A YEAR WITH TRUMPLast week, UtahSenator Orrin Hatch stood on...

A YEAR WITH TRUMP

Last week, Utah
Senator Orrin Hatch stood on the White House lawn, opining that Donald Trump’s
presidency could be “the greatest presidency that we’ve seen, not
only in generations, but maybe ever.”

I beg to differ. 

America has had its share
of crooks (Warren G. Harding, Richard Nixon), bigots (Andrew Jackson, James
Buchanan), and incompetents (Andrew Johnson, George W. Bush). But never before Donald
Trump have we had a president who combined all these nefarious qualities.

America’s great good fortune was to
begin with the opposite – a superb moral leader. By June of 1775, when
Congress appointed George Washington to command the nation’s army, he had already
“become a moral rallying post,” as his biographer, Douglas Southall Freeman, described
him, “the embodiment of the
purpose, the patience, and the determination necessary for the triumph of the revolutionary
cause.” 

Washington won the war and then led the fledgling nation “by
directness, by deference, and by manifest dedication to duty.”  

Some two
hundred forty years later, in the presidential campaign of
2016, candidate Trump was accused of failing to pay his income taxes. His
response was “that makes me smart” – thereby signaling to millions of Americans
that paying taxes in full is not an obligation of citizenship.

Trump also 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 okay 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 after 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. As the New
York Times editorial board put it in June 2017, “for Mr. Trump and his
circle, what matters is not what’s right but what you can get away with. In his
White House, if you’re avoiding the appearance of impropriety, you’re not
pushing the boundaries hard enough.”

A president’s most fundamental legal
and moral responsibility is to uphold and protect our system of government. Trump
has degraded that system.

When as a presidential nominee Trump said that 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-demonstrators in Charlottesville,
Virginia, by blaming “both sides” for the violence, he wasn’t being neutral. He
was condoning white supremacists, thereby undermining the Constitution’s
guarantee of 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 okay for the police to engage in 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 just asking that they
demonstrate their patriotism. He was disrespecting their – and, indirectly,
everyone’s – freedom of speech.

When he berated the intelligence
agencies and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, he wasn’t just questioning
their competence. He was suggesting they were engaged in a giant conspiracy to
remove him from office – potentially inviting his most ardent supporters to engage
in a new civil war.

America has had its share of good and bad presidents, but Donald Trump falls far below anything
this nation has ever before experienced. In less than a year, he has degraded the
core institutions and values of our democracy.

We have never before had a
president whose character was so contrary to the ideals of the republic. That Senator Orrin Hatch and other
Republicans don’t seem to recognize this is itself frightening.