Analysis of Trump Presidency: Raw to the Bone Fair, Open, and Accurately Honest

Is this White House and Administration a “Sinking Ship” 

(Boy, it sure seems like it)

Excellent article from The Atlantic (October 2017) here:

The author is JACK GOLDSMITH: Professor at Harvard Law School and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution who is a former assistant AG under President George W. Bush.

Note: I have highlighted some parts I wanted to emphasize in this rather long article – but it is truly worth the read:

Donald J. Trump is testing the institution of the presidency unlike any of his 44 predecessors. 

We have never had a president so ill-informed about the nature of his office, so openly mendacious, so self-destructive, or so brazen in his abusive attacks on the courts, the press, Congress (including members of his own party), and even senior officials within his own administration. 

Trump is a Frankenstein’s monster of past presidents’ worst attributes: Andrew Jackson’s rage; Millard Fillmore’s bigotry; James Buchanan’s incompetence and spite; Theodore Roosevelt’s self-aggrandizement; Richard Nixon’s paranoia, insecurity, and indifference to law; and Bill Clinton’s lack of self-control and reflexive dishonesty.

A symbiotic relationship between the bureaucracy and the press has also exposed abuses and illegalities. National-Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s lies about his Russian contacts were leaked and reported, and forced his resignation. 

When The New York Times published a leaked draft of an executive order that would have restored CIA authority for black sites and enhanced interrogation, the outcry in Congress and elsewhere killed the order. 

Trump and his family have not yet been brought to heel on their business conflicts of interest. Checks have been weakest here, but that is mainly because the Constitution and laws are ambiguous on such conflicts, and are not designed for judicial enforcement.

Nonetheless, several imaginative lawsuits have been filed against Trump and his associates, and the press has done a good job of bringing conflicts to light.

Trump’s norm violations are different. Many of them appear to result from his lack of emotional intelligence — a “president’s ability to manage his emotions and turn them to constructive purposes, rather than being dominated by them and allowing them to diminish his leadership,” as the Princeton political scientist Fred I. Greenstein has put it. Trump’s behavior seems to flow from hypersensitivity untempered by shame, a mercurial and contrarian personality, and a notable lack of self-control.

During the presidential campaign, Trump gave his challengers derogatory nicknames. Hillary Clinton was “Crooked Hillary.” Jeb Bush was “Low-Energy Jeb.” Ted Cruz was “Lyin’ Ted.” And Marco Rubio was “Little Marco.” Trump’s taunts exceeded the bounds of campaign decorum but generated attention and helped distinguish him from the stale, conventional elite wisdom reflected by other candidates in both parties. (Norm-breaking helped him more during the campaign than it has in the presidency).

The vast majority of elite journalists have a progressive outlook, which influences what gets covered, and how, in ways that many Americans, especially outside of big cities, find deeply biased. The press was among the least trusted of American institutions long before Trump assaulted it as the “enemy of the people” and the “lowest form of life.”

Members of the media viewed these attacks, correctly, as an effort by Trump to discredit, marginalize, and even dehumanize them. And they were shocked when the strategy worked.

“The country was really angry at the elite, and that included us, and I don’t think we quite had our finger on it,” Dean Baquet, the executive editor of The New York Times, said with exquisite understatement during a roundtable discussion with his reporters in June.

Check out the whole article – very enlightening and worthwhile history lesson from a GOPer’s honest legal perspective. 

Thanks for stopping by.