Although I know quite a lot of (what I consider) well-educated Americans, it is also the only country from which I regularly meet the type of person who doesn't care at all about how society works (also, technology, history, art, etc).
You'll probably find that HN-person is the kind of person who values this kind of argument, but HN-world is quite small.
On multiple occasions, I've met Americans who simply care about might-makes-right. It's skin-deep, as soon as you ask them why they support this or that policy, it's because they are powerful and the rest of the world is not. I've literally met Americans who thought their tax money allowed them to summon troops, more than once. (This ended up backfiring as it turns out, they did not know how to get US Marines to arrive, big shocker.)
The same kind of thinking seems to be prevalent internally. You can trample the law, because you can. You see it even in ordinary US-made popular media. What happens what a character gets in trouble with the law? Well, then of course it depends on who has the most money to hire the best lawyers.
In the current case, I suspect the government will just do whatever it wants and there will be no legal reckoning.