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| The Mueller report addressed Russiagate. There's still a host of financial crimes - e.g. fraud, tax evasion, profiteering, bribery, money laundering - as well as his cover-ups, campaign and election law violations, lies, abuse of power, dementia, racism and incompetence |
Trump and his
propaganda machine at Fox News have repeatedly conjured up a “witch hunt” and
maintained a drumbeat of “no collusion,” which already has mired Robert
Mueller’s report in a fog of alt-interpretation and epistemological confusion.
What’s
“collusion?” What’s illegal? Has Trump obstructed justice? Has he been
vindicated? What did Mueller conclude, exactly? What did he mean?
The real danger
is that as attention inevitably turns to the 2020 campaign, controversy over
the report will obscure the far more basic issues of Trump’s competence and
character.
An American
president is not just the chief executive of the United States, and the office
he (eventually she) holds is not just a bully pulpit to advance policy ideas.
He is also a moral leader, and the office is a moral pulpit invested with
meaning about the common good.
A president’s
most fundamental responsibility is to protect our system of government. Trump
has weakened that system
As George Washington’s biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, explained, the first president believed he had been entrusted with something of immense intrinsic worth, and that his duty was to uphold it for its own sake and over the long term. He led by moral example.
Few of our
subsequent presidents have come close to the example Washington set, but none
to date has been as far from that standard as Trump.
In the 2016
presidential campaign, when accused of failing to pay his income taxes, Trump
responded “that makes me smart.” His comment conveyed a message to millions of
Americans: that paying taxes in full is not an obligation of citizenship.
Trump boasted
about giving money to politicians so they would do whatever he wanted.
“When they call, I give. And you know what, when I need something from
them two years later, three years later, I call them. They are there for me.”
In other words,
it’s perfectly OK for business leaders to pay off politicians, regardless of
the effect on our democracy.
Trump sent
another message by refusing to reveal his tax returns during the campaign or
even when he took office, or to put his businesses into a blind trust to avoid
conflicts of interest, and by his overt willingness to make money off his
presidency by having foreign diplomats stay at his Washington hotel, and
promoting his various golf clubs.
These were not
just ethical lapses. They directly undermined the common good by reducing the
public’s trust in the office of the president.
A president’s
most fundamental responsibility is to uphold and protect our system of
government. Trump has weakened that system.
When, as a
presidential nominee, he said a particular federal judge shouldn’t be hearing a
case against him because the judge’s parents were Mexican, Trump did more
than insult a member of the judiciary. He attacked the impartiality of
America’s legal system.
When Trump
threatened to “loosen” federal libel laws so he could sue news organizations
that were critical of him and, later, to revoke the licenses of networks
critical of him, he wasn’t just bullying the media. He was threatening the
freedom and integrity of the press.
When, as
president, he equated neo-Nazis and Ku Klux Klan members with
counter-protesters in Charlottesville, Virginia, by blaming “both
sides”for the violence, he wasn’t being neutral. He was condoning white
supremacists, thereby undermining equal rights.
When he pardoned
Joe Arpaio, the former sheriff of Maricopa county, Arizona, for a criminal
contempt conviction, he wasn’t just signaling it’s OK for the police to engage
in brutal violations of civil rights. He was also subverting the rule of
law by impairing the judiciary’s power to force public officials to abide by
court decisions.
When he
criticized NFL players for kneeling during the national anthem, he wasn’t
really asking that they demonstrate their patriotism. He was disrespecting
their – and, indirectly, everyone’s – freedom of speech.
In all these
ways, Trump undermined core values of our democracy.
This is the
essence of Trump’s failure – not that he has chosen one set of policies over
another, or has divided rather than united Americans, or even that he has
behaved in childish and vindictive ways unbecoming a president.
It is that he
has sacrificed the processes and institutions of American democracy to achieve
his goals.
By saying and
doing whatever it takes to win, he has abused the trust we place in a president
to preserve and protect the nation’s capacity for self-government.
Controversy over
the Mueller report must not obscure this basic reality.
Robert B. Reich is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fifteen books, including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent, "The Common Good," which is available in bookstores now. He is also a founding editor of the American Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary, "Inequality For All." He's co-creator of the Netflix original documentary "Saving Capitalism," which is streaming now.
