When critics cried to the mountaintops that President Trump’s election posed an authoritarian threat to American democracy, we were calmer. Our system is planted thick with checks and balances, including institutions the primary roles of which include holding the president accountable. For that reason, we were confident that Trump, whatever his real or imagined flaws and intentions, wasn’t going to push us toward tyranny.
Whether acting on these overblown fears of tyranny or in response to Trump’s vulgarity and sloppiness, or simply in response to a president whose beliefs they oppose, too many people in our crucial institutions have abandoned norms and constraints. They have decided that they are part of the #Resistance, amorphous and self-aggrandized critics whose purposes are sufficiently vague both not to exclude many cranks and extremists and to attract some decent people.
Yesterday, in this space, we lamented federal judges who have become a robed corps within the #Resistance. Courts that have struck down Trump’s travel ban, a policy clearly within his powers, have made it clear that Trump’s foibles — his ugly tweets and perceived ill-intent — are behind their rulings. As we put it yesterday, “long-uncontroversial presidential powers are being challenged just because Trump is president.”
In the most charitable interpretation of their actions, these judges are disregarding the law to combat a president they see as uniquely evil. Just as likely, Trump’s vulgarity and crude rhetoric provide a cover story, and in truth these judges are destroying the rule of law to stop a president with whom they disagree.
But this grave constitutional problem isn’t limited to the judicial branch. Executive branch employees have found themselves shattering norms, too, and even shredding the rule of law in order to resist Trump. Again, they’re not obligated to go along with everything the president says or wants. Bureaucrats or appointees ought to disobey any illegal orders. But that’s not what some executive branch employees have been up to.
Former acting Attorney General Sally Yates became a #Resistance hero by refusing to enforce an executive order on immigration because she thought it “unjust.” In a memo that didn’t even assert that the order was illegal or unconstitutional, Yates made it clear she wouldn’t follow the law. Trump rightly fired her.
The precedent Yates set was that if a president’s policy is reviled enough by elite groups who believe they are entitled to govern this country, then bureaucrats and appointees are free to become a law unto themselves. The Constitution declaring that executive power rests with the president? That takes a back seat.
In a parallel sense, former FBI Director James Comey has abandoned norms on his book tour. Don’t take our word for it. Just ask former President Barack Obama and Clinton confidant David Axelrod. “As a central player, Comey should have waited for Mueller to finish his work” before publishing his book, Axelrod wrote on Twitter. He added that Comey should have “omitted the more personal attacks about @POTUS he justifies as literary flourishes. My view is that the timing & tone of his reemergence may be cathartic but they just aren’t helpful.”
Axelrod is thinking within the bounds of old norms and expectations of public officials and former public officials. Too many executive branch officials today believe their job is not to execute the law and carry out the chief executive’s instructions, as is proper, but instead to use their power to advance their own idea of what’s right and wrong.
They are wrong — grossly, lamentably, and culpably wrong. Our country is one of norms and laws. Our president often tramples norms, and he is ideologically at odds with most of the ruling class. The ruling class has responded by trampling more norms and disregarding the law.
That weakens the credibility of crucial institutions, which in turn is a threat to the American order.
