One of the general problems with legalism, at least as we currently practice it, is that there are what the laws actually are, and what people feel like the laws probably should be, and generally people like to constantly equivocate between these two things.

And it's fine to endorse actual world's legalism or ideal legalism, or even a mix of the two. People just aren't very clear about what they're doing, I think.

Trump seems to be an ideal legalist. He's not interested in eg my wacky ideas about trying people under surprising interpretations of extant laws, nor in following “libs'” tendentious interpretations of extant laws. He'd rather punish people under what the laws should be, and see what happens.

The problem with ideal legalism is that it's basically, like, why even have laws at all, if you just follow "what people 'should' be punished for"? What's the point of writing them down at all. The problem with actual-world legalism is that the actual legal texts are ridiculous. So I guess everyone finds some compromise on this.