Will Bunch on Trump the norms-buster.

The main reason that Trump violates long-standing norms and established rules, or tells so many easily disprovable lies from the presidential podium, is because he knows that no one will stop him. And that exercise of unchallenged power isn’t just a weird quirk of the Trump presidency. It is, rather, its driving force.

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I’m talking about forbearance, and if that word lulls you to sleep, maybe that’s part of the problem. What that term means — and it’s laid out brilliantly by political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their 2018 best seller with the chilling title, How Democracies Die — is “not deploying one’s institutional prerogatives to the hilt, even if it’s legal to do so.” In other words, an American president can launch a nuclear first strike, add justices to pack the Supreme Court, fire prosecutors investigating him or his family or, failing that, issue full pardons to his allies or even perhaps himself. There are no laws and clauses in the Constitution to stop him from doing these things. Only tradition and a sense of what’s right and what’s good for America.

And Trump, of course, has absolutely no interest in either.

Trump’s lawyers are now out there openly saying they believe the president of the United States is above the law. This weekend, the New York Times published a 20-page letter that Trump’s personal attorneys sent to special counsel Robert Mueller seeking to avoid an interview with the prosecutor, which includes the stunning claim that it’s impossible for the White House to obstruct justice because, in the end, the president is justice.

The secret letter, drafted in January, argues that Trump has sweeping constitutional powers, including the ability to kill off a probe into criminality in his own campaign — to, “if he wished, terminate the inquiry, or even exercise his power to pardon.” That means, they argue, it’s also within Trump’s rights to fire Mueller or the prosecutors overseeing him — even though a similar move by Nixon in 1973 triggered a flurry of impeachment resolutions.

L’Etat, c’est moi. Trump and his lawyers are claiming the rights, and the powers, of a king — not a democratically elected president.

And a king of the absolutist kind, not the constitutional kind we’re familiar with now.

Trump is wearing down the American people, one lie at a time. He is chipping away at our notion of what constitutes American justice, one crony pardon at a time. And he is eroding the foundation of our democracy, to make it so weak that by the time he makes his inevitable moves to nullify the Mueller investigation, the remaining frayed house of cards may be too weak to fight back.

Trump is doing very little with his presidency but to dictate things. He wakes up every morning and dictates lies, then he dictates arbitrary justice, and then he dictates unilateral policies — trade wars with our allies in Canada or in Europe, requiring power plants to burn dirty fuels like coal, or ripping little kids from their mommies and daddies at the border — that could never win political or legislative support, because they lack common sense or morality, or both.

Hour by hour, lie by lie, dictate by dictate, Donald Trump is becoming an American dictator. And recent days have proved what many of us have long feared: That no one knows how to stop this. Not the Republicans or Democrats on Capitol Hill who, for different reasons, are too cowed politically to take substantive action. And not a news media that doesn’t have the mechanisms for informing the public when a president is a compulsive liar. Maybe things will change after the November midterm election — but there’s no guarantee, and that feels like a long time away.

People are patronizingly telling me they’re not surprised by Trump’s announcement that he has the absolute right to pardon himself, but surprise isn’t the issue. I don’t really care whether or not you’re surprised that the house is burning down; the issue is how the fuck do we get out of here?