The threat from all the presidents' yes-men
By Jonathan Bernstein / Bloomberg Opinion
How do presidents get in trouble? Monday’s Jan. 6 committee’s hearing on Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election didn’t focus on that general question, but it did demonstrate something familiar to students of the presidency.
The committee heard former Attorney General William Barr and other witnesses say they had told the president flat-out that the fraud he was hearing about from various dubious sources had not happened. Trump chose to reject what the Justice Department, state governments and experienced professionals in his own presidential campaign told him, and to rely instead on nonsense conjured up by cranks.
Once again, we saw a president fail to accept — or, in Trump’s case, fail even to try to understand — that presidents are only one of many sources of legitimate authority within the U.S. political system. When presidents try to get their way despite failing to persuade those other political players to go along, they risk winding up surrounded by buffoons. The president’s plans blow up in his face, sometimes to the point of legal jeopardy.
That is one way to understand what brought down Richard Nixon’s presidency. Trump didn’t quite suffer Nixon’s fate, but he did wind up as the only president to be impeached twice, and the only one to have senators in his own party vote to convict him (with several others saying they would have done so had the clock not run out on his presidency). He still may wind up in considerable legal trouble. So Nixon’s story is instructive.
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