Donald Trump Wants an Etch A Sketch Presidency
Unfortunately for him, presidents don’t get to shake their past mistakes away.
By Dahlia Lithwick
While we try to absorb the enormity of Donald Trump’s decision to fire FBI Director James Comey—ostensibly because Comey had been too mean to Hillary Clinton; laughable considering the source—one thing is abundantly clear: How we respond to the rationalizations put forth by the Trump administration to justify its daily assaults on the law will determine whether the constitutional order on which we have relied for two centuries will survive. Whether we truly are teetering on the brink of a constitutional crisis, as some experts now posit, turns on whether the various governmental systems that exist to check authoritarian behavior can distinguish between that which is normal and that which is insane. It truly is that simple.
Lawyers, judges, and elected officials (not to mention the rest of us) wake up every day asking whether the crazy mess of pretexts and justifications proffered by Trump and his defenders really is a crazy mess or whether the fact that it is proffered by the president of the United States somehow makes it reasonable. It’s an inquiry separate and apart from whether it was “legal” or “permissible” to fire Comey. The legality of the firing is one thing—the better question is whether the reasons proffered for the firing are normal or reasonable. In essence, “are we nuts for even accepting this rationale?” has become the hottest game in town.
There is a useful legal lens through which to analyze this question, although it comes with a loftier name than “normal versus insane.” It was on display just this week, as the Trump administration attempted to defend its second try at the travel ban in federal appeals court. To do so, his lawyers demanded what’s called a “presumption of regularity.” That phrase means pretty much what you would expect, that we should assume that the president warrants tremendous judicial deference because he is assumed to be a regular, reasonably functional executive.
Donald Trump’s lawyer, Jeffrey Wall, used the words “presumption of regularity” four separate times in his argument defending the travel ban at the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals last Monday, May 1. And when challenged on whether judges would need to “willfully blind themselves” to the fact that Trump is not normal, Wall assured the court that the president’s activities don’t even come close to the line where we need to be probing such things.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2017/05/we_can_t_let_trump_shake_away_his_past_decisions.html?wpsrc=newsletter_tis&sid=5388f1c6dd52b8e4110003de
