John Adams, the second US president, identified the founding constitutional tenet of the American republic as “a government of laws, not of men.”
A third possibility never occurred even to that sage man, an oversight corrected by Donald Trump. Under his tutelage, America is run by a government of neither laws nor men, but by that of just one man, Trump himself.
Watching from afar, I’m amazed that a nation that has always venerated its constitution can so blithely watch it being crushed underfoot. The checks no longer check, the balances have lost their fulcrum, laws have fallen by the wayside. But one law looms large: Trump’s arbitrary will.
He began his second term in office by issuing a blanket pardon to all 1,500 people arrested after riots at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021 – including those few directly involved in assaults on police officers. Trump started as he meant to go on.
A new legal principle was beginning to take shape: no one wearing a MAGA cap and playing lickspittle to Trump is ever guilty of any crime, even if convicted of one. Any such conviction will be quashed by a presidential pardon.
The mechanism usually involves an intercession by dubious characters Trump sees as his political and cultural kin, most prominently the rapper Kanye West and his ex-wife Kim Kardashian. It was this hideous couple who set the wheels in motion during Trump’s first administration.
In 2018, Kim, who turns a bad case of lipoedema into a cash-spinner, interceded on behalf of Alice Marie Johnson, 70. She was serving a life sentence for cocaine trafficking, a little transgression she had committed, according to Kim, only “to keep a roof over her family’s heads”.
I don’t know if Miss Johnson’s tough childhood was also cited, along with her having suffered the trauma of sexual and/or racial abuse, but one way or another Trump was moved. A few days later, after Kim’s then husband, Kanye West, had paid his main man Donald a visit in the White House, Johnson was freed.
When Trump returned to the White House, he was seething with hatred of the American judiciary who he knew were out to get him and his supporters. Well, not on his watch. He was prepared to pardon any MAGA convict irrespective of his crime.
(“Even paranoiacs have real enemies,” goes the old saying. Trump’s feelings weren’t wholly unjustified, for the Biden administration had disgracefully tried to commandeer the law to pursue Trump and his acolytes even when nothing illegal had been committed. However, Trump’s vengeance outdoes Biden’s bungling ten-fold.)
The scale of that planned undertaking was so large that a special position had to be created in the administration, that of ‘pardon tsar’. Or rather, in this case, tsarina, for Trump found a perfect candidate for the job: the very same Alice Marie Johnson.
One can see some warped logic in that appointment: an army general knows how to fight a war, an economist knows how to run the economy – and a pardoned criminal knows how to pardon criminals.
Such as the Chicago gangster Larry Hoover, serving six life sentences for running a cocaine empire with sales of $109 million a year. This pardon can also be traced back to that 2018 meeting of souls between Donald Trump and Kanye West, whose affection for the Donald is only matched by his declared admiration of Hitler.
Hoover is languishing in a Colorado maximum security prison, but he was also sentenced to 100-200 years for murder in Illinois, meaning he is unlikely to go free soon. But miracles do happen, especially when Kanye and Don are such good pals. For the time being, Trump has issued a federal pardon.
“It’s very important for me to get Hoover out,” said Kayne. “Because in an alternate universe, I am him.” I can just see his main man Don flashing an avuncular smile. Misusing ‘alternate’ for ‘alternative’ comes right out of the Trump textbook of English, while the MAGA cap covers up Kanye’s self-declared identification with a murderous drug runner.
The president can justifiably claim to be rappers’ best friend, always provided the ‘artists’ sport the regulation headgear. During his first term, he pardoned a whole batch of degenerates, and last week he laid his exonerating hands on NBA Youngboy, convicted of gun crimes.
And, should ‘P Diddy’ be found guilty of sex trafficking, he needn’t fret. “I would certainly look at the facts,” said Trump. Or, by the looks of it, just one fact: the design of the criminal’s baseball cap.
Trump’s underlings are quite forthright about this novel approach to jurisprudence. Last week, Johnson told Fox News she had pardoned two TV stars guilty of bank fraud because they were the “Trumps of Georgia”. And Ed Martin, Trump’s pardons attorney, freed a sheriff doing a tenner for bribery because “No Maga [is] left behind”.
Trump isn’t the first president abusing the pardoning privilege. Both Obama and Biden did so as well, the latter issuing a wholesale pardon even for those friends and relations who hadn’t even been indicted yet. Well, foresight is better than hindsight, we can all agree on that.
Yet Trump’s natural tendency to rule by fiat, bypassing legislative and judiciary bodies, poses a greater threat to the Constitution. Thus he usurps the constitutional domain of Congress by imposing arbitrary tariffs. Yet the executive branch can only take control of international commerce in an emergency.
The nature of such emergencies has never been tightly defined, although it’s assumed that constitutional documents understood them as wars or natural disasters. This gave Trump a loophole to interpret an emergency as anything he says it is.
Hence he can wreak havoc on domestic and international commerce unimpeded by any constitutional constraints. Perhaps the president could benefit from a remedial course taken by any naturalised American, specifically the chapters on the separation of powers and the three branches of government.
America is a resilient country able to withstand recessions, depressions, wars, civil unrest, assassinations of presidents. But that resilience comes from the country’s solid constitutional core that has stayed intact ever since the Civil War put the final touches on it.
An egomaniac bully combining the traits of a Mafia godfather and a self-appointed messiah can cause an accelerated erosion of that core. This would have a devastating effect even if some policies he pushes through are beneficial, as Trump’s doubtless are.
His attempt to slash government spending is ham-fisted and only marginally successful, but the instinct behind it is good. Trump’s refusal to be swayed by the net-zero madness should make any Briton envious, as should his effort to stem the flow of illegal immigrants.
But the constitutional sabotage Trump is perpetrating, along with his much-publicised corrupt shenanigans, will undo all the good things he does and make the bad things much worse. I don’t think America can afford a president like that.
Although my comment runs the danger of being written-off as sycophantic I will say it: Well put, Mr Boot! It seems to me that you clearly identify the problems, which are, I believe, major and present severe risks to America, her friends, and her allies.
The solution has to lie in American hands, but their handiwork in recent years (Biden, Trump, etc) is not at all encouraging.