Just two weeks after Election Day, President-elect Donald Trump already is acting in ways more suited to a self-indulgent, power-mad Roman emperor than to the president of a constitutional republic.
More than a few of Trump’s early personnel announcements, combined with his demands and threats to greatly augment executive power, make clear that service to him — his whims, his grievances, and his unchecked authority — supersedes all other considerations. Personal character is of no account, nor is experience, nor is obeisance to constitutional guardrails.
Trump must be put back in his place, as a servant of the public rather than as an unconstrained ruler. As of now, Trump II’s pending reign bears too much resemblance to that of Caligula.
The Roman emperor from A.D. 37-41, Caligula was known for trying to expand the absolute power of the emperor, humiliate the Roman Senate, spend the public Treasury down to oblivion, and promote an orgiastic culture of decadence in his court.
Similarly, on sexual grounds alone, Trump’s incoming orbit is outlandish even by Washington, D.C.’s lax standards. Yet even those sexual grounds are less worrisome, in the long run, than the threatened abuse of power of which they are part.
Beginning with the least problematic, there is Gov. Kristi Noem (R-SD), nominated to head the Department of Homeland Security, whose dog-shooting escapades actually put her on the mild side of Team Trump’s personal-character disturbances. At least Noem has shown some executive-level talent, so she merits serious consideration for confirmation.
Department of Health and Human Services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr. made headlines this year when journalist Olivia Nuzzi was fired for engaging in a sexting relationship with him, which was tame by his extraordinary standards. A 14-year heroin abuser and dangerously nutty anti-vaxxer whose second wife committed suicide upon finding his journal with highly detailed accounts of affairs with 37 different women, Kennedy has spent his whole life on the left-wing political and cultural fringes.
And, of course, former Rep. Matt Gaetz, nominated for attorney general despite an almost-nonexistent legal career and a long record of trafficking with vile antisemites, seems to have frequently bragged about his hard partying with very young women — and allegedly older teenagers, although perhaps legal — while having suspiciously sent funds via Venmo to a pal who pleaded guilty to sex-trafficking minors.
Back when character mattered and people justifiably worried that high officials with dark secrets could be subject to blackmail, the Senate rejected the nomination of fellow longtime Republican Sen. John Tower of Texas specifically because of allegations of boozing and womanizing that weren’t even as bad as most of the Trump personnel choices mentioned above.
Alas, Trump’s crazy personnel choices are part of a larger battle. These aren’t just people loyal to the president-elect’s policy agenda but loyal first and foremost to Trump’s personal obsessions, grievances, and vendettas. Even some of the better-qualified Trump choices, such as Doug Collins (Veterans Affairs), Todd Blanche, Dean John Sauer, and Emil Bove (all at Justice), were Trump’s personal defense attorneys in criminal cases or (Collins) impeachment defense.
Those who are confirmed are openly charged with one main task: Blow things up. Break the boundaries. Enhance Trump’s power.
Yet there’s more. With nominees as radical and morally compromised as Gaetz and Kennedy — or worrisomely a shill for Russia’s Vladimir Putin and Syria’s Bashar Assad, as is intelligence nominee Tulsi Gabbard — part of Trump’s calculus appears to be to try to bring the Senate, indeed all of Congress, to heel. Already demanding that the Senate go into “recess” to allow his nominees to take office without a Senate vote and already floating a bizarre constitutional end-run to force a recess for that purpose even if the Senate wants to stay in session, Trump is trying to seize as much power as he can get away with.
Trump also has threatened to gut all civil service laws so he can “mak[e] every executive branch employee fireable by the president” and says he will defy law and Supreme Court language by “impounding” funds appropriated by Congress.
The historian Suetonius attributed to Caligula an exchange with “his grandmother Antonia,” when he answered some advice from Antonia by saying, “Remember that I have the right to do anything to anybody.”
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Likewise, Trump, mis-referring to the presidential section of the Constitution, has said, “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want.”
Well, no, he doesn’t. But the Senate must show the self-respect, not to mention the devotion to constitutional liberty, to stop him.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
