When Donald Trump talks about the “phony emoluments clause” of the U.S. Constitution, what he is really saying is “it’s just the Constitution, get over it.”
Excepting of course the sacrosanct second amendment, slowly but steadily Trump has normalized violations of the Constitution until amid the chaos and debris, what was once unthinkable has become thinkable. Maybe Trump was right in 2015 when he said, “I could shoot somebody in the middle of Fifth Avenue and people would still vote for me.”
Wisdom from the Mad Hatter.
Asked how he consolidated power after assuming power constitutionally, the Fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini replied, “You pluck a chicken slowly, one feather at a time, and nobody notices.”
Over time, Mussolini plucked the democratic liberties and checks and balances from the Italian constitution. One at a time, he drew all those powers under his control and Italians didn’t notice it. At least for a while, until they shot him and hanged him upside down.
Trump’s politicization of the executive branch of our government is an attempt to consolidate power.
Perhaps more insidiously is the manner in which Trump has undercut the power of Congress to approve cabinet appointments by simply having “acting” agency heads. “Acting” agency heads are much less likely to push back against his reckless ideas, such as former Defense Secretary James Mattis did when Trump first proposed betraying our Kurdish allies by pulling troops out of Syria in December 2018.
Trump says of Syria, “It’s not our border. It’s 7,000 miles away.”
The border of South Korea and North Korea is also thousands of miles away. It is not our border, though much American blood was spilled over it. Besides, Trump’s sweetheart, North Korea’s Kim Jong Un sends him Valentine cards. What should we expect South Korea and Japan to think?
What about NATO allies Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia and their borders with Russia? The borders of our NATO allies are thousands of miles away. Whey should we care about NATO? Must we relearn the bitter lesson of the 1940s that isolationism is a tragic mistake and the world is much smaller than we might think or wish it to be?
The “phony emoluments clause” of our Constitution was set up exactly to deter future presidents like Trump who would seek to enrich or empower themselves through “favors” from foreign governments. It was what President George Washington most sternly warned against in his “Farewell Address.”
Trump believes he did not get caught by the Mueller investigation, so why not leverage (illegal) help against Joe Biden and the Democrats from a foreign government like Ukraine. Withholding bi-partisan approved military aid to Ukraine that helps them resist Putin’s Russian invasion in return for a “favor” for Trump conspicuously benefits just two people — Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
Trump loves dictators. Is America just the latest of countless benighted countries through the ages where the truth is whatever the king says it is?
Marty Ansley
Cinebar
