He keeps asking the same question—“What happens if I do this?”—and the answer from those who should be defending democracy is always: nothing.
Republished with permission from Thom Hartmann
Donald Trump isn’t just breaking norms, he’s running a live experiment on the limits of American power. Each move is a test: How far can a president go? What laws and how much of the Constitution can be ignored? And, most importantly, will anyone actually stop him?
It took the King of England to remind Congress that their job is to restrain a president, not cheer him on no matter what. Charles III said:
“The U.S. Supreme Court Historical Society has calculated that Magna Carta is cited in at least 160 Supreme Court cases since 1789, not least as the foundation of the principle that executive power is subject to checks and balances.”
King Charles was essentially begging Congress to restrain Donald Trump’s imperial overreach, the most glaring example of which is his starting a war with Iran without congressional approval and in violation of both the US Constitution, the 1973 War Powers Act, and the Geneva Convention.
It’s a lesson America first lost touch with when President Harry Truman got us into the Korean War without Congressional authorization, was amplified by LBJ and Nixon in Vietnam and Reagan in Granada, and has since led through a series of modern presidential actions straight to Trump joining Netanyahu to bomb Iran without Congress, provocation, or legal basis.
Both parties have been complicit in this, generally in support of their own presidents while questioning the actions of presidents of the other party, but the actions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney—and Obama’s failure to respond to them—most directly led to Trump’s excesses.
George W. Bush came into office wanting to start a war with Iraq as a strategy to get himself re-elected in 2004 and “have a successful presidency.” In 1999, when Bush decided he was going to run for president in the 2000 election, his family hired ghostwriter Mickey Herskowitz to pen the first draft of Bush’s “autobiography,” A Charge To Keep.
“I’ll tell you, he was thinking about invading Iraq in 1999,” Herskowitz told reporter Russ Baker in 2004. He told Baker that Bush said:
“One of the keys to being seen as a great leader is to be seen as a commander-in-chief. My father had all this political capital built up when he drove the Iraqis out of (Kuwait) and he wasted it.
“If I have a chance to invade Iraq, if I had that much capital, I’m not going to waste it. I’m going to get everything passed I want to get passed and I’m going to have a successful presidency.”
Cheney, meanwhile, was in a world of trouble because of a huge asbestos bet he’d made as CEO of Halliburton in 1998. The company was facing possible bankruptcy.
In July of 2000, Cheney walked away with $30 million from the troubled company and the year after that, as Bush’s now-Vice President, Halliburton subsidiary KBR suddenly received one of the first no-bid no-ceiling (no accountability and no limit on how much they could receive) multi-billion-dollar military contracts that arguably rescued the company.
Bush and Cheney both had good reason to want to invade Afghanistan in October 2001 for their own selfish purposes, the law and public good be damned.
- Bush was unpopular and seen as an illegitimate president at the time because his father’s corrupt appointee on the Supreme Court, Clarence Thomas, had cast the deciding vote in the Bush v Gore lawsuit that made him president; he wanted a war that would give him legitimacy and the aura of leadership.
- Cheney’s company was in a crisis, and Afghanistan War no-bid contracts helped turn around Halliburton from the edge of bankruptcy into one of the world’s largest defense contractors today, adding a fortune to Cheney’s family’s holding of Halliburton stock.
Under Bush’s and Cheney’s command, American forces committed numerous war crimes—including torture, murder, slaughter of civilians including children, and kidnapping/rendering to “black sites”—that earned America universal condemnation. Our reputation was damaged, but, even worse, the precedent of an untouchable, unaccountable presidency was established.
That could have been stopped by Congress, but the body failed; the crime was then compounded when Barack Obama came into office in January, 2009 with a 257-198 Democratic majority in the House and a 60-vote supermajority in the Senate. They had real political power, but instead of holding these two liars and war criminals to account, President Obama said, when asked if he was going to prosecute them:
“I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.”
When he and Democrats in Congress took that position—much like House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries saying this Sunday on Fox “News” that impeaching Trump is not a priority if they take power in this November’s election—they let Bush and Cheney off the hook and thus pretty much guaranteed that Trump would overreach and commit war crimes, as he has done.
After all, if Obama and congressional Democrats let Bush and Cheney get away with what everybody in America knew was a series of deadly lies that cost us both lives and treasure, why would Trump think that any Democrat would ever try to hold him accountable for the same thing?
Which is exactly why it’s so important for Democrats to abandon appeasement and hold Trump accountable for his many crimes in office—from taking bribes and selling pardons to tearing down part of the White House to bombing Iran—if they regain the power of the subpoena and impeachment this fall.
Instead of telling Trump in advance that he’ll skate just like Reagan, Bush, and Cheney did, Jeffries and Schumer should be loudly proclaiming that there will be accountability.
This sort of behavior—by presidents of both parties—has to stop. It’s wrong, it’s illegal, it’s unconstitutional, and it destroys the world’s confidence in America as a moral force.
Taking on Trump is also good politics.
A recent Strength in Numbers/Verasight poll found 55% of all voters support impeaching Trump, with especially strong backing among Democrats. One-in-five of Trump’s own voters want him impeached and at least 85 members of the House are on record for holding him accountable. A Quinnipiac University poll found that fully 95% of Democrats support prosecuting Trump on federal charges.
A hereditary king praising restraints on executive authority before the U.S. Congress was both historically ironic and politically elegant: King Charles III was reminding Congress not to tolerate a man trying to become the kind of ruler our Founders rejected. As he pointed out, free nations only survive as free when executive power is answerable to Congress, the people, and the law.
Democrats damn well better be paying attention.
At some point, this stops being just about Trump. It becomes about whether the United States still believes in accountability at all. Because if the answer to every abuse of power is still “nothing,” then the destruction of American democracy isn’t just continuing, it’s succeeding.
Thom Hartmann, one of America’s leading public intellectuals and the country’s #1 progressive talk show host, writes fresh content six days a week. The Monday-Friday “Daily Take” articles are free to all, while paid subscribers receive a Saturday summary of the week’s news and, on Sunday, a chapter excerpt from one of his books.
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