This failure infects or undermines just about everything he does
Jack Goldsmith at Lawfare Blog:
consider one of French’s* best points about what the Comey statement reveals:
Overall, one gets the impression that the president views himself less as the president of a constitutional republic and more as the dictatorial CEO of a private company. This is understandable, given his long experience in the private sector, but it’s unsustainable. President Trump has to better understand not just the separation of powers but also the constitutional and legal obligations of governance, or the turmoil surrounding Comey’s termination will be but the first of a series of controversies that could well shake his presidency to its foundation.
This analysis echoes points that Bob Bauer has made on this site. And it is right. Trump does not remotely understand his role, status, and duties as President and Chief Executive, and this failure infects or undermines just about everything he does. It is an amazing state of affairs: A President of the United States who does not at all grasp the Office he occupies, and who thus entirely lacks the proper situation sense, or contextual knowledge, in which a President should exercise judgment or act.
This is what I keep saying. He has no idea, and he has never bothered to find out. It’s horrifying. David French is right in a way that it’s “understandable,” in the sense that we can see how stupid and obstinate and intellectually lazy Trump is, but it’s not understandable in the colloquial sense of “and thus forgivable.” It’s outrageous and appalling and not forgivable at all. As I also keep saying, this is not a game, it’s not A Fun Project for Donnie, it’s the god damn country and to a large extent the world.
And this also sums up much of the problem coming from more ‘mainstream’ Republicans. They all seem to be under the illusion that the chief executive’s office is the “CEO of the government”. It’s not, and it never has been, and it was never intended to be, and when you act like it is, the whole apparatus fails to work.
In Illinois, for instance, Bruce Rauner, a successful businessman with no governmental experience, was elected as Governor. During the campaign, he was asked several times how he would get his agenda past Michael Madigan, the Democratic Illinois Speaker of the House, who wields tremendous power and clout, and can pretty much shut down anything he doesn’t like. Madigan’s abuse of this power is a serious and legitimate problem for the state, in that he is able to get away with financial shennanigans that have put the budget deeply into the red, often at times with the help of his GOP counterparts* Rauner kept talking like a CEO candidate who is going to come in and break up fiefdoms at a company that’s become stagnant or over-managed.
Sure enough, Rauner came in and started issuing decrees from on high. Madigan promptly laughed him off, refusing to give in to Rauner’s demands, and beating him both in the legislature and the courts. End result? Illinois just made news as a record-breaker: Our state now has the longest period without a complete budget being passed in the history of the country. We’ve been getting by on stopgap, short-term band-aids that keep the state from falling into complete collapse, barely, but because Rauner can’t look beyond the corporate governorship model, he’s utterly unable to actually do anything useful. (He also reneged on his ostensibly moderate abortion position, but that’s par for the GOP course.)
* The biggest example of Madigan’s governmental misconduct–the pension debacle, in which the state underpaid into the state employee pension fund for a decade, but didn’t put it on the books as a loan, even though in order to make it right the money would, in fact, have to be pad back with interest; this is particularly an issue because in IL, pension obligations are, by the language of the state’s constitution, sacrosanct and cannot be amended by later legislative action. The end result is we’ve basically been issuing bonds for years, but pretending we weren’t. Whether the pensions are ‘too high’, ‘not high enough’ or ‘just right’ is utterly irrelevant; the fact is, once the state signed the contracts, they were constitutionally required to honor them–meaning we should’ve been raising taxes two decades ago to make up the difference. Had we done that, the increase needed would’ve been relatively trivial; the magic of compound interest has turned it into a crippling burden. These ‘compromises’ were very much bipartisan in nature–the Dems got to claim they were fighting for the state’s unions, while the GOP was able to claim they ‘held the line on taxes’. So, “How do you deal with Madigan?” is a very pertinent question for every potential gubernatorial candidate.