The Constitution of Trump

Sit with it. A mob, thousands strong, swarming the U.S. Capitol. The violence on January 6 was particularly disturbing because it was fueled by self-professed patriotism, and those leading the insurrection carried symbols of American democracy. It is also a fitting coda to the Trump administration. President Trump likewise embraced the symbols of American democracy while attacking it head on. He insisted that if he could not stay in power, democracy itself had to be burned to the ground. That is exactly what the mob indicated, when person after person said that this was another American Revolution. The irony, of course, is hard to miss, since they were turning the American Revolution on its head. They were trying to overthrow a constitutional democracy and replace it with a monarchy, a constitution of Trump. At the start of the Biden administration, we have a choice. We can reaffirm the limit’s that the Constitution places on presidential power, or we can set the stage for another Trump to return and claim the crown.

The physical violence on January 6 was clearly a few standard deviations away from the Republican mean, but its underlying ideology is party mainstream. It is what columnist Garry Wills once called “antigovernmental constitutionalism.” It starts with the conviction that a true patriot’s allegiance is to the U.S. Constitution. (So far, so good.) But its adherence then reject the very institutions created by the Constitution and designed to uphold it. They reject the judiciary’s authority to interpret the Constitution, and they abandon the legislature’s role to amend the Constitution if the judiciary misinterprets it. Instead, they set themselves up as the judge, jury, and executioner.

President Trump’s assault on American democracy started long before the January 6 insurrection. Indeed, he spent four years trying to achieve administratively what his supporters tried to do violently, namely undermine the basic functioning of our constitution government whenever it refused to do his bidding. I am not talking about policy changes that every president has authority to make, nor am I talking about the president’s valid authority to select people who share his or her ideology for leadership positions and send their nominations to the Senate for review. Rather, I am talking about the four years President Trump spent trying to thwart his own executive branch, from the Justice Department to the Department of the Interior. I could give dozens of examples, but just consider the president’s almost principled commitment to filling leadership positions with acting figures who do not face Senate confirmation or simply to leaving leadership positions vacant. By setting agencies adrift, the President stymied their legitimate work and pushed them out of his way.

Similarly, Trump’s Republican supporters in Congress have assaulted our constitutional democracy. They have refused outright to exercise oversight and to legislate. During the Trump administration Republican leaders in Congress seemed to decide that if they could not control legislation, they would help Trump bypass Congress and advance his agenda autocratically.

It is time for some introspection among Congressional Republicans now, while the terror of January 6 is fresh in their minds. They should NOT act surprised that a mob they helped incite turned on them. The moment they stood up for the Constitution by accepting the nation’s electoral votes they sided against Trump and his own autocratic constitution. Unfortunately, other than the ten who voted for impeachment in the house, few Republicans have repented of their enabling. Congressman McCarthy certainly demonstrated this by groveling at Trump’s feet last week in Florida.

But Democrats need to invest in some introspection as well. Power is seductive, and presidential power has expanded dramatically over the last two decades. President Trump simply showed how easy it is for a president to push the boundaries further if Congress refuses to hold him or her accountable. We must not accept a democracy in which only members from the opposition party seek to hold a president in check. In our constitutional Republic, Congress as an institution must accept this responsibility. President Biden will be under enormous pressure to seize the power Trump enjoyed and simply use it to different ends. And congressional Democrats will be tempted to shield President Biden from Republican scrutiny. Doing so might advance their agenda in the short term, but it would be a pyrrhic victory that sends us farther down the path toward authoritarianism. At this moment in American history, we need a Congress that will support the president’s exercise of legitimate executive power while clarifying and strengthening the limits on that power.