now measured by strict adherence to Trumpist dogma and talking points, however vulgar and stupid they are. /6 Significantly, though Trump Administration briefs have become much more combative, few have sunk to these Stygian depths. I think it reflects how important the stupid ballroom is to Trump and how closely he is monitoring this case. /7 By the way: this wasn’t written by Trump. If you say it sounds like him, you mean that the idiom and capitalization and grievance sound like him. But the spelling, sentence structure, and organization are much better than his. So what it sounds like….. /8….is very capable and experienced writers deliberately imitating his style within the bounds of briefwriting. Deliberate evil, in other words.