by Mark C. Eades
In Donald Trump's most recent (Apr. 13) “off-the-rails” COVID-19 press briefing, tensions between him and Democratic governors on dealing with the pandemic and re-opening states for business boiled over when he made an absurd claim of “total authority” over governors in such matters. “When somebody is the president of the United States, the authority is total and that is the way it’s got to be,” the agitated Imbecile-in-Chief insisted, “It’s total. It’s total. And the governors know that.... They can’t do anything without approval of the president of the United States.”
Anyone with a basic, high-school knowledge of constitutional checks and balances, separation of powers, and federalism knows that the president does not have “total authority” over either the federal government or state governments. As most of us learn in our junior-high civics and/or high-school U.S. government classes, the United States has three co-equal branches of government, separation of powers between these three branches and between the federal and state governments, and an elected president who is not a king or a dictator with absolute power. Donald Trump doesn't seem to have been paying attention in these classes, however, because he was too busy being a spoiled brat and bullying his classmates; or because he was just too stupid.
This is not the first time The Moron Who Would Be King has made such claims of absolute power or “absolute rights.” In a July 2019 speech bemoaning the Mueller investigation, Trump told an audience of right-wing student activists, “I have an Article Two where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” referring to something that he apparently thinks is Article Two of the Constitution of the United States.
Let's unpack this statement: “I have an Article Two...,” as though there are different Article Twos that you can have (Kellyanne Conway might call these “alternative Article Twos”); “...where I have the right to do whatever I want as president,” which no Article Two that you can have actually says. In fact, the only Article Two in the U.S. Constitution explicitly says that the president does not have the right to do whatever he or she wants.
Donald Trump, however, thinks he has “an Article Two” that says this — A very special Article Two, which only he has. No previous president has ever had such an Article Two as the one Donald Trump has. Barack Obama’s Article Two only said that he was supposed to do his job. Richard Nixon’s Article Two said that he should probably resign as soon as it became clear that Congress was going to impeach him and remove him from office for the Watergate cover-up. Donald Trump’s Article Two, however, says that he has the absolute right to do whatever he wants, and that he is accountable to no one.
Donald Trump loves to talk about the "absolute rights" he thinks he has as president. After The Washington Post revealed in May 2017 that Trump had blurted out highly classified intelligence to the Russian ambassador and foreign minister during a meeting in the Oval Office, Trump claimed that he had the “absolute right” to do so. In a Dec. 2017 interview with The New York Times, Trump said, "I have [the] absolute right to do what I want to do with the Justice Department." In June 2018 during the Mueller investigation, Trump insisted on Twitter, “I have the absolute right to PARDON myself.” In Oct. 2019 as the Ukraine scandal unfolded, Trump claimed that he had “an absolute right” to solicit foreign help investigating political opponents in his re-election campaign.
Donald Trump seems to think that, for him, presidential powers are something akin to the divine right of kings, which he can exercise as he chooses, purely for his own benefit. If Donald Trump were to actually read the U.S. Constitution (assuming that in school he learned how to read anything longer than the Bazooka Joe strip in a pack of bubble gum), he would know that this is not the case. The Constitution makes a clear distinction between the rights of citizens and the powers of government; and powers of government — including the powers of the president — are not rights. Rights are vested in citizens, as citizens (or as persons), and the only rights the president has are the same rights that any other citizen has.
Such impenetrable ignorance: A solid steel shell of ignorance that Donald Trump wears on his head like a space helmet; and that facts, knowledge, and reason simply bounce off of like tiny meteoroids, to protect his even tinier brain from anything that he doesn’t want to know about. Donald Trump, as Naval War College professor Tom Nichols aptly described, "is incapable of learning anything"; and has surrounded himself with a White House full of sycophants and wackadoodles who just tell him whatever he wants to hear.
This is, after all, the same Donald Trump who thinks that there are two places in Asia called “Nipple” and “Button” which are both part of India (the nations of Nepal and Bhutan are not part of India); that millions of Norwegians are anxious to immigrate to his warped version of America (They're not); and that someone needs to investigate "the oranges" of the Russia investigation (HE is the orange of the Russia investigation). This is the same Donald Trump who thought that he could buy Greenland (It’s not for sale), and that wind turbines cause cancer (Nope).
Still, the the moron insists that he’s “like, really smart...and a very stable genius,” because he knows words: “I know words. I have the best words.” The only way that anyone could be a bigger moron than Donald Trump is to be someone who votes for Donald Trump.
