TRUMP DISPLAYS A TOTAL DISREGARD FOR US LAWS

…I don’t believe President Lincoln would agree with this man.

 

Per Newt Gingrich, “Just pardon your advisors if they are found to have violated US laws!”

 

Well, now that we have Donald Trump as a US president, we have made it official as was stated by the Trump supporter: Newt Gingrich.  If the new president-elect and his cabinet of billionaires has some issue regarding a conflict of interests, then there is a simple solution.  Just ignore the laws.

 

Per the former disgraced House Speaker, Gingrich said, “Should those in his administration do as they wish with their personal fortunes and business interests, just pardon them if they are found to have violated laws against using public office for personal enrichment.” He could simply say, “Look, I want them to be my advisers, I pardon them if anybody finds them to have behaved against the rules, period’,” Gingrich said this on NPR’s “The Diane Rehm Show”.

 

As one Post writer has written: “ ’Drain the Swamp’ is so October”.

 

Gingrich had also said that he had heard that Trump really didn’t like the term “Drain the Swamp” and wasn’t going to use it anymore.  But then he went on social media and said that he had talked to the president-elect and that he had mis-spoke and Trump was still going to use the “Swamp” term.

 

But then just minutes later it was announced that Trump’s former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, was setting up a consulting firm (insert “Lobbyist” here) located near the White House that will profit from his proximity to the new president.  (Is that anyway to “Drain a swamp?”)  Lewandowski also told Fox News that “drain the swamp is probably somewhere down at the bottom of Trump’s to-do list”.  Based on Trump’s actions so far, that is probably an accurate statement.

 

Let’s face it, based on what the Trump family has done since the election, they are acting as if they can do as they please for selling access to the new president-elect.

 

First, the Trumps proposed to auction off access to Ivanka Trump as the bidding had already exceeded $72,000 in charitable contributions for just having coffee with the presidential daughter.  Then the two eldest Trump boys had to distanced themselves from another scheme to auction access to themselves for $500,000 for a hunting trip and for access to the incoming president for $1 million for a private reception with the new president.  Sounds more like expanding the swamp.

 

Do these individuals not understand any of the rules?  Well, according to the former House Speaker, Donald could just pardon the whole bunch.

 

The General Services Administration (GSA) has already said that Trump will be in violation of his lease agreement for the new Trump International Hotel in the old Washington US Post Office Building because the contract prohibits any US elected official from participating in or benefiting from the lease.  Trump needs to decide whether to try to oust the head of the IRS, which he says is auditing him, but the Trump Foundation had recently already admitted to the IRS that it had violated federal rules against self-dealing.

 

But let’s not forget the little matter of the US Constitution and its obscurely named “emoluments clause,” which forbids the receipt by a US official of funds or gifts from foreign governments. Trump has ties to hundreds of companies doing business in scores of foreign countries that would be exactly what this clause was meant to forbid.

 

The reality is that it is well known that Trump would need to either put every part of his business in a blind trust or to divest himself of all of his business holdings.  However, so far he has shown no intention of doing any of those actions.  Yes, there are no actual laws that say he can’t continue to run his business with the exception of the “emoluments clause”.  However the billionaires that he has nominated for the cabinet positions, those do present many more conflicts and are subject to additional ethics laws.

 

But Gingrich is correct that Trump’s “power of the pardon” could by law allow them to just travel down the road without breaking stride.

 

It that were to actually occur, it really would make the former Party of Lincoln into the Party of Trump.  When President Lincoln was a young Illinois lawyer in 1838, he had warned that a president’s disregard for laws would leave the United States vulnerable to its own Caesar or Napoleon.  Is that where we have now come to?

 

Lincoln had warned that the loss of the “political religion” of the rule of law would leave the country defenseless when an ambitious leader like a Donald Trump felt unconstrained by the founders’ framework and if they tried to create their own rules. “Is it unreasonable then to expect, that some man possessed of the loftiest genius, coupled with ambition sufficient to push it to its utmost stretch, will at some time, spring up among us?” Lincoln had asked. “And when such a one does, it will require the people to be united with each other, attached to the government and laws, and generally intelligent, to successfully frustrate his designs.”  Well, it’s apparently time for the American people to start “frustrating Mr. Trump’s designs”.

 

Unfortunately, that’s not what is occurring.  Just this week, a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll found that only 22% of the Americans polled have confidence in their federal government.  This former “attachment” to the US government has dissolved over the past two decades.  We’ve seen this through the shrinking of the American middle class.  We’ve also seen this through the prediction that for the first time since the end of WWII, the latest generation of American children will be less well off than the previous generation.

 

But many of the recent US presidents have also bent the past rules while they have been in office.

 

A number of American’s personal liberties were put aside by the 2^nd Bush administration, right after the 9/11 terrorist attack.  President Obama went against the GOP’s ideas of making him a one-term president when he used so many of his executive orders on immigration and health care issues.  Bill Clinton even lied under oath and Hillary was careless with classified information and casual about transparency laws.  She also often gave the impression that donors to her campaign and the Clinton foundation were paying for access to her high office.

 

But even with all this, Trump is an order of magnitude worse.  He is an incoming president directly at odds with the US Constitution, while many of his top aides have already flouted federal laws against self-dealing while his key adviser has proposed brazen law-breaking.

 

Where is President Lincoln’s attitude toward a president’s disregard for the laws when we need it?

 

Copyright G.Ater  2016