President Donald Trump sent a chill through the legal profession with his executive orders designed to cripple three big law firms that have represented or employed his perceived enemies.

Lawyers might not be the most sympathetic group targeted by Trump, but they perform a foundational role in safeguarding the rule of law.

The latest attack came on Friday, when Trump targeted Paul Weiss, a New York-based firm, with an order that strips its employees of security clearances, limits its access to federal buildings and begins a process that could rescind government contracts from its clients.

The order highlighted the work of former Paul Weiss attorney Mark Pomerantz on the Manhattan district attorney’s investigations into the president’s business, but Pomerantz retired from the firm in 2012. The directive also cited another partner’s work on a case against Jan. 6 rioters and its diversity policies as justification.

That order was similar to one against Perkins Coie, which represented Hillary Clinton’s campaign in 2016 and contracted with a firm that produced the discredited Steele dossier. (Trump filed a lawsuit against Perkins Coie in 2022, which failed because of lack of standing.) Trump also suspended security clearances for the attorneys at Covington & Burling who provided legal counsel to former special counsel Jack Smith in his personal capacity.

U.S. District Judge Beryl A. Howell granted Perkins Coie a temporary restraining order last Wednesday after the firm said it had lost clients every day since Trump’s order. “It sends little chills down my spine,” the judge said. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s chief of staff, Chad Mizelle, argued at the hearing on behalf of the government that the president has broad discretion to cancel contracts and clearances under a broad reading of Article II. Howell said Trump’s order appeared to violate the firm’s First Amendment and due process rights. The Sixth Amendment also guarantees a right to counsel.

Perkins Coie employs a bipartisan mix of lawyers.

It notes in its lawsuit that Trump nominated two of its partners to be judges in 2019. Political law is the smallest of Perkins Coie’s nine practice groups, consisting of only eight lawyers and accounting for 0.5 percent of its revenue.

The rest of the firm, spanning 1,200 lawyers across 21 offices globally, regularly interacts with more than 90 federal agencies, such as the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The order requires all federal contractors to disclose if Perkins Coie performs legal work for them, even if it has nothing to do with their government contracts. An accompanying White House fact sheet said that “the Federal Government will prohibit funding contractors that use Perkins Coie.”

That’s potentially fatal for the firm, whose largest clients — such as Boeing and Microsoft — compete for government contracts. Perkins Coie said several clients already terminated their legal engagements.

Trump’s maneuvering is working as intended. Before Williams & Connolly stepped up to represent Perkins Coie, the New York Times reported, several other firms declined out of fear of becoming targets. The Wall Street Journal reported that “advocacy groups and smaller law firms say it has been more difficult to recruit larger firms to help with cases against Trump, which now number more than 100.”

Just because Trump campaigned on revenge against his political opponents doesn’t make it legally permissible. These orders constitute blatant viewpoint discrimination, which the state is barred from doing under the First Amendment. The same amendment protects the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, which lawyers cannot do if they’re prevented from meeting with federal employees and entering buildings.

The right to counsel should be sacrosanct in the American system, especially for unpopular clients. In March 1770, after the Boston Massacre, John Adams agreed to defend British soldiers who opened fire on civilians even though he was a leading critic of the crown. Later in life, he described the case as “one of the best pieces of service I ever rendered to my country.” In more recent history, a senior Pentagon official under President George W. Bush apologized and resigned in 2007 after saying during a radio interview that corporations should sever ties with law firms representing detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

Trump’s orders are not just at odds with the American tradition; they come straight from the autocrat’s playbook. More than 60 lawyers, for example, were murdered in the Philippines between 2016 and 2022 after then-President Rodrigo Duterte told police, “If they are obstructing justice, you shoot them.”

America is a long way from that extrajudicial nightmare. But judges, competing law firms and Republican lawmakers — especially those with experience in the profession — must reject Trump’s improper targeting.

Otherwise, Trump will keep pushing. “We have a lot of law firms that we’re going to be going after,” Trump said recently on Fox News. The rule of law won’t uphold itself.