Charles P. Pierce: Always Remember: Every President Works for Us. Even President* Trump.

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http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a53273/trump-presidents-day/


Always Remember: Every President Works for Us. Even President* Trump.

A few thoughts on Presidents Day.

By Charles P. Pierce
Feb 20, 2017

"In many respects, it is an even more effective form of isolation than physical confinement. The prisoner doing a spell in solitary knows that he is cut off from other human beings. The president, however, is surrounded by large, adoring groups that give him the illusion of human contact when all they really do is act as an echo chamber for his thoughts."

—George Reedy, The Twilight of the Presidency.

snip//

I do not feel compelled to respect a president any more or less than I respect somebody I hire to fix my roof or paint my house. Whomever gets elected works for me. As to the office, well, I understand how it is a single unifying figure within the government, and how he—again, theoretically—represents the whole country. But, in my lifetime, the Oval Office has seen coups, burglaries, and illegal arms sales planned. It has been the venue for criminal mischief and illicit canoodling. That it is also the place where the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act were signed is the great paradox. But the idea that I have to respect The Presidency qua The Presidency is something that raises the hackles in my democratic conscience.

First of all, there's this commander-in-chief business. By constitutional mandate, the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces. Period. He is not my commander-in-chief. Neither is he yours. Neither is he the commander-in-chief of the civilian government. The Congress can tell him to go whistle. The Supreme Court can slap his agenda back in his face. Nobody outside the military has to salute him. But, in every presidency, there's a temptation to push the commander-in-chief prerogatives a little further into the civilian sphere, and this is powerfully dangerous. To his credit, Garry Wills has been railing against this for years. He points out that, when Richard Nixon decapitated the Watergate Special Counsel's office, Alexander Haig presumed to tell assistant attorney-general William Ruckelshaus that Ruckelshaus' "commander-in-chief" had given him an order. Ruckelshaus told Haig to pound sand and got fired. Nixon wasn't Ruckelshaus' commander-in-chief. He was just his boss. As Wills wrote in the Times:

The glorification of the president as a war leader is registered in numerous and substantial executive aggrandizements; but it is symbolized in other ways that, while small in themselves, dispose the citizenry to accept those aggrandizements. We are reminded, for instance, of the expanded commander in chief status every time a modern president gets off the White House helicopter and returns the salute of marines. That is an innovation that was begun by Ronald Reagan. Dwight Eisenhower, a real general, knew that the salute is for the uniform, and as president he was not wearing one. An exchange of salutes was out of order. (George Bush came as close as he could to wearing a uniform while president when he landed on the telegenic aircraft carrier in an Air Force flight jacket). We used to take pride in civilian leadership of the military under the Constitution, a principle that George Washington embraced when he avoided military symbols at Mount Vernon. We are not led — or were not in the past — by caudillos.

Which, in a master irony that Wills did not intend when he wrote that in 2007, brings us to our current situation on this Presidents Day. So far, the president* has produced a distressing amount of evidence that he is on the wrong side of the concerns expressed by both George Reedy and Garry Wills. He has bunkered himself in the isolation of his office with sycophantic lightweights and wildmen. And he certainly has shown a sweet-tooth sharpened into a fang for the quasi-military aspects of his office, surrounding himself with retired generals and claiming that he knows more about military matters than they do anyway.

Mercy Otis Warren, the great pamphleteer of Revolutionary Boston, and one of the avatars of this particular shebeen, in her doubts about the new federal Constitution, saw within in the possibility that, two centuries and change later, the system therein devised would cough up someone like the current president*.

And when patriotism is discountenanced and publick virtue becomes the ridicule of the sycophant—when every man of liberality, firmness and penetration who cannot lick the hand stretched out to oppress, is deemed an enemy to the State—then is the gulph of despotism set open, and the grades to slavery, though rapid, are scarce perceptible—then genius drags heavily its iron chain — science is neglected, and real merit flies to the shades for security from reproach…

Perhaps the best way to celebrate Presidents Day this year is to recognize what the office is—and, especially, what it is not. We do not serve as citizens at the pleasure of the president. He serves at ours.