![]() ![]() As his presidency progressed, Trump made millions from visits to his properties by well off Americans and foreigners who came with the expectation that he would be there and hear them out. The second shock to democratic norms came from Trump’s refusal, once in office, to divest himself of his business interests. Although we still don’t have Trump’s tax returns, his legal troubles since then constitute a good argument for why we should see all the tax returns of major party candidates, to enable media and the general public to vet the next potential president. Writing in Eisen’s volume, Virginia Canter makes the case for tax transparency. The reason it came as a surprise is that since 1976 all major party nominees for president (with the sole exception of Republican Gerald Ford) have voluntarily released their tax returns.Īnd yet when Trump refused to make his returns public, first during the campaign and then while in the White House, people realized that this norm was so important that it should be a law. To the surprise of many, there is no law requiring presidential candidates to make their tax returns public. ![]() ![]() The first two deal with the fact that, unlike all previous presidents, Donald Trump refused to separate his public life from his business life. But there are other, newer action items in the volume that come as the result of unprecedented behavior by President Trump that broke longstanding norms. In one way or another, all of these vulnerabilities came into sharper focus during the Trump era. Some of the action items are oldies but goodies-concern about money in politics, fights against voter suppression, unease over lax congressional oversight, and debates over the filibuster, for instance, have been sources of concern about the health of American democracy for some time. Each of the ten essays in the book provides a valuable road map to action most of these are legal reforms that would codify or clarify norms that have governed modern American politics and government for at least a half century.Īs befits a Brookings publication, the book is a comprehensive roadmap to action. In it he pulls together thirteen heavyweight legal scholars who tackle a set of issues related to what Eisen calls “Trumpery … a disdain for ethics, the rule of law and the structures and values of democracy itself”. When that happens in a society, people ask-why isn’t there a law against this? My Brookings colleague, Norm Eisen, has produced an edited volume-called Overcoming Trumpery: How to Restore Ethics, the Rule of Law and Democracy-that answers that question. But the candidacy and presidency of Donald Trump challenged one norm after another. When norms are widely held throughout a society, they can function as robustly as written law. ![]()
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