Why Donald Trump Needs to Take a Salary
There’s a reason the Framers wanted the president to get paid—and if their logic was good enough for George Washington, it should be good enough for Trump.
By Rob Goodman
November 15, 2016
In his first interview as president-elect, Donald Trump pledged that he will accept as little of the presidential salary as he can get away with. “I think I have to by law take $1, so I’ll take $1 a year,” he told CBS’s Leslie Stahl. “$400,000 you’re giving up,” she responded, as if this were some sort of public-spirited sacrifice.
It is anything but a sacrifice. The precedent of insisting that the president accept a salary—not in his interest, but in the public interest—is as old as the first Congress, even older. The American framers considered payment of the presidential salary an important duty under the Constitution, and the principle that moved them then matters just as much as it ever did: It confirms that the president serves the public, and not the other way around. If the Founders’ reasons were good enough to persuade George Washington, our first independently wealthy president, they should be good enough for Donald Trump.
If we remember Washington’s 1789 inaugural address for anything today, it’s probably for the halting and soft-spoken delivery that surprised some of its audience. But we generally forget that a promise at the very end made quite a bit of news in its day. Washington had declined a salary as commander of the revolutionary army (though he did have a lavish expense account). Now, he announced that he would continue that tradition and once again serve for free. As a general, Washington said, “the light in which I contemplated my duty required that I should renounce every pecuniary compensation.” Since then, he went on, “from this resolution I have in no instance departed. And being still under the impressions which produced it, I must decline as inapplicable to myself, any share in the personal emoluments … for the Executive Department.”
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http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/11/donald-trump-salary-george-washington-214458
