Happy Independence Day!
We begin today’s roundup with Eugene Robinson at The Washington Post, who pulls no punches in noting that Donald Trump is nothing like our founding fathers or past presidents:
We have a president who neither understands nor respects the basic norms of American democracy. Make no mistake: Donald Trump is a true aberration. There is no figure like him in U.S. history, for which we should be thankful.
Trump’s inexperience is unique; he is the only president never to have served in government or the military. This weakness is exponentially compounded by his ignorance of both policy and process, his lack of curiosity, his inability to focus and his tremendous insecurity. He refuses to acknowledge his shortcomings, let alone come to terms with them; and he desperately craves the kind of sycophantic adulation that George Washington, a genuine hero, pointedly rejected. [...]
The Founders, mindful of their own faults, ultimately designed a system to contain a rogue president. They limited his elective term to four years, gave checking and balancing powers to the legislative and judicial branches, and designed impeachment as a last-ditch remedy. The Trump presidency compels all of us to be mindful of our constitutional duties.
David Remnick at The New Yorker:
Donald Trump, who, in fairness, has noted that “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job,” represents an entirely different tradition. He has no interest in the wholeness of reality. He descends from the lineage of the Know-Nothings, the doomsayers and the fabulists, the nativists and the hucksters. The thematic shift from Obama to Trump has been from “lifting as we climb” to “raising the drawbridge and bolting the door.” Trump may operate a twenty-first-century Twitter machine, but he is still a frontier-era drummer peddling snake oil, juniper tar, and Dr. Tabler’s Buckeye Pile Cure for profit from the back of a dusty wagon.
Trump is hardly the first bad President in American history—he has not had adequate time to eclipse, in deed, the very worst—but when has any politician done so much, so quickly, to demean his office, his country, and even the language in which he attempts to speak? Every day, Trump wakes up and erodes the dignity of the Presidency a little more.
John Avlon on patriotism in the Trump era:
And so, this Fourth of July, the challenge is to widen the aperture of our patriotism beyond the president. We are living through a stress test to the American system and we can’t afford to simply tune out or bask in the cynicism of moral relativism. Liberal democracy is not a guarantee and the alternatives have proven themselves worse in every way for fans of individual liberty.
But we can take comfort from the fact that our founders designed the Constitution with someone very much like Donald Trump in mind. The Achilles heel of democracy was always the danger that people would fall under the sway of a demagogue with authoritarian ambitions. That’s why the founders divided power into three equal branches of government, strengthened with a series of internal and external checks and balances. Participating in the legislative and judicial branch—let alone state and local government—doesn’t get as much attention as presidential-level politics, but it is just as essential to the overall stability of our system.