I’m a career prosecutor. This is a lawless presidency.

We’re seeing just how far Trump will go to subvert the rule of law.

In today’s America, the rule of law is hanging by a thread. And President Donald Trump—a convicted felon and avowed day-one dictator—with the assistance of his corrupt executive branch officials, is trying to cut that thread.

We can’t let him.

I was a career federal prosecutor, serving for more than six years as an Army JAG prosecutor and 24 years at the Department of Justice, specifically as an Assistant United States attorney for the District of Columbia. In short, I'm a rule of law guy.

Trump is trying to walk the rule of law deep into the woods and shoot it dead. Whether it's mass violations of undocumented immigrants’ 5th Amendment right to due process; or their 4th Amendment right to be free from an unreasonable seizure; or Trump’s “blatantly unconstitutional” attempt to take a Sharpie and cross out the United States Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship—Trump's presidency is an exercise in lawlessness.

We don't yet know anything about the legalities surrounding the execution of a search warrant on former National Security Advisor and Trump critic John Bolton's home. But, given Trump’s previous scorched-Earth criticism of Bolton, and the decision to revoke his security detail despite ongoing credible threats to his physical safety, it feels like this could be a continuation of his attempt to seek revenge on his avowed enemies.

When not on the golf course, Trump spends his days signing unconstitutional executive orders one after another. That's bad enough. But what comes next is unfathomable to this old prosecutor: Attorney General Pam Bondi, serving as consigliere to Trump's mafia boss, is sending DOJ lawyers into court to argue that Trump's unlawful acts are lawful, and his unconstitutional acts are constitutional.

I have little doubt that, when the rule of law comes back into force in this country, these lawyers will be held accountable for violating their oath of loyalty to the Constitution. Indeed, some DOJ attorneys have already been referred to their state Bar Associations for ethics investigations and possible sanctions, up to and including disbarment. Do these DOJ lawyers have any regard for their license to practice law? Think of the Trump-affiliated lawyers who have been disbarred or are pending disbarment—Rudy Giuliani, Kenneth Chesebro, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark. There should be more to come.

The good news is that federal judges from coast to coast—trial court judges and appellate court judges, Republican-appointed judges and Democrat-appointed judges, even Trump-appointed judges—are ruling against the Trump administration in record numbers. I have to laugh every time I see Trump's press secretary complain about how judges are ruling against the administration in record numbers—numbers that far exceed federal court rulings against any other administration in our nation’s history—trying to spin this as an indication of widespread judicial bias against Trump. No, it's because Trump spends his days acting lawlessly and unconstitutionally, where other presidents didn’t. In a very real and direct sense, the federal courts are protecting the American people against a criminal, abusive president of the United States.

I maintain that what we are experiencing at this extraordinarily dark moment in our nation's history is not sustainable. The way Trump is governing (perhaps the more accurate term is “ruling”), is not sustainable. The way ethically-compromised DOJ lawyers are going into court and arguing in favor of Trump's lawlessness and unconstitutionality, is not sustainable. It feels to me, based on my career inside America’s institutions of law, that the lawlessness we’re seeing from this administration is on a collision course with the mechanisms by which we as Americans hold everyone—regardless of office or privilege—to account for their actions.

I do think there's an obvious endgame that Trump likely has in mind: the militarization of the streets of America. Trump has previewed this endgame in unsubtle ways. He created chaos in the streets of Los Angeles by having masked law enforcement agents engage in immigration sweeps that federal trial court and appellate court judges have deemed unconstitutional. Unsurprisingly, the people of California protested and resisted such lawlessness. And chaos ensued. Trump then points to the chaos—the very chaos he created—as a basis to deploy the military to the streets of LA.

And now, we have federalized law enforcement and even National Guard troops patrolling the streets of Washington, DC.

So, Trump's endgame may very well involve using the military as a means to keep him in power. This is where my days as an active-duty Army JAG kick in. In both officer basic training and the Army’s Judge Advocate General School—where all Army lawyers are sent after they graduate law school, but before their first active-duty assignment—I was taught what is perhaps the most important obligation of military members. We take an oath of loyalty to the Constitution, not to the President of the United States.

And whereas we must obey lawful orders, we must disobey patently unlawful orders. When and if a corrupt president attempts to use the United States military in an effort to lawlessly retain power, the military is required to disobey unlawful orders. The rule of law is essential to a functioning democracy. We need to make sure the thread holds.

Glenn Kirschner is a former U.S. Army prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Attorney, and NBC News/MSNBC legal analyst. He hosts the show Justice Matters.