Will Trump Destroy the Presidency?

[struggle4progress]

JACK GOLDSMITH
OCTOBER 2017 ISSUE

... Trump’s bizarre behavior has coarsened politics and induced harmful norm-breaking by the institutions he has attacked. These changes will be harder to undo ...

Donald Trump is a norm-busting president without parallel in American history. He has told scores of easily disprovable public lies; he has shifted back and forth and back again on his policies, often contradicting Cabinet officials along the way; he has attacked the courts, the press, his predecessor, his former electoral opponent, members of his party, the intelligence community, and even his own attorney general; he has failed to release his tax returns or to fill senior political positions in many agencies; he has shown indifference to ethics concerns; he has regularly interjected a self-regarding political element into apolitical events; he has monetized the presidency by linking it to his personal business interests; and he has engaged in cruel public behavior ...

Trump’s norm violations are different. Many of them appear to result from his lack of emotional intelligence—a "president’s ability to manage his emotions and turn them to constructive purposes, rather than being dominated by them and allowing them to diminish his leadership" ... Trump’s behavior seems to flow from hypersensitivity untempered by shame, a mercurial and contrarian personality, and a notable lack of self-control.

A corollary to Trump’s shamelessness is that he often doesn’t seek to hide or even spin his norm-breaking. Put another way, he is far less hypocritical than past presidents—and that is a bad thing. Hypocrisy is an underappreciated political virtue. It can palliate self-interested and politically divisive government action through mollifying rhetoric and a call to shared values. Trump is bad at it because he can’t "recognize the difference between what one professes in public and what one does in private, much less the utility of exploiting that difference" ... He is incapable of keeping his crass thoughts to himself, or of cloaking his speech in other-regarding principle ...

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/10/will-donald-trump-destroy-the-presidency/537921/

[Kleveland]

1. Already has! n/t

[Initech]

2. I'm pretty sure that was the plan all along.

Republicans are like locusts - they destroy everything in their path.

[BigmanPigman]

3. Putin's and Bannon's plan is working out nicely...destroying the US

via the presidency.

[Turbineguy]

4. No.

Many will learn that it's an important enough position to elect a competent person for.

[Doreen]

5. I think he already has changed it.

I have an awful feeling that Obama was our last president. If trump is able to win 2020 it will go into a dictatorship and we will be the cross of Russia and North Korea. Our country is in danger of disappearing. This country already can not be called the U.S.A because united is the last thing we are. If someone were to ask me what country I live in I would just say America.

[Arkansas Granny]

6. Excellent article.

[N_E_1 for Tennis]

7. Very insightful article

The way it was presented, if you maintain a positive outlook, is quite hopeful. Problem being is that all the resistance to *him* must continue. The MSM must continue to point out the lies constantly being spouted. Congress must keep *him* under control and be vigilant to any unlawful incursions that *he* may try to pass by them.

We must continue to resist we cannot normalize the behavior of this imposter.

I feel that the presidency is like a rubber band you can stretch it almost out of shape, but it will rebound. It just can't be allowed to be stretched too far. So far I do believe that's being accomplished.