...and Narcissistic, Megalomaniacal, Anti-Constitutional Presidentialism

The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world.

This quote will be shared often and tediously. Nevertheless, those who study the Constitution and retain some loyalty to it should still take note of it and retain their capacity for astonishment, the absence of which is the surest sign that one is either dull-witted or has willingly fitted himself for the abbatoir.

One does not, in sooth, expect Donald Trump to have either much knowledge of the Constitution or the slightest interest in it, both points that I take it are viewed as positives by many of his mass of supporters. ("Supporters" as opposed to his voters, whose individual reasons to vote for him and whose expectations surely vary widely. And "mass" as opposed to his supporters in the intelligentsia, who appreciate Trump not for his "ideas" but, variously, for his willingness to offer this or that transactional good for which they have a high-intensity preference and are willing to ignore a few principles and scruples to see it achieved; for the personal benefits he may provide them, or the whips he may use on their perceived enemies; for his provision of some ersatz form of post-liberalism as a kind of entertainment, from whose devastating real-world effects they are largely insulated by wealth and tenure; or for his skills as a wrecker, which they imagine will clear the ground for the fantasy regime they eagerly await.) Normally, Trump supplies the desire, whim, ignorant belief, or impulse, or the perceived slight to which he is responding. It is left to whatever semblance of a lawyer, expert, or intellectual can still be found--in, as the line goes, the nearest gutter--to fit that impulse to a form of words, a dangerous, overly capacious, formerly-disdained, and/or dishonestly* misinterpreted statute, a tyrannous interpretation of constitutional text, later-acquired facts or allegations, a pretense of a vision or philosophy, or, often enough, an inconsistent, ever-shifting, or revisionist set of pretended justifications for whatever it is he just wants to do.   

For this reason, whatever else one might think of his garrulity and lack of restraint, the fact that he has turned Twitter and TruthSocial into the semi-official means of government communication, and the fact that he thinks and speaks with the frequency and intellectual limitations one has come to expect of social media addicts, we should be grateful for his logorrhea in this instance. With or without a theory of a unitary executive on steroids, Donald Trump's constitutional vision is what Donald Trump--not his mouthpieces, apologists, or supplicants--say it is. If you want to know what the Khmer Rouge wanted, you don't ask the ghost of Malcolm Caldwell; you count the damn skulls. So I am in this sense grateful to Trump for offering a clear, succinct, and precise account of what he thinks the presidency is, what he thinks of Congress and the states, what he thinks of the Bill of Rights, what he thinks conservatism is, and what he thinks of every other country on the planet. Doubtless I would have disagreed with and opposed him on many things, but all things considered I would have preferred President Franck.  

One notes in passing that, as is to be expected, Trump manages multiple lies and errors several times even in so short a span of words. And that the people he slanders as "crooked" were, in many cases, precisely the ones who made some measure of lawful and competent government possible in the 2017-21 Trump presidency. In their absence, we have only the man and his words, which we are now obliged to take both seriously and literally.

*The most striking thing about AG Bondi's memo last week rescinding the Biden administration's policy against issuing subpoenas to journalists was not the fact of the rescission, nor did it have anything to do with its legality, its open and vulgar partisanship, or even the Trump regime's general hostility to mediating institutions of all kinds. It was the fact that Bondi's memo cited, as an example of "unauthorized disclosures that undermine President Trump's policies," this very news story, which reported that the Trump regime's basis for an invocation of extraordinary coercive power was a knowing lie. Judges considering the degree of deference they owe to the justifications and purported facts proffered by the regime, and the degree to which they should presume any regularity on the part of the regime, are, I'm sure, aware--and certainly can and should be--of the extent to which its law enforcement apparatus's policies and actions are designed to enable it to lie to the courts, among others, without the inconvenience of contradiction by the truth.