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Has Donald Trump been sent among us to demonstrate the foolishness of placing cult-like faith in the presidency?I don't mean "sent" in the literal sense, of course. Maybe it's more like he slipped and fell among us, tumbling backwards down the escalator of history, to land on the presidency just in time to squish the hopes of a political also-ran who thought the office was hers.Let's review just last week's parade of horribles (because this week's tales of poor judgment are coming too fast to keep up). There was the clumsy firing of James Comey, which managed to convert an FBI director about whom almost everybody harbored doubts into a martyr. He also left us to wonder whether it's worse that he thinks he originated the phrase, "prime the pump," or that he believes the Keynesian nostrum is a good idea. Then the White House apparently got pwned by a photographer for Russian state media, predictably feeding into the ongoing questions about the president's relationship with that country.The overall impression was certainly not that of "a soul nourisher, a hope giver, a living American talisman against hurricanes, terrorism, economic downturns, and spiritual malaise," as Gene Healy of the Cato Institute described Americans' vision for the nation's chief executive in an article published nine years ago in Reason and even more relevant today.Then again, Healy wasn't writing that Americans should view the presidency in that light—only that they've done so, to the detriment of the republic. Healy, who elaborated on his warnings in the 2008 book, The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, cautioned that Americans have piled impossible expectations on the office of the presidency, and increased its power to near-monarchical levels to match—but that authority is still unequal to the demands people place on the office . . .. . . Trump is profoundly and publicly unsuited for the demands of the presidency, but so is every human who might be elected to a post that has become more the object of cult-like veneration than an administrative office of limited and defined power. Trump is the turd we can't polish, but they're all turds. We just can't pretend otherwise with this guy.So maybe Trump has stumbled into his perfect moment—to demonstrate that the president is very definitely not going to live up to people's hopes and dreams. He just may be the right guy to deprogram our country's presidential cultists.Or maybe we'll just hope for the next president to do better, with a few more tools to sweep away obstacles, of course.
Good read, thanks.Some good points, too.
Thanks! But you really should read the Healy book to which Mr. Tuccille referred, too,and its followup:
Will the coordinated coup against a sitting President finally bring an end to the NT's tantrum?? TBR, May 16, 2017, Right_in_Virginia(I like mine better )
