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A GUEST COLUMN BY SCOTT GALUPO
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In September of 2020, two former White House officials — Democrat Bob Bauer and Republican Jack Goldsmith — published After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency, a concrete set of proposals to reform the office that had become simultaneously vulnerable to “dangerous excesses of authority” and “dangerous weaknesses in accountability.”
“The often-feckless Trump also revealed deeper fissures in the structure of the presidency that, we worry, a future president might choose to exploit in a fashion similar to Trump — but much more skillfully, and to even greater effect,” the authors wrote.
Little could they have known that the “future president” who would so exploit these fissures would be Trump himself in a second, nonconsecutive administration.
That future is now.
Both parties need to commit to ensuring it never happens again — that this anti-republican moment does not become permanent.
It is in neither’s party’s interest for it to continue.
Whatever one chooses to call this present state of affairs — a kleptocracy, quasi-monarchy, illiberal democracy, competitive or personalist authoritarianism — it is antithetical to the republican principles the Founders entrusted to the care of the American people in 1787.
First and most pressing — never resolved during the first term and magnified to a remarkable degree in the second — is the conflict posed by the president’s web of private family business ventures. Compelling the presidential entourage and security detail to pay for lodging at Trump properties, an ongoing abuse of power, to be sure, seems a trifle when compared to accepting a $400 million airplane and $2 billion in cryptocurrency investment from his Qatari and Emirati friends.
We may never know the full extent of Trump’s entanglements with foreign governments seeking his favor, whether in the form of, for instance, tariff relief (Vietnam) or computer chips (the UAE).
The point is, we should not have to wonder.
We need to return to the ethos under which public officials sought to avoid even an appearance of a conflict of interest.
Bauer and Goldsmith recommend a ban on presidential participation in a business interest. They write: “The president should not be able to maintain an active or supervisory role in the oversight of any businesses in which he or she has an interest on the day he or she takes the oath of office.” This wouldn’t mean full divestiture of assets; wealthy businessmen and -women need not be discouraged from running for high office. Neither would it mean a “blind trust.” The public has a right to see not just the headline value of a president’s assets, but to “all the information necessary to detect or evaluate any connection between his official duties and personal business interests.”
Note how in the examples of Vietnam and UAE above the administration’s entanglement of private business with the public interest is cross-pressured: In one case, he wields the “stick” of the state (tariffs) and in the other a “carrot” (permission to transfer chips essential for artificial intelligence) and created at least the appearance of receiving favorable private business outcomes.
Which brings us to the subject of tariffs: The president can’t unilaterally and broadly impose them as he has under dubious emergency authority. They raise revenue. Under Article I, Section 7 of the Constitution, all revenue must originate in the House of Representatives, specifically the Committee on Ways and Means. (It’s simple and clear. You can look it up.)
The Supreme Court may adjudicate this particular dispute sooner rather than later. But it’s an institutional prerogative every candidate for office should reaffirm. The Founders had good reason not to allow the chief executive to raise money (or an army!) on his own. After all, even kings needed parliaments to raise taxes. When you see American and European CEOs and leaders of other countries falling all themselves to avoid the cudgel of tariffs, while the Congress sits idly by, you glimpse the power of a monarchy. Of the fusion of one man, his privately-held business, and the state. Of “ L’etat c’est moi .”
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If you think blanket tariffs are a good idea, have at it. Pass a law.
Also, if you think bribing the president is a no-no, the law needs to be clarified.
Amazingly, according to Bauer and Goldsmith, it’s not certain whether statutory law against bribery is applicable to the president. Congress can fix this and, while they’re it, make sure that it’s clear that a president can’t accept a bribe in exchange for a pardon.
To repeat: The issue of corruption and financial entanglement, of bribery and pay-for-play schemes, should not have a partisan valence. If you are a Trump-supporting Republican who sincerely believes President Trump is guilty of none of these things, has kept an impregnable wall between his office and his business, then imagine how you’d feel if a businessman you didn’t like — say, Mark Cuban — became president. Which guardrails would you like to see in that case?
While we’re at it, would you be simpatico with a King Gavin Newsom sending the U.S. Marines into your town?
If not, then let’s agree that if a president deploys troops or National Guardsmen on American soil — which a president is authorized to do if there is a breakdown in civilian law enforcement — he or she must consult with Congress and periodically (say, every two weeks) justify via public report why the deployment is still necessary.
Notice what I haven’t brought up. Immigration. Gender norms. Wokeness. DEI. Vaccines. Nor Obamacare or “affordability” or monetary policy or guns. Things about which we can have spirited debates. Nor have I brought up Russia or Ukraine or Gaza or Venezuela. Nor the Epstein Files. Nor even the remarkable politicization of the Department of Justice, an agency whose firewall against political interference from the White House, fraught for decades, has always been more norms-based than statutory.
My remit here is narrow: to join both parties in a reaffirmation of a presidency that is above suspicion, free from financial conflicts, and within its broadly accepted Article II powers under the Constitution.
Quite simply, we can’t lurch between republicanism and whatever-it-is-we’ve-got-now.
That should not be a choice on the menu. That’s not doing politics the right way. Effectively, that’s not doing politics at all.
I’m paraphrasing, of course, Ezra Klein’s soul-searching essay in the wake of the assassination of Charlie Kirk. He meant it in the context of increasing concerns over the culture of commentary in the social media era, of unhinged rhetoric that encourages violence. I share those concerns. But we have seen political violence in America before. Violence is baked into our political DNA. The late novelist Philip Roth called it the “indigenous American berserk.”
What’s new is America doing the republic the wrong way.
With a nod to Ben Franklin, it’s not too late to keep it.
Scott Galupo is a freelance writer living in Arlington, Va. In addition to contributing to The American Conservative, he writes for TheWeek.com and reviews live music for The Washington Post. He was formerly a staff writer for The Washington Times and worked on Capitol Hill.
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