Thou art more deranged, and intemperate
David Leonhardt on Trump’s contempt for the rule of law.
Even amid bitter fights over what the law should say, both Democrats and Republicans have generally accepted the rule of law.
President Trump does not. His rejection of it distinguishes him from any other modern American leader. He has instead flirted with Louis XIV’s notion of “L’état, c’est moi”: The state is me — and I’ll decide which laws to follow.
How does Trump scorn the law? Let Leonhardt count the ways.
LAW ENFORCEMENT, POLITICIZED. People in federal law enforcement take pride in trying to remain apart from politics. I’ve been talking lately with past Justice Department appointees, from both parties, and they speak in almost identical terms.
They view the Justice Department as more independent than, say, the State or Treasury Departments. The Justice Department works with the rest of the administration on policy matters, but keeps its distance on law enforcement. That’s why White House officials aren’t supposed to pick up the phone and call whomever they want at the department. There is a careful process.
That’s what I and no doubt others have been learning over the past few weeks (which makes it all the more dubious that Kennedy made his brother Attorney General). Trump’s behavior with Comey was way over the line.
The attorney general, Jeff Sessions, is part of the problem. He is supposed to be the nation’s head law-enforcement official, but acts as a Trump loyalist. He recently held a briefing in the White House press room — “a jaw-dropping violation of norms,” as Slate’s Leon Neyfakh wrote. Sessions has proclaimed, “This is the Trump era.”
Like Trump, he sees little distinction between the enforcement of the law and the interests of the president.
Then there’s Trump’s habit of attacking the courts.
Trump has tried to delegitimize almost any judge who disagrees with him.
His latest Twitter tantrum, on Monday, took a swipe at “the courts” over his stymied travel ban.
“We need the courts to give us back our rights,” he said, as if the courts had taken them away. It’s all very coup-y.
It joined a long list of his judge insults: “this so-called judge”; “a single, unelected district judge”; “ridiculous”; “so political”; “terrible”; “a hater of Donald Trump”; “essentially takes law-enforcement away from our country”; “THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!”
“What’s unusual is he’s essentially challenging the legitimacy of the court’s role,” the legal scholar Charles Geyh told The Washington Post. Trump’s message, Geyh said, was: “I should be able to do what I choose.”
Wouldn’t you think he would have educated himself on all this between the election and the inauguration? If he were anyone other than himself, I mean?
TEAM TRUMP, ABOVE THE LAW. Foreign governments speed up trademark applications from Trump businesses. Foreign officials curry favor by staying at his hotel. A senior administration official urges people to buy Ivanka Trump’s clothing. The president violates bipartisan tradition by refusing to release his tax returns, thus shrouding his conflicts.
He doesn’t accept the idea of equality.
The larger message is that people who support him are fully American, and people who don’t are something less. He tells elaborate lies about voter fraud by those who oppose him, especially African-Americans and Latinos. Then he uses those lies to justify measures that restrict their voting. (Alas, much of the Republican Party is guilty on this score.)
And there’s the kingdom of lies problem.
TRUTH, MONOPOLIZED. The consistent application of laws requires a consistent set of facts on which a society can agree. The Trump administration is trying to undermine the very idea of facts.
It has harshly criticized one independent source of information after another. The Congressional Budget Office. The Bureau of Labor Statistics. The C.I.A. Scientists. And, of course, the news media.
Fake news, enemies of the people, yadda yadda.
The one encouraging part of the rule-of-law emergency is the response from many other parts of society. Although congressional Republicans have largely lain down for Trump, judges — both Republican and Democratic appointees — have not. Neither have Comey, the F.B.I., the C.B.O., the media or others. As a result, the United States remains a long way from authoritarianism.
Unfortunately, Trump shows no signs of letting up. Don’t assume he will fail just because his actions are so far outside the American mainstream.
He hasn’t failed yet, so I’m not assuming he ever will.
This is actually quite surprising to me. Not that Fuckface von Clownstick would announce to the world that he’s open to blatant bribes, but that so much of the rest of the world would almost immediately go “Ok then, that sounds great, here you go…”. I’d have thought the rest of the world’s diplomatic corps would take more of a “Really? I’m pretty sure that’s not how this is supposed to work – at least, not so much out in the open. Let’s hold off a bit before dipping our toes in these unfamiliar, and possibly entrapment-laden waters…” line.
Nope, me neither. Whenever I hear people talk about how quickly he is going to get impeached or forced to resign, it sounds to me like more of the same kind of thinking that led people to predict that he would never make it past the primaries, and later that he would never actually get elected. As I have previously stated, I won’t be the least bit surprised if he is able to serve for 8 years only to be replaced by some of his deplorable offspring (or someone equally bad).
First of all, the same traits that make Trump so abhorrent to any halfway decent person – his authoritarianism, his bigotry, his corruption, his dishonesty, his egotism, his fascism, his greed, his hatred, his ignorance, his journalist-bashing, his knowledge-bashing, his lability, his misogyny, his narcissism, his obnoxiousness, his pettiness, his queerphobia, his racism, his sadism, his temper-tantrums, his ugliness, his vulgarity, his word-salads, his xenophobia, his yeti-behavior, and the zombie-like manner in which he acts out every baser impulse without the involvement of any higher brain functions – are precisely the things that those who voted for him find so appealing about him in the first place. Even if he fails to deliver on most of his promises (and so far he has in fact delivered to an alarming degree) they’re not going to hold it against him as long as he hates the same people that they hate.
Second, even if his approval ratings are record low compared to other presidents (but still a lot higher than they ought to be), as we have seen, he doesn’t need a majority to win. In fact, he doesn’t even need the largest minority. Thanks to the ridiculous and undemocratic winner-takes-all principle, theoretically all he needs to do is to get one more vote than the candidate who got the second most votes in a the red states as well as a few “swing states”, and It doesn’t matter if the other candidate got 100% of the votes in the blue states. Of course it doesn’t help things that the whole electoral college system is inherently rigged in favor of white people in rural areas to begin with, and with widespread gerrymandering and voter-suppression going on (selectively closing down polling stations in areas dominated by democrats, passing ID requirements specifically targeting black and latino voters etc.), need I say more?
Third, even if most Americans agree that Trump needs to go, it doesn’t necessarily mean they agree on much else, let alone enough to unite behind a common candidate in sufficient numbers to challenge the walking orange sewage-pipe.
Americanliberals, lefists and progressives are nothing if not divided, and the fact that they all hate Trump doesn’t automatically lead to political change as long as they hate each other even more.Karellen, that probably is what they think, but at the same time, the personality of Trump is so public, so blatant, and so scary that, if it were me, I would think twice before crossing him. No matter what the distaste might be for the giant orange baby running this country, there is still going to be a sense of needing to be seen sucking up…and perhaps the rest of the world is as unconvinced as I am that this will actually lead to any sort of legal process.
Bjarte, that last bit is just it – the left would rather attack each other than do anything serious, because there are too many ideological purists that won’t consider anyone who they think is flawed. Too many Democrats sat home in 2016, and allowed the election to go to Trump, because they didn’t want to vote for Clinton, since she was so imperfect (totally evil in their minds). If they couldn’t have the candidate they wanted, they would punish the whole country, even if that wasn’t what was going through their minds. They couldn’t taint their lily white hands to vote for Clinton.
[…] a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on Thou are more deranged, and […]
iknklast, I think this problem too is greatly amplified by the defects of your electoral system, though.
People always like to point out that the trumpist/tea-party movements are in a minority, maybe even among Republicans (although every Republican must at the very least be willing to accommodate them), but that doesn’t mean that any other identifiable and largely coordinated movement is bigger, since liberals, leftists and progressives are more divided than the Judean People’s Front and the People’s Front of Judea. I think it was Soroya Chemaly who once pointed out that tea-partiers only have a handful of causes they actually care about (prohibiting abortion, screwing the poor, closing the borders, mixing religion and politics as much as possible, making sure that every homicidal maniac has easy access to firearms etc.), but the point is that they really do care about those things – enough to actually show up, even at midterm elections – while a significant percentage of more reasonable people are either too lazy, or too indifferent, or too disillusioned with the system (and hey, who can blame them on that point?) to even bother voting.
However, it is only in a winner-takes-all system that a minority in the electorate counts as an absolute majority. I’m not particularly proud to be European, or Norwegian for that matter, but one thing that most European states do have going for them is a system of (roughly) proportional representation. If you Americans had something similar, the last election would, at the very least, yield a majority for “not Trump”, even if “not Trump” were not united behind a single candidate.
Another point is that having a winner-takes-all system in practice tends to favor a two-party system since third parties – let alone fourth, fifth, or sixth (etc.) parties – rarely stand any chance of getting the most votes in a sufficient number of states/counties/districts/whatever to matter. I really don’t think a government can truly be said to represent the will of the people if the people only have two real options to chose from. Maybe American voters wouldn’t feel so disillusioned and alienated if they had the option to vote for a party more in line with their own views, and not just settle for the “least bad” of the two standard options (Mind you, there is plenty of disillusionment and alienation going on over here as well, so maybe not.)
Also, it seems to me that a two-party system by its very nature encourages polarization, since the only two parties that count now have to go out of their way to mark their distance from each other in order to stand out. In most European countries no single party has any chance of gaining an absolute majority, which means that every party that doesn’t want to end up on the sideline has to seek coalitions and cooperate with other parties. In Germany they have even had coalitions between the biggest parties on both sides of the traditional left-right axis. Can you imagine something like that happening in the U.S.?