Presidential Norms & Presidential Reforms
REPORT: What's being done to stop Trump from just making up his own presidential rules if he is re-elected? Well, little to nothing. He'll be unleashed. Count on a no-holds-barred presidency.
When Joe Biden and Dr. Jill Biden first entered the White House as newly-inaugurated President and First Lady, they were not greeted by the outgoing President and First Lady, Donald & Melania Trump, as was a change-of-power tradition. That usual respectful welcome was the last presidential norm broken by Donald Trump in a history of his presidential norm-breaking. It was a classless slight.
Former President Trump did not attend the Inauguration of his successor, another breach of protocol & courtesy. But, this was par for the course for the small, coarse man who spent four years ignoring and decimating the traditions of the presidency.
(Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
A week after Election Day in 2020, David Montgomery of The Washington Post Magazine published “The Definitive List of the 20 Presidential Norms Trump Broke.”
Montgomery wrote:
What does it mean to be presidential? Article II of the Constitution describes the office in just a handful of paragraphs. To a remarkable extent, the presidency is shaped by unwritten traditions and expectations that historians and political scientists call “norms” — what political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt call the “soft guardrails” of American democracy.
And what are some of the “unwritten traditions and expectations” that President Trump decided didn’t pertain to him? Well, pretty much all of them. Trump has always seen himself as the boss, the one who makes the decisions.
In his business endeavors with The Trump Organization, Trump had always skirted the law, and had gotten away with most of his alleged business wrong-doings. He’d lost lawsuits and paid fines, for sure. But, for the most part he had escaped meaningful prosecution. He was used to playing by his own rules.
We are awaiting what will come from the criminal investigations into Trump’s presidential campaign and administration. Maybe justice will be served, Maybe not.
More from Montgomery:
One of the things Trump has forced presidential scholars to realize “is the extent to which shamelessness in a president is really empowering,” says Jack Goldsmith, a former Justice Department official in the George W. Bush administration who teaches at Harvard Law School. The (Trump) presidency also reveals “the extent to which the whole system before Trump was built on a basic assumption about a range of reasonableness among presidents, a range of willingness to play within the system, a range of at least a modicum of understanding of political and normative constraints.”
Below is Montgomery’s list of broken norms. In his magazine piece, “The Abnormal Presidency,” which I recommend you read, he gives evidence of all these infractions of presidential practices.
Personally profiting from official business
Not releasing tax returns
Refusing oversight
Interfering in Department of Justice investigations
Abusing appointment power
Insulting allies while cozying up to authoritarians
Coarsening presidential discourse
Politicizing the military
Attacking judges
Politicizing diplomacy and foreign policy
Undermining intelligence agencies
Publicizing lists of potential Supreme Court picks
Making far more false or misleading claims than any previous president
Abusing the pardon power
Using government resources for partisan ends
Making racialized appeals and attacks
Dividing the nation in times of crisis
Contradicting scientists
Derailing the tradition of presidential debates
Undermining faith in the 2020 election results
But, that was then, this is now, you might say. Well, almost immediately after Trump left office, still saying he won the 2020 election, politicians began to work on turning many of these “unwritten traditions and expectations” into law.
Michael Schaeffer picked up that story on May 19, 2023 in Politico Magazine, with his Capitol City column entitled, “Hurricane Trump Is Coming — And Washington Hasn’t Bothered to Prepare.” He begins:
Two months before the 2020 elections, Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer published “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency,” a volume of proposals designed to protect the nation from future rogue chief executives. The book’s 423 pages are chock full of wonky, granular measures:
A reporting requirement for campaign contacts with foreign governments.
A ban on presidential participation in a business interest.
Mandatory release of candidates’ tax returns.
Rules governing revocation of White House press passes.
A prohibition against presidential self-pardons.
New specificity about what constitutes a forbidden emolument.
Laws spelling out how presidents can or can’t sack special counsels and inspectors general.
Measures to isolate federal prosecutions from political interference.
Sadly, to the best of my knowledge & research, not a single one of these reforms has become law.
“Almost every reform that we propose in that book ended up being in a bill in Congress,” Goldsmith said this week. “Basically, with a couple of exceptions, neither Congress nor the executive branch have done anything concrete to address the many gaps in norms and legal constraints that Trump made apparent during his first term. There was a lot of discussion about how we had to have reform. It just wasn’t a priority.”
So, if Trump were to regain the office of the presidency, you could expect that there would be no ‘norm’ or ‘rule’ or ‘tradition’ or ‘‘constraint’ or ‘guardrail’ to inhibit him from doing whatever the hell he felt like doing. You could expect the unexpected.
There is one ray of hope trying desperately to peek its way outside the dark cloud surrounding it. Reports Schaeffer:
California Rep. Adam Schiff, author of the ill-fated Protect Our Democracy Act package, told me this week that he’ll be reintroducing the measure. Though the bill is a collection of executive-branch reforms that includes a bunch of ideas championed by Republicans, the association with the Jan. 6 committee member and tireless Trump critic is not likely to boost GOP support.
For the record, Schiff says he thinks a big, attention-getting reform bill is the best way to go. But he won’t mind if some other member wants to break off some discrete chunk — say, the ban on presidential self-pardons — and push it through separately.
To answer the question I proposed at the top: What’s being done to prevent an emboldened President Trump from writing his own rules if he regains the presidency? Well, literally, little to nothing.
So, where does that leave us? Well, it’s quite simple. We CAN NOT let Donald Trump back into the Oval Office. Period. If he somehow ‘retakes’ the White House, it will be a no-holds-barred presidency. It will be an anti-democratic, kleptocratic, oligarchic autocracy.
It will be the United States Under Trump.