Trump faces rising storm of historical challenges
Donald Trump’s grandiosity may or may not have been clinically diagnosed, but there is a dimension of his 100-day presidency that is unique: None of his predecessors has so quickly become entangled in as many constitutional conflicts, historical errors and false statements as those committed by the 45th president.
You need not be a mathematician to add up, even modestly, the dozens of President Trump’s violations of the Emoluments Clause, which prohibits the president from receiving compensation or gifts from foreign governments. Every time a foreign official rents a room or leases suites of offices at any of Trump’s businesses — from New York to Washington to Ankara — the money that goes into his business, and into his pocket, constitutes a violation of that constitutional provision.
Does anyone think that foreign officials who “negotiate” leases are going to quibble with the price tag imposed by management? No foreign tenant is getting a family discount. If, as one foreign official remarked, it would be “rude” to travel to Washington and not stay at the Trump hotel down the street from the White House, would it not be equally inappropriate to haggle over the cost of a suite? What’s a yuan or two between friends, anyway?
President Trump’s stunning lack of historical knowledge and, more broadly, civic education, distinguishes him from his predecessors. His observation that Andrew Jackson was growing “angry” about the Civil War, and that the Tennessean could have averted the war if only he had taken office at a later date, left White House aides and supporters scrambling to clean up that gaffe. Jackson died 16 years before the Civil War began.
President Trump’s assertions about Jackson’s time and place reminds us of his earlier misstep when he observed that Frederick Douglass is “someone who’s doing an amazing job,” and “getting recognized more and more.” If Trump is uninterested in discerning that Douglass, one of the most remarkable persons in the sweep of American history, died 125 years ago, then his administration needs to hire a historian to save the president from himself.
It’s likely that President Trump will continue to engage in historical errors, and more than likely that Americans will witness a rising storm of constitutional conflicts, as a result of the congressional investigations into ties between the Trump campaign and Russian officials.
We should expect that congressional committees will exercise their constitutional authority to issue subpoenas to Trump operatives, and that President Trump will seek to block former and current aides from testifying by invoking the doctrine of executive privilege. It seems likely, as well, that Trump will invoke that doctrine to refuse the demands of committees for various documents, including, perhaps, his taxes.
In a conflict between the well-grounded constitutional authority of Congress to issue subpoenas pertinent to an investigation, and the constitutionally sketchy assertion of executive privilege, Congress can prevail — if it has the will to prevail. Its arsenal of powers, ranging from control of appropriations to approval of executive programs and policies, as well as the ultimate weapon, that of impeachment, guarantees congressional access to anything that the Trump Administration possesses.
But matters of political partisanship and party allegiance could deter GOP committees from pursuing the evidence, “wherever it leads.”
President Trump holds a constitutional wildcard that would enable him to scuttle the investigations, if he wishes to play it. The sweeping presidential power to grant pardons might be employed, for example, to protect son-in-law and White House adviser Jared Kushner, or aides including his former National Security Adviser, General Mike Flynn, from testifying before congressional committees.
As it happens, presidential pardons may be granted before trial, even before congressional testimony is requested or subpoenaed, except, as the Constitution provides, “in cases of impeachment.”
What you see on the horizon is a constitutional storm rising.
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Dr. David Adler is President of the Alturas Institute. He has lectured nationally and internationally on the Constitution and presidential power. He will be speaking at the Coeur d’Alene Library Thursday at 7 p.m. (doors open at 6) on the subject, “Executive Orders and Executive Power in the Trump Presidency.”