The Specter of Illegitimacy Haunts Trumps First 100 Days [View all]

[L. Coyote]

The Specter of Illegitimacy Haunts Trump’s First 100 Days
By Jonathan Chait

Donald Trump narrowly won his party’s nomination despite the clear misgivings of his party’s professional class, which viewed him as erratic, uninformed, and dangerous. He won the presidency despite losing by an unprecedented three million votes nationwide, with the benefit of extraordinary interventions by the FBI director and Russian intelligence to help criminalize and discredit his opponent. All these things add up to a crisis of legitimacy. And yet, rather than confronting the crisis of legitimacy hovering over them, all the actions Trump and his governing partners have taken over their first 100 days have deepened it.

Trump may have few traditionally defined achievements so far, but he has redefined the institution he occupies. Before Trump it would have been outrageous for a president to withhold his tax returns, and unthinkable for one to retain business holdings in office. Breaching both of those bygone norms together has created a change much larger than the sum of the two. He has constructed a full-on nontransparent oligarchy. The arrangement is more easily recognizable to autocrats than to Americans, which is why China’s government identified Jared Kushner as what is known in their system as a “princeling.”

Trump’s Republican allies have shut down Democratic bills to compel the president to disclose his tax returns, and raised no objection as his family has used his office to leverage their brand across the country and the globe. They have likewise slow-walked investigations into whether his campaign colluded openly with Russian hackers, or whether it was simply the unwitting beneficiary. Whatever comes out, the already-public evidence — from the financial ties between Russia and numerous Trump advisers, to Trump’s open exhortation for Russia to hack his opponent’s emails — implies the most devious subversion of the national interest since Richard Nixon covertly sabotaged the 1968 peace talks in Vietnam.

The most shocking degradation of office is the lowering of the standards of the office he has carried out. Whatever doubts Trump inspired about his fitness for office seem naïve in comparison to what has transpired. The president is childlike, impulsive, ignorant, and ostentatiously lazy. .................................