Does Trump really want to bring everything down?
Donald Trump’s first week as president was so chaotic, bizarre and unnerving that it left many Americans, liberal and conservative alike, sincerely terrified that the United States is in the early stages of an unprecedented national nightmare. It is unclear whether the political system can adequately contain or withstand the unfolding assault on elementary and essential American norms and values. So many of those core mores have been contemptuously flouted by the new president that it’s unclear how, and whether, they can be fully or even partially restored.
It’s unnecessary and impossible to list here the unprecedented, and often breathtaking, breaches of basic American political standards and principles by the Trump administration during its first week. Mr Trump hasn’t done anything to meaningfully distance himself from his business, so a strong suspicion of corruption inevitably hangs over many of his decisions.
His war against both facts and press freedom has intensified. He and his press secretary, Sean Spicer, tirelessly propagated obvious and ego-driven lies about the size of the crowd at his inauguration and have made preposterous claims of massive voter fraud during the election.
Mr Trump’s speech at the Central Intelligence Agency, an im- portant opportunity for reconciliation with the intelligence services he has repeatedly compared to Nazis, quickly degenerated into a rambling, narcissistic diatribe falsely boasting about his inauguration audience and bashing the press.
He inexplicably initiated a diplomatic crisis and threatened a trade war with Mexico.
He issued a shockingly immoral, mean-spirited order essentially barring the door to refugees and banning almost all entry from seven Muslim-majority countries. Another immigration order stretches the definition of “criminal” to include almost any undocumented migrant, and allows officials to deport anyone they believe, for whatever reason, could pose a threat. He authorised the recruitment of 10,000 new immigration enforcement officers to go on this massive anti-immigrant witchhunt. He continues to advocate torturing terrorism suspects, thereby contradicting even his own cabinet appointees.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists terrifyingly reset their Doomsday Clock, which attempts to track our proximity to a nuclear holocaust, to 2.5 minutes before midnight. This is the closest it has been to Doomsday since 1953, even including the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. The change was attributed entirely to Mr Trump’s irresponsible comments and conduct.
All that, and much more, was the work of less than a week.
The framers of the US constitution were acutely aware of the conundrum of executive power in a free society with an accountable government.
They gathered to revise the disastrously decentralised Articles of Confederation, and so understood that a strong federal government was essential. They realised that a powerful chief executive is required for fast action and the implementation of laws and to make those decisions that can only be made by a single person rather than by a committee. However, their republican ethos, grasp of classical history and deep scepticism of human nature rendered them acutely aware that a hyper-empowered president might pose a wide range of dangers.
To offset them, they devised a system of interlocking institutional checks and balances within the government. And they integrated into the decision- making process a wide variety of external inputs from an empowered civil society with competing factional interests. They also counted on society to uphold minimal expectations of political propriety and civic duty.
They established institutional restraints on popular enthusiasm, which they considered the greatest potential source of political mischief. Among these was the electoral college, by which Mr Trump was elected president even though Hillary Clinton won almost 3 million more popular votes in November.
The American system was designed long ago and society has altered greatly. Its institutions now often function differently – and in the electoral college’s case, oppositely – to their original conception.
A minority has indeed overruled the majority, but the uneducated, enraged and bamboozled prevailed, not an enlightened elite. Thus, the electoral college, which was designed to help forestall the rise of a populist demagogue, has abetted precisely that.
Moreover, the presidency has increasingly accumulated power, most recently through the proliferation of executive orders by a succession of presidents. Congress and the courts have sometimes even willingly surrendered their own authorities.
The American constitutional system has been tested by civil war, economic depressions, and constitutional crises. But it has never been confronted with an incoming president so manifestly unfit and unprepared, or so wantonly reckless and destructive in word and deed. Mr Trump’s White House chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, calls himself a Leninist who seeks to “destroy the state … bring everything crashing down and destroy all of today’s establishment”.
If that is also Mr Trump’s goal, this is an excellent start. After only a week, it’s alarmingly easy to envisage that four more years of such paroxysms could indeed bring everything crashing down. And how, or by whom, he can be restrained is becoming far more difficult to imagine.
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington On Twitter: @ibishblog