The President’s Self-Destructive Disruption

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/11/opinion/donald-trump-tradition-disruption.html

Version 0 of 1.

Donald Trump ran for the White House as a change agent hostile to the habits of Washington, the place he nicknamed “the swamp.” It worked. But the customs he continues to upend as president are the scaffolding that supports the otherwise fragile words of our written Constitution. Mr. Trump’s rejection of them is more threatening to both his presidency and our constitutional regime than any technical violation of the law that he has been accused of (at least so far).

Customs are the punctuation marks of republican politics, the silent guides we follow without pausing to consider their authority. They operate in a space that is difficult for formal rules to codify. That the president of the United States speaks with caution and dignity, that he exercises the pardon power the Constitution grants him soberly rather than wantonly, that he respects the independence of law enforcement, and that, to the extent reasonable politics permit, he speaks truthfully — these are all customs, not laws. Law is powerless to impose them and powerless without them.

When Mr. Trump drains language of its normal meaning, the law can do nothing about it. His ridiculing of the United States senator who leads the Foreign Relations Committee, his repeated use of the word “fake” to describe news coverage when he actually means “unpleasant” and his style of rhetoric in front of the United Nations, where he called terrorists “losers” and applied a childish epithet to the head of a nation in whose shadow tens of thousands of American troops serve and with whom nuclear war is a live possibility, are all cases in point. There is no way to formalize conventions of maturity and dignity for presidents. Custom fills that void.

Mr. Trump’s prodigious abuse of language violates the custom according to which presidents use words to convey serious meanings. Examples arrive daily, but here are a few more. The president has promised to decree his way to better health care, which he cannot constitutionally do. He has repeatedly tweeted threats at North Korea whose imprecision has turned red lines into smudges. He zigs and zags between alliances with and attacks on other constitutional officers in such a way that no one can constructively work with him. Yet all of these abuses of language are violations of custom, not law.

When he violates such customs, Mr. Trump is at his most impulsive and self-destructive. It may sound ridiculous to invoke James Madison or Edmund Burke when we talk about this president, but that is part of the problem. Mr. Trump could profit from the wisdom of his predecessor Madison, for whom the very essence of constitutionalism lay not in what he derided as “parchment barriers” — mere written commands there was no will to follow — but rather “that veneration which time bestows on every thing.” The Constitution, in other words, would be only as strong as the tradition of respecting it.

Burke, the foremost expositor of the authority of custom, preferred “the collected reason of ages, combining the principles of original justice with the infinite variety of human concerns” to “personal self-sufficiency and arrogance, the certain attendants upon all those who have never experienced a wisdom greater than their own.”

Burke is generally seen as the progenitor of modern conservatism, but Mr. Trump, who came late to the conservative cause, is said to be so hostile to custom that his staff knows the best way to get him to do something is to tell him it violates tradition. The tweeting, impulsivity, lying, interference with prosecutorial independence, incautious rhetoric about war and peace, demagogic campaign rallies masked as presidential addresses and the like are all violations of informal customs of presidential behavior. They also tend to be the moments when Mr. Trump makes his worst mistakes.

Of course, it is a conceit of many presidents — conceit being all but a constitutional qualification of the office — that they are saviors who, by force of personality, will transform all that preceded them. Most ultimately find the traditions of the office to be a shield. Mr. Trump is finding them to be a constraint he cannot bear. Worse, because many elements of his base associate these customs with failed politics, every violation reinforces the sense that he sides with them over a corrupt establishment.

Historically, conservatism has tended to value light governance, for which custom is even more essential. Aristotle writes that “when men are friends they have no need of justice.” In other words, rules enter where informal mechanisms of society have collapsed. The philosopher and statesman Charles Frankel summed it up powerfully: “Politics is a substitute for custom. It becomes conspicuous whenever and wherever custom recedes or breaks down.”

Mr. Trump’s many critics are not all guiltless on this score. Since Woodrow Wilson’s critique of the framers’ work, progressive legal theory has generally denied that the meaning of the original Constitution, as endorsed by generational assent, wields authority because it is customary. Much of libertarian theory elevates contemporary reason — the rationality of the immediate — above all else. Both schools of thought assume that individual reason, here and now, is better at resolving social and political questions, in all their dimensions of infinite complexity, than the accumulated wisdom of custom.

The president’s daily, even hourly, abuse of language is also deeply problematic for a republic that conducts its business with words and cannot do so if their meanings are matters of sheer convenience. The unique arrogance of Mr. Trump’s rejection of the authority of custom is more dangerous than we realize because without custom, there is no law.