He is completing his project of fashioning the office around his own personality. It’s unrestrained, unaccountable, often profane, impervious to outside influence and factual constraints of normal governance. The President has established dominance over his party, his Cabinet and his own media complex. He loosened Congress’s constraints by refusing to cooperate with the impeachment probe.
The result is that there are very few political constraints on his behavior left.
Trump sent a strong signal of Washington’s new power realities Friday by ignoring pleas from the Republican senators who acquitted him and who had hoped to protect those who testified against him.
Republican senators have correctly pointed out that the President has the power to fire anyone in the executive branch and has the right to a team in which he has confidence.
“He’s a political appointee. He serves at the pleasure of the President,” South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” on Sunday, referring to Vindman.
Yet Trump’s moves, conducted so quickly after the ending of the impeachment showdown were a clear sign that those who cross him will pay a price — in a way that could send a chill through the government and stifle dissent and accountability. And they undermine the comments of GOP senators who in voting to acquit the President suggested that the shame of impeachment could temper his behavior.
Taking aim at the NSC
“He told me that they have created a process that Rudy could give information and they would see if it’s verified,” Graham, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, said. Graham also warned that any information Giuliani collected in Ukraine needed to be evaluated by Justice to ensure that it did not contain Russian propaganda. But given previous evidence that Barr is acting not as the independent arbiter of the US Justice system but as a political facilitator for the President, there will be extreme skepticism among Democrats about Justice handling Giuliani’s material at all.
Trump shows how he will use his new power
In a post-impeachment appearance at the White House last week, the President lashed out at his political enemies, even questioning the faith of some critics, hinting that he would use his power to exact vengeance.
He branded his opponents “evil,” compared those who investigated his presidency to “dirty cops,” blasted the Russia probe as “bullsh*t” and condemned his critics as “liars and leakers.”
From a historic perspective, the President’s consolidation of his own position is a political achievement that is not to be discounted. It is even more notable than his dominance of the Republican nomination chase in 2016 and remarkable for the fact that he had no prior political experience.
But it also raises profound questions about the balance between the branches of government and puts American democracy under the most strain that it has faced in decades.
And it raises the possibility that the President’s instincts could steer him on to more murky legal and constitutional ground. After all, his notorious “do us a favor” phone call with Ukraine’s President came just two days after ex-special counsel Robert Mueller testified on the Russian probe in Congress.
The President’s new-found political liberation is the culmination of three years of tearing at the norms of his office and of defanging competing centers of power. He has comprehensively answered the question posed at the beginning of his term: would he change to accommodate the presidency or bend the office in deference to his wild, unrestrained personality?
Trump has removed cabinet titans like former Defense Secretary James Mattis and former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson who worked to contain his more impulsive instincts. He has replaced them with more compliant loyalists, and also favors pliable and dispensable acting cabinet secretaries.
And he has discovered, especially during the impeachment drama, that a President who is willing to ignore the institutional restraints around his office and the normal codes of moral behavior that have attached themselves to his role can access a well of power that his predecessors were unable to tap.
That’s part of a reason why his presidency seems likely to set many new precedents for the behavior of the executive in the US political system before it ends — and why the current period up until the next election could be a particularly intense ride for Trump and the nation.
Source : Nbcnewyork