When Power Becomes Performance: A Presidency Without Guardrails

 

For those who find humor in the absurd, Donald Trump has become an essential and inexhaustible source of laughs. After launching a war that shut down the Strait of Hormuz, he declared the war’s mission was getting the strait open. He promised political liberation to the citizens of Iran and then threatened to wipe them from the face of the earth: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.” He answered Pope Leo’s pronouncement that civilization destruction was “unacceptable” by calling the Pope “weak on crime.” He then cast himself as the Pope’s spiritual superior with a post of a glowing-hands Doctor Jesus Trump blessing a bedbound man surrounded by awestruck acolytes with an American flag, a bald eagle, and floating commandoes in the background. A Peace Prize aspirant playing at being the God of War. A self-proclaimed healer compelled to polarize.

 

It all would be rip-roaringly hilarious if people were not dying, the world economy was not tanking, and something more reliable than “My own morality. My own mind” protected the world from the president’s power and petulance. We can only pray that Trump’s unpredictable threats, ultimatums and incomprehensible ravings do not eventually lead to a world-threatening conflagration fueled by presidential prerogative, patriotic frenzy and madness.

 

November will mark the 81st anniversary of the Nuremberg Trials, the military tribunal convened by France, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States after World War II. In his opening statement, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Johnson, who served as chief U.S, prosecutor, declared, “The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored because it cannot survive their being repeated.”

 

Those proceedings, undertaken to hold the surviving Nazi leadership accountable, recognized that even war required rules, that the whims of political leaders could not be allowed to cancel basic human rights. The Nuremberg Charter was an antecedent to the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which attempted to make clear that certain acts—including genocide and other crimes against humanity—could not be justified even by war.

 

Trump presumably would replace those international agreements with a consensus that the world would bow to his personal morality, which, as he put it, is “the only thing that can stop me.”

This summer, the United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, which put the nation on the path to a constitution, ratified in 1788, that created a set of checks and balances of the sort that Trump disdains. Instead, his view is that the presidency should elevate one American above all others, with the right to persecute (and prosecute) his critics, enrich himself and his friends, and threaten pesky smaller nations with annihilation.

It’s sobering to realize that millions of Americans are coming of age in an era when their view of the American presidency will be shaped by a vain, cruel man who preens and pretends he is a god who respects no one other than himself and no law other than those with which he agrees.

 

In a few years, Trump will be out of office, and indeed, may even be dead—an event that many of his critics will treat the same way Trump treated former prosecutor Robert Mueller’s death. “Good. I’m glad he’s dead,” Trump declared.

 

But even death will not be the end of Trump. This country and the world will be coping with the consequences of redefining the role of the president for some time. What that means is that an aspiring democracy that once seemed on a promising path to equal opportunity, governmental compassion, and accountability will find itself in an agonizing battle for America’s soul, with no guarantee that decency and integrity ultimately will prevail.