Since Donald Trump was sworn in as president in January 2017, he has put America’s democratic system under constant assault. The country has learned that, by itself, the Constitution is not enough to sustain effective and responsible government. This requires, in addition, norms of restraint and good conduct. The president hasn’t just neglected to abide by those norms: He has mocked and repudiated them.
One of the more striking features of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign was the bipartisan opposition to Donald Trump from inside the foreign-policy establishment. Democrats opposed him for obvious partisan reasons, but hostility to Trump was even more vehement on the Republican side.
In the wake of Trump’s election, signs of a grassroots activism in the tech industry have been everywhere: management-endorsed Googleplex protests; tech workers participating in their first political marches; executives from Tesla, Intel, and IBM leaving the president’s advisory councils. There’s also a growing realization that the most effective form of resistance is winning state and local elections.
Hillary Clinton says she made a mistake when she gave speeches on Wall Street after leaving government. Taking money from banks, she writes in her new memoir, created the impression she was in their pocket. Her old boss doesn’t seem to share her concern.
Max Boot, a lifelong conservative who advised three Republican Presidential candidates on foreign policy, keeps a folder labelled “Trump Stupidity File” on his computer. It’s next to his “Trump Lies” file. “Not sure which is larger at this point,” he told me this week. “It’s neck-and-neck.”
Has Trump undermined America’s constitutional order? Is he consolidating executive power the way democratically elected leaders such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan have? Or are U.S. institutions holding up reasonably well, either because they have proved to be surprisingly resilient or because Trump has been less adept at politics than he claimed to be?
