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Here is a brief and far from exhaustive list of excuses for, minimizations of, and attempts to change the subject from the abuses and misbehavior of the Trump administration that should be retired.
- “What Donald Trump is doing is not unprecedented.” That is true. It also is irrelevant in most cases. There are precedents for bribery and murder in politics, but that doesn’t mean we accept bribery and murder. And if an atomic bomb were about to go off in your backyard, there would be two precedents for that, too. As our happy gang discussed on a recent episode of The Dispatch Podcast, presidents before Donald Trump have tried to radically and unconstitutionally expand executive power, most significantly in the cases of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. President Wilson and his administration dispatched gangs of armed hooligans to attack and harass critics of the administration, imprisoned political opponents, and despised the Constitution as a savage relic. President Roosevelt put Americans into concentration camps and violated constitutional norms to become, in effect, president for life, spooking Americans to a sufficient degree that they ratified a constitutional amendment after his death … during his fourth term … to prevent that from happening again. Maybe President Jackbooted Thugs and President-for-Life Put ‘Em in Camps should not be, in that regard, raised up as our standards. Most Americans rightly understood the actions of those presidents as violations of our constitutional order and as aberrations—not as precedents to excuse future misbehavior by power-hungry presidents.
- “Donald Trump is arguably within his technical legal rights to do that outrageous thing he did.” That one also is true, except when it isn’t—as in the president’s refusal to enforce the law in the matter of TikTok and his other clear and obvious violations of the law. You can kill a man in self-defense if you have reasonable cause to believe that you are in imminent danger of death or grievous physical harm and that lethal force is the only way to prevent it. And you can show up at a guy’s front door at 2 a.m., knock on that door, shoot him in the face when he answers it, then insist that you had reasonable cause to believe that you are in imminent danger of death or grievous physical harm and that lethal force is the only way to prevent it. But you’ll go to jail. Just because there is a justifiable scenario that can be imagined does not mean we are living in that scenario. Trump’s various “emergencies”—the D.C. crime emergency, the supposed trade emergency—and other pretexts are no more defensible than those of that cretin in Las Vegas who claimed self-defense after he livestreamed himself hunting down a social-media rival—and his wife—and murdering them. Sure, as the apologists say: “You can make an argument.” You may do that. But your argument may also be dumb and unserious and deserve scorn.
- “The president hasn’t openly refused to comply with a Supreme Court ruling.” No, I suppose not, but then, O.J. Simpson never vowed to defy a court order, either. So what? Taking a case to the Supreme Court is a long, expensive, cumbrous undertaking, and the administration knows that many—indeed, most—of its daily abuses will never be challenged in court at all, while only a tiny handful of them will make it to the Supreme Court, where he might even win a few, as in Chief Justice John Roberts’ inexplicable invention of a presidential immunity found nowhere in the Constitution. During the first Trump administration, the president and his henchmen did more or less what they are doing now, i.e., just throwing everything they want at the wall and seeing what sticks. The last time around, the administration lost nearly 80 percent of the court challenges against it, either losing the case outright or withdrawing the action before it was ruled on. In the matter of Harvard—or the Fed, or John Bolton, or tariffs—the administration knows that it can inflict a great deal of harm on people—American citizens, in many cases—or institutions even if it fails to prevail in court. This is a very old technique described by the proverb: “The process is the punishment.”
- “Well, it’s not actually criminal.” Some of it probably is criminal, but a lot of Trump’s abuses are not that. So what? There are lots of things a president can do that are wrong, destructive, evil, unpatriotic, etc., that are not violations of the criminal law.
This isn’t one random thing after another—it is a consistent pattern of predictable behavior from a man who already has tried once to stage a coup d’état.
Trump is the toddler in the backseat of the Family Truckster who, when told not to touch his brother, holds an index finger an angstrom away from his sibling’s forehead while bleating, “I’m not touching you!” All of us—and Trump’s apologists most of all—know exactly what Trump is doing: He is seeing what he can get away with. He believes that his supporters and sycophants will accept virtually any degree of misbehavior from him—that they will celebrate it—and that our institutions are not equipped to deal with a president who cynically abuses power in this way.
And he is right on both counts.
Kevin D. Williamson is national correspondent at The Dispatch and is based in Virginia. Prior to joining the company in 2022, he spent 15 years as a writer and editor at National Review, worked as the theater critic at the New Criterion, and had a long career in local newspapers. He is also a writer in residence at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. When Kevin is not reporting on the world outside Washington for his Wanderland newsletter, you can find him at the rifle range or reading a book about literally almost anything other than politics.
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