That’s why Congress and the current president must act fast and impose more durable legal guardrails on the commander in chief. Because while Trump himself has been sitting in Mar-a-Lago brooding over his loss to Joe Biden, all the weaknesses in our legal and constitutional system that he exploited remain, waiting for a future presidential miscreant to take advantage of them - maybe even for Trump himself, if he is reelected in 2024. Trump may not have destroyed the American presidency, but he did put the institution on a perilous path. But right now, as it stands after Trump’s four years in office, American presidents can, in fact, commit all those abuses - and suffer little more than losing their Twitter account. When these laws and norms are violated, they should be backed up by severe consequences if that democracy is to maintain its integrity. That’s the promise of democracy: that it will be superior to these authoritarian tendencies of tyrants and kings. Presidents in a democratic system of government are not meant to be able to extract personal profits from government service - or hand out pardons to imprisoned buddies, pervert justice, or foment an insurrection. Trump began one of the most corrupt presidencies in US history on the campaign trail when he failed to disclose his full tax returns and his hundreds of millions of dollars of debt. While there are supposed to be laws and limits on the presidency, Trump was unrestrained, exposing just how toothless those safeguards have become and just how urgently the nation needs to reform the office of the presidency itself.ĭonald Trump at a campaign event in Vienna, Ohio, March 2016. As was the case for so many of the countless outrageous abuses of his presidency, the former president largely got away with serving a full term in which he bargained with foreign leaders, signed tax legislation, and named financial regulators, without ever coming clean about his own personal debts and the conflicts of interest and opportunities for corruption they created. By the time he was running for reelection, Trump was over $400 million in debt, most of which would have been due during his second term should he have won in 2020.Īnd yet for nearly four years, there was effectively nothing whatsoever the public could do about it. While he was dumping money into his hotels, his golf courses, and his real estate deals, they were netting him almost nothing but significant losses year after year. Trump’s business empire - the one he espoused during the campaign as an example of his purported financial acumen - was nothing more than a hollow gold-plated shell. As long as justice and injustice have not terminated their ever-renewing fight for ascendancy in the affairs of mankind, human beings must be willing, when need is, to do battle for the one against the other.Donald Trump exposed the weaknesses in our system of government that could now be exploited by a corrupt leader with control of the White House. In this series, the Globe editorial board outlines the urgent reforms needed to prevent the rise of an American tyrant - and to protect our democracy for posterity.īefore the day Donald Trump moved into the White House in 2017, Americans had never had to contend with a president in such deep financial trouble - and with such determination to conceal his true finances from the public. ![]() A man who has nothing which he is willing to fight for, nothing which he cares more about than he does about his personal safety, is a miserable creature who has no chance of being free, unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their free choice, - is often the means of their regeneration. When a people are used as mere human instruments for firing cannon or thrusting bayonets, in the service and for the selfish purposes of a master, such war degrades a people. ![]() ![]() “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth a war, is much worse.
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