Just to remind you what a coarse, ugly brute he is and why so many people loathe him with every fiber of their beings:
That’s his idea of a generous tribute —it’s all about him.
I worry a lot that this behavior is becoming so standard (look at Bondi’s freak show last week) and that too many Americans now believe it’s normal to be this egotistical, stupid and crude, especially young people who have only seen this grotesque role model celebrated and rewarded. He is the quintessential Ugly American come to life and I’m afraid we’re going to be plagued with many more like him in the future.
Let’s hope the better angels of our nature continue to assert themselves as they have in Minneapolis. It’s our only hope.
Most presidencies have at least one iconic moment that makes the history books. It may not be fair or legitimately representative, but it’s usually an image that people remember if they recall nothing else, like Ronald Reagan in Berlin — “Mr.Gorbachev, tear down this wall” — or Bill Clinton falsely claiming “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” One of the most indelible images in recent memory was George W. Bush’s misguided aircraft carrier stunt in which he donned a flight suit and landed on the ship in a fighter jet during the early days of the Iraq War in 2003 to give a speech before a banner that proclaimed “Mission Accomplished.” The war would go for another eight years.
That image of Bush has become a meme — a symbol of presidential hubris that any leader with a drop of sense would seek to avoid at all costs. But Donald Trump apparently didn’t get the message.
Hubris is Trump’s middle name. He is so defined by ego and narcissism that he declared the affordability crisis to be over; the president has apparently fixed America’s economy once and for all. In an interview for the Super Bowl, Trump told NBC News, “The one thing that they don’t say anymore is ‘affordability,’ because I fixed the problem that they created. I’m very proud of it.”
Trump is a reflexive braggart and a hype artist, so his claims of success where none exists are so common as to be unremarkable. But this time, he may have stepped on Bush’s landmine. Even former president Joe Biden, who was punished for his inability to fully tame inflation while maintaining his insistence on touting impressive jobs numbers, didn’t go that far. And Trump’s dismal approval ratings show that most Americans are anything but convinced.
“Affordability” is a concept that really reflects how people feel about the cost of living and their ability to get ahead. Polls phrase the questions differently, often in ways that obscure more than they reveal. But generally large numbers of people still feel that prices are going up, and that they are unable to buy the things they need or desire.
A recent YouGov poll found that 53% of Americans said the economy is getting worse. Twenty-one percent believed it is getting better, while 19% said it was about the same. Most believe, though, that their own personal finances will get better or remain the same, so this is a generalized feeling about the economy-at-large. Still, the poll found that “79% say the price of food has gone up a lot (54%) or a little (24%), while only 9% say it’s gone down.” A whopping 72% reported that housing costs have “gone up a lot,” versus 47% who said a little and only 6% who responded that rent or mortgages have declined.
These are things that average people deal with all day long. But Trump, living in his gilt mansions in New York, Washington, D.C., and Florida, believes that the rise of the stock market — which experts say is due to the artificial intelligence bubble and not great economic fundamentals — is the avatar of a soaring economy. He continues to believe that the manufacturing boom that only exists in his imagination will convince people they aren’t seeing what they say they’re in fact seeing.
Economist Paul Krugman knows a little bit more about how the economy actually works than Donald Trump, and he recently quoted another economist, Paul Samuelson, who famously joked that the market had predicted nine of the last five recessions. In other words, the stock market is an unreliable indicator of the country’s economic health. Beyond that fact, the American market is not doing nearly as well as the rest of the world’s market; our economy is anemic by comparison. As Krugman noted, “Inflation remains stubbornly elevated. Despite one good month, employment growth has shriveled. And it keeps getting more difficult to find a job.”
Having people such as Attorney General Pam Bondi declare that Americans should be celebrating the stock market instead of worrying about the massive pedophilia scandal surrounding Jeffrey Epstein that has enveloped some of the world’s decadent elites — including Trump and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick — is tone deaf on virtually every level. Not only aren’t people in a celebratory mood about the markets, they are downright sour on the future. That affects consumer spending, business start-ups — everything.
Back in December, the White House announced that Trump was planning to hit the road to sell his economic accomplishments, with the thinking apparently being that if people can just see the president saying it in front of enthusiastic rally goers, the country will go along. His first foray into Pennsylvania was, as Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye noted, a dud. In between his usual forays into windmills and racism, the president lied repeatedly about the economy claiming, for instance, that he had obtained $18 trillion in investments when the reality, as reported by Politifact, is that the number was closer to $9 trillion, and most of the projects were “aspirational, multi-year goals that may not come to fruition.”
Trump claimed inflation was way down from when he took office. In reality, it’s right about the same: elevated. (The number declined a bit in January, mainly due to lower gas prices, while other energy costs went up substantially.) Health care premiums are through the roof, and the president’s TrumpRx website certainly isn’t going to solve that problem. The administration has also made false claims about the Big Beautiful Bill’s tax cuts in hopes they will appease the masses into believing that their ship has finally come in.
Interestingly, beyond a couple of small-scale events, there hasn’t been much talk of sending him out on the road again. Perhaps the White House is realizing the limited utility of bringing more attention to the fact that the president is either lying about people’s lived reality or is completely out of touch. Either way, his poll numbers have been cratering for the last two months.
Ahead of the midterms, Democrats are gearing up for a fight on the economy. Trump made big promises during the presidential campaign that, despite his claims to the contrary, have not come to pass — and he’s actually made things worse. Democrats hope to hang Trump’s failures around his neck, and it’s likely the GOP will fare even worse than Kamala Harris did in 2024, largely due to his unfulfilled economic promises.
But there’s more to it than just that. The president’s insistence that the economy is great despite the public’s feeling otherwise is contributing to a general sense that the country is hurtling out of control on Trump and the GOP’s watch. That sense, combined with his horrific mass deportation policy and violence in the streets, his weird obsessions with unnecessary White House renovations and the Nobel Peace Prize, military incursions and threats of imperial seizures of sovereign territory, and public health being dismantled, signals to the American people that we are in a period of overwhelming chaos.
Republican pollster Whit Ayres recently observed in POLITICO that “there’s a sense that this is a pretty chaotic administration and it seems to remind people of the pandemic period in the first term.” It’s all of a piece — and if Democrats can find a way to synthesize this into a message that voters need to give them a congressional majority in November, the country will begin to at least some sense of relief. Between a bad economy and the escalating violence, people are simply yearning for a break from Trump’s chaos.
It’s AI slop day here at ye olde blog (above, and my earlier post).
Stephen Colbert is done with the “Late Show” in May. He’s not going quietly. Via Raw Story:
Stephen Colbert went off on Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr after he pressured CBS into scrapping the broadcast of an interview with Texas state Rep. James Talarico, who is running for the U.S. Senate.
The “Late Show” host instead posted his interview with the Democratic candidate on the program’s YouTube page and addressed the FCC’s threat to revise the equal-time requirements for hosting political candidates on late-night talk shows.
“[Talarico] was supposed to be here, but we were told in no uncertain terms by our network’s lawyers, who called us directly, that we could not have him on the broadcast,” Colbert said. “Then, I was told, in some uncertain terms, that not only could I not have him on, I could not mention me not having him on, and because my network clearly does not want us to talk about this, let’s talk about this.”
Colbert explained the equal time provision and Carr’s threat to waive an exemption the FCC has long recognized for news programming, which the agency notified broadcasters might not apply to talk shows, and he took a shot at President Donald Trump’s nominee.
“Carr said… some of [the talk shows] were ‘motivated by partisan purposes,’” Colbert said. “Well, sir, you’re chairman of the FCC, so FCC you.”
After punctuating his FCC you to Brendan Carr with an AI-generated “tasteful nude” of Carr (or was it old-school Photoshop?), Colbert made sure to alert viewers to where they could find his Talarico interview online: at “The Late Show with Stephen Colbert” YouTube page.
I don’t know if he can win a Senate seat in Texas, but it seems the Party of MAGA worries he might.
President Shitposter cannot find time to work at lowering the cost of your groceries or your rents. Donald J. Trump is too busy having his boots licked, issuing overnight extortionist threats by “truths,” suing people (including the government he leads) for damages, and taking bribes. In his spare time, he’s finding even more creative ways to turn his public office into private profit. It’s a pastime enjoyed by many members of the federal government, but most are discrete about it. Not Trump the Shameless. He may not be the Antichrist, but he’s certainly earned “the anti-George Washington.”
On February 13 and 14, President Donald J. Trump’s representatives filed three applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office to trademark his name for future use on an airport. As trademark lawyer Josh Gerben of Gerben IP noted, the application also covers merchandise branded “President Donald J. Trump International Airport,” “Donald J. Trump International Airport,” and “DJT,” including “clothing, handbags, luggage, jewelry, watches, and tie clips.”
Because of the trademark filing, Gerben notes, any airport adopting the Trump name would have to get a license to use the name, potentially paying a licensing fee. Gerben emphasizes that while it is common for public officials to have landmarks named after them, “never in the history of the United States” has “a sitting president’s private company…sought trademark rights” before such a naming.
You’ll recall, as Richardson does, that Trump has cut off funding for new tunnel construction under the Hudson River. Because DEI, something-something, and until you rename Dulles Airport and New York City’s Penn Station after oh, marvelous me.
In 1789, when George Washington took the oath of office as the first president of the United States of America, no one knew what to expect of leaders in a democratic republic. Washington understood that anything he did would become the standard for anyone who came after him. “I walk on untrodden ground,” he wrote in 1790, the year after he assumed the office of the presidency. “There is scarcely any part of my conduct w[hi]ch may not hereafter be drawn into precedent.”
After watching colonial lawmakers under royal rule demand payoffs before they would approve popular measures, Washington rejected the idea of profiting from the presidency. In his short Inaugural Address, he took the time to state explicitly that he would not accept any payments while in the presidency except for an official salary appropriated by Congress.
Washington noted that the support of the American people for the new government was key to its survival. He hailed the pledges of the new nation’s lawmakers to rule for the good of the whole nation, not for specific regions or partisan groups. He also predicted that the power of the government would come not from military might but from its determination to serve the needs of the public. He promised “that the foundations of our National policy will be laid in the pure and immutable principles of private morality; and the pre-eminence of a free Government, be exemplified by all the attributes which can win the affections of its Citizens, and command the respect of the world.”
[We pause for those who did a spit-take to wipe the coffee off your monitors and keyboards. ]
Fifty-odd years ago, Richardson reminds readers, “Republican senators warned Republican president Richard M. Nixon that the House was about to impeach him for obstruction of justice, abuse of power, and contempt of Congress.” Not these Republicans. All but a tiny handful lick his boots and smile meekly. The anti-Washingtons read the first U.S. president’s Farewell Address as a how-to manual for undoing 250 years of government of, by, and for the people, and the unsteady expansion of human rights and dignity. They’ve turned America’s temple of democracy into a den of thieves.
The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism. The disorders and miseries which result gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual; and sooner or later the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.
A wise people would shun that temptation. Such a faction would surely agitate “the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms.” It would kindle “the animosity of one part against another,” foment “riot and insurrection,” and open the door to “foreign influence and corruption.” Thus, Washington warned, “the policy and the will of one country are subjected to the policy and will of another.”
But modern Americans are not a wise people. “Washington’s dire warnings have come true,” Richardson laments.
In fact, Americans remember and revere Washington because of his reluctance to promote himself, not in spite of it. John Trumbull’s portrait of him resigning his wartime commission after negotiators had signed the Treaty of Paris ending the Revolutionary War hangs in the U.S. Capitol as a moment that defined the United States: a leader voluntarily giving up power rather than becoming a dictator. Then, when voters made him president of the new United States in 1789, he refused a second time to become a king, emphasizing that he was the servant of the people and then, after two terms, voluntarily handing power to a successor chosen not by him but by the people.
As Washington predicted, the presidents Americans revere despite their faults—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt—are those who used the enormous power of the U.S. government not for their own aggrandizement but to secure and expand the rights and the prosperity of the American people.
Trump has made no secret of wanting his image carved onto Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, where sculptor Gutzon Borglum carved the busts of Presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln in the Black Hills of the Lakotas. Beginning his sculpture in 1927, Borglum chose President Washington because he had founded the nation, Jefferson because he had launched westward expansion, Lincoln because he had saved the United States from destruction, and Roosevelt because he had protected working men and helped fit democracy to industrial development.
The anti-Washington, would-be fifth head on Mount Rushmore, is a walking atrocity, a shit stain on everything Americans and presidents before him achieved. He may yet order construction of a colossus of himself to stand astride New York harbor as the fabled sun god Helios once did on the island of Rhodes. It’s a wonder Trump I hasn’t thought of it already.
Bush Jr. steps up (a little bi)t for a change. In a President’s Day essay he discusses Washington’s stellar character and leadership qualities — which are obviously the polar opposite of the 12 year old bully-boy in chief’s:
Bush waxed poetic on several of George Washington’s qualities, but paid particular attention to ones that are currently in short supply. Those included “humility,” a deep appreciation for history, a reverence for knowledge superior to his own, and an unwillingness to retain power “for power’s sake.”
“Our first president could have remained all-powerful, but twice he chose not to,” Bush wrote. “In so doing, he set a standard for all presidents to live up to.”
Bush also dissected Washington’s commitment to a code of conduct that was considered, at the time, to be the “gentlemanly arts.” Washington, according to Bush’s research, “schooled himself” by copying “the 110 maxims from Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation,” a text authored by French Jesuits in the late sixteenth century.
“Many of the qualities that came to be associated with Washington’s leadership, from self-control and courteousness to modesty and diplomacy, can be traced to that short book on manners,” Bush wrote.
Washington’s repeated decisions to step down from power were critical lessons for the nation, according to Bush, who argued that Washington’s decision to step down as commander of the U.S. Army after the Revolution, and his later decision to end his presidency after two terms, “ensured America wouldn’t become a monarchy, or worse.”
[…]
“Our first leader helped define not only the character of the presidency but the character of the country,” Bush wrote. “Washington modeled what it means to put the good of the nation over self-interest and selfish ambition. He embodied integrity and modeled why it’s worth aspiring to. And he carried himself with dignity and self-restraint, honoring the office without allowing it to become invested with near-mythical powers.”
Those used to be the character traits everyone taught their children and aspired to themselves. Today, our leaders model dishonesty, brutality, ignorance, immaturity and vainglory. You’re a sucker if you care about anything but self-aggrandizement.
An exhibit about nine people enslaved by George Washington must be restored at his former home in Philadelphia after President Donald Trump’s administration took it down last month, a federal judge ruled on Presidents Day, the federal holiday honoring Washington’s legacy.
The city of Philadelphia sued in January after the National Park Service removed the explanatory panels from Independence National Historical Park, the site where George and Martha Washington lived with nine of their slaves in the 1790s, when Philadelphia was briefly the nation’s capital.
The removal came in response to a Trump executive order “restoring truth and sanity to American history” at the nation’s museums, parks and landmarks. It directed the Interior Department to ensure those sites do not display elements that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
U.S. District Judge Cynthia Rufe ruled Monday that all materials must be restored in their original condition while a lawsuit challenging the removal’s legality plays out. She prohibited Trump officials from installing replacements that explain the history differently
History is very woke. The only way to restore truth and sanity is to lie about it.
Li’l Marco gave a big slurp to Trump’s wingtips today:
BUDAPEST, Hungary (AP) — U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday enthusiastically endorsed Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán ‘s bid to serve a fifth straight term after upcoming elections in April, emphasizing during a visit to Budapest the strong personal relationship between the nationalist leader and U.S. President Donald Trump.
Orbán, who has led Hungary since 2010, is one of Trump’s most vocal supporters in the European Union, and has actively curried the U.S. president’s favor leading up to the April 12 vote in which he will face the toughest challenge of his last 16 years in power.
Rubio was in the Hungarian capital for meetings with Orbán and his government where he signed an agreement on U.S.-Hungarian civilian nuclear cooperation that includes the possible purchase of compact nuclear reactors — known as small modular reactors or SMRs — as well as U.S.-supplied nuclear fuel and spent fuel storage technology.
Jesus.
At a news conference in Budapest, Rubio said U.S.-Hungary relations — which both he and Orbán described as experiencing a “golden age” under Trump — go beyond mere diplomatic cooperation.
“I’m going to be very blunt with you,” Rubio said. “The prime minister and the president have a very, very close personal relationship and working relationship, and I think it has been beneficial to our two countries.”
“That person-to-person connection that you’ve established with the president has made all the difference in the world in building this relationship,” Rubio continued, addressing Orbán. “President Trump is deeply committed to your success because your success is our success.”
It seems like only yesterday that he thought Orban was an undemocratic, Russian stooge:
Every last one of these people are absolutely worthless lackeys. It is unthinkable that this whore could ever become president.
BANNON: We either own 2019 or it will surely own us
EPSTEIN: Im back in the f and b biz only
BANNON: F and B director
EPSTEIN: No it does not stand for f*ck and bl*w
EPSTEIN: Spoke to my dems. This weekend. Boy are emotions running high
BANNON: Going to blow him up right our of the box– WH has zero plan to punch back– Fort Apache with no cavalry enroute
EPSTEIN: And no soldiers in the fort. He really is borderline. Not sure what he may do.
BANNON: I think it’s beyond borderline — 25 amendment
Now he ‘s telling everyone that Trump is running for a third term and he is for it.
Bannon is something else. I want to see the movie made about him. Jesse Plemons is the guy to play him. He’ll be about the right age when Bannon is finally out of the picture.
If Joe Rogan is any indication, February 2026 may go down as the month that the Epstein files saga cemented itself as a lasting political liability for President Donald Trump and Republicans. The podcaster has spent the lastweek discussing the disjointed release of files by the Department of Justice, analyzing emails and redactions, and concluding that a myriad of conspiracies might actually be true.
And what is he saying? That the slow-walked and highly censored presentation of information by the Trump administration is “the gaslightiest gaslighting shit I’ve ever heard in my life,” that “none of this is good for this administration,” and that “this is not a hoax…if you’re not protecting victims…then who are you protecting?”
Rogan is representative of a large swath of voters who delivered Trump his 2024 victory: distrustful, low-propensity, and anti-system voters. And what he and other spokespeople for this suspicious segment of America — Tim Dillon, Shawn Ryan, Andrew Schulz — are saying matters: it suggests that these anti-system voters, who were once thought to be a permanent part of the new GOP coalition, are nothing of the sort.
Those voters tend to skew politically moderate, independent, and, perhaps most importantly, young. They don’t tend to follow the news or know too much about Trump or politics. They get informed through nontraditional avenues like podcasts and social media, and aren’t wed to a political party or identity.
In 2024, all of this created an opportunity for the Trump campaign — to promise to release the so-called Epstein files. But what these Americans are hearing and thinking now is very different. They feel like they are being lied to again, being gaslit, and seeing another cover-up happen in real time.
I will hold my tongue about the extreme naivete of these people. If they are having their minds opened by Trump and the GOP’s obvious cover-up, that’s all to the good. The fact that most of them (not Rogan who’s almost 60!) have only vaguely paid attention to politics before mitigates in their favor. Gotta live and learn. Hopefully this lesson will stick.
“There’s a sense that this is a pretty chaotic administration,” said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster and political consultant with 40 years of experience, speaking with Politico Monday.
“And it seems to remind people of the pandemic period in the first term. Joe Biden’s fundamental message in 2020 was to restore normalcy, and that seemed to be persuasive to enough people to get him elected.”
Indeed, many have described Trump’s second stint in the White House as “chaotic,” with its unpredictability only increasing in recent months.
For instance, the Trump administration has increasingly pivoted from its previous positions. Trump has backtracked on his bid to acquire Greenland, the administration announced plans to end its immigration enforcement operations in Minnesota, and Trump’s recent threat towards Canada over a bridge came and went with no follow-through.
That chaos, Ayres argued, had largely been responsible for bringing Trump’s approval ratings to “his lowest point in the second term.” As of Friday, a new AP-NORC poll found that Trump’s approval rating sits at 36%, a figure that Ayres warned could spell doom for the Republican Party this fall.
The problem is that the chaos is intentional and even if it wasn’t Trump doesn’t know how to operate any differently because he still doesn’t know how to do the job. It’s all flash and PR and hurtling headlong from one thing to the other. They call it “shock and awe” but that’s just another word for chaos. And people are tired of it.
It’s been a rough six years since the pandemic. People were severely traumatized and Biden suffered from the hangover. Too many people thought that Trump would magically restore us to the time before it happened and instead he’s made it worse.
THAT is what’s happening in our society. It isn’t just the economy although that’s key. It’s the fact that we just keep getting battered, over and over and people are starting realize who is at fault for most of it. It’s not just the last six years. It’s the last decade — ever since that moment when Orange Julius Caesar came down that escalator and took a wrecking ball to America.
On Wednesday America was subjected to a monumentally outrageous performance by one of the most powerful people in the federal government — and for once it wasn’t by Donald Trump. Pam Bondi was called to Capitol Hill to appear before the House Judiciary Committee, and she chose to behave like a bratty schoolgirl having a temper tantrum in the principal’s office. If the stakes weren’t so high, it would have been almost comical to see an adult behave so childishly in such a formal setting. As it was, the attorney general embarrassed herself, the Justice Department and the country with the insulting, irrational attitude she apparently adopted to impress her boss and mentor, who has worked to shatter the rule of law.
The next Democratic-appointed attorney general will have a mess to confront and clean up. They will need their ethical, intellectual and political wits about them to craft reforms and regulations, and to restore a sense of confidence in the department’s independence. But they can also look to the not-too-distant past for inspiration.
There was a time when Americans considered the attorney general to be one of the most distinguished, consequential appointments in government. Occupants of the office were assumed to be people of high integrity and good character, qualities considered necessary to remind Americans of the commitment to dispense justice fairly and impartially.
Of course this was not always the case. The office of the attorney general is a political position tasked with carrying out the priorities of the president, and that may inevitably lead to at least the appearance of partisanship. It also opens the door to abuse of power by a president inclined to go there.
Richard Nixon’s behavior during Watergate brought those prospects into clear focus. The president attempted to use the Justice Department to block investigations into the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters, as well as many other abuses that slowly came to light as the scandal unfolded. Nixon’s order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox, who had been appointed to head the investigation, prompted Attorney General Elliot Richardson to resign, followed swiftly by Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus, in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre, crystallized for the public the corruption at the core of Nixon’s presidency.
After Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, Congress realized that reforms were needed to insulate the Justice Department from political pressure by the White House. Years of congressional investigations and in-depth reporting had made the country aware of massive abuses of power by the executive branch. J. Edgar Hoover, who led the FBI for 48 years, had established a personal fiefdom devoted to consolidating power and pursuing his own personal obsessions, sometimes with blackmail and coercion. The intelligence community was implicated as well, along with Nixon’s exploitation of the Internal Revenue Service and other agencies for partisan and personal gain.
Advertisement:he Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which was passed by Congress to, among other provisions, prevent conflicts of interest and create the Office of the Independent Counsel, a position designed to be insulated from political pressure by the president. (The independent counsel statute was allowed to expire 20 years later following the debacle that was the Starr Investigation in the late 1990s.)
Presidents Gerald Ford and his successor Jimmy Carter took up the mantle of reform, instituting new norms and rules designed to rein in an out-of-control presidency. Edward H. Levi, a respected legal scholar who served as Ford’s attorney general, began working to mend the department from within, which included limiting the scope and power of the FBI. His successor Griffin Bell, who served under Carter, came up with the idea of making the Justice Department a “neutral zone,” which was designed to formalize the idea that the White House would not directly involve itself in any law enforcement decisions. This led to new oversight mechanisms, including the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of Personal Responsibility, to keep the abuses in check. Carter’s administration instituted the most sweeping reforms of the civil service since 1883’s Pendleton Act, which replaced the spoils system and created a professional, merit-based system.
According to Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith, with the exception of the Independent Counsel Act and the War Powers Resolution — legislation from 1973 that required congressional authorization for military intervention — those reforms held up quite well, even as various presidents attempted to push the envelope.
In retrospect, George H.W. Bush’s pardons of Iran-Contra participants was an early attempt by the executive branch to circumvent the post-Watergate reforms. But it wasn’t until the election of Donald Trump that the full scope of the reforms’ inadequacies in the hands of a real tyrant became obvious. Having had no ethical boundaries in his business and personal life, he saw no purpose in observing any such guidelines in government.
One of Trump’s first scandalous acts as president was firing James Comey. The FBI director ran afoul of Trump early on when he refused to publicly state that the president was not under investigation in the Russia probe or to let his newly-named National Security Adviser Michael Flynn off the hook for lying to the bureau. Since then, Trump has never looked back in treating the norms and rules established after Watergate as rubbish. He would simply ask if he had the power to do something and that would be all he needed to know, ethics and traditions be damned.
In his second term, Trump hasn’t even bothered to ask that question. He simply does what he wants, and if the courts tell him he can’t, only then might he consider pulling back. When it comes to Bondi’s Justice Department and Kash Patel’s FBI, the results are clear. As Salon’s Sophia Tesfaye laid out in detail, the department is being decimated from top to bottom. The brain drain is overwhelming, with hundreds of career prosecutors being fired or leaving voluntarily; they are being replaced by unqualified lackeys and loyalists.
The wreckage left behind is what will await the next Democratic attorney general who, with an equal commitment from Congress, will have no choice but to reform the entire department from the bottom up. At the end of Trump’s first term, the New York Times’ Peter Baker reported that Goldsmith and former Obama White House Counsel Bob Bauer created a bipartisan blueprint for what such a rebuilding would require. They proposed to restrict the president’s pardon power and private business interests, enhance protections for journalists and give more powers to future special counsels among other things.
Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and others in the Congress have similarly drawn up plans to overhaul the ethics rules and create various mechanisms to prevent the gross abuses of power that Trump and his loyalists are practicing. According to Baker, these would include “limits on a president’s authority to use declarations of national emergencies to take unilateral action; more protections for inspectors general and whistle-blowers; and an accelerated process to resolve disputes over congressional subpoenas.”
With a Supreme Court determined to give presidents more power rather than less, even in light of Trump’s absolute monarchical power grab, it remains to be seen whether any of these restraints will come to fruition. Democrats will have to do everything in their power, including such bold acts as expanding the high court, to make it work. If they don’t, the damage done by Trump will be permanent.
Once they have seen the door is open to abuse, future tyrants will eagerly walk through it — and there are plenty more waiting in the wings and willing to take advantage of what Trump has wrought.
