WASHINGTON — It’s crazy to think about President Donald Trump outrunning anything.
But in legal terms, the president is an Olympic-class sprinter. He breaks the law so fast that the law is left in his orange dust.
Trump is an outlaw. And our system was not built for an outlaw in the Oval.
He zeros in on loopholes in the law and the system that are based on trust and the assumption that our leaders — and their families — will not be voracious scam artists.
“The Constitution was built on this idea that the president would have enough decency and morality that they just wouldn’t run around exploiting the gaps,” said Trump biographer Tim O’Brien. “And for Trump, it’s like red meat. This idea that Trump’s mentor was Roy Cohn was profoundly wrong. Donald Trump’s mentor was Fred from Day 1. His father showed him how to exploit the government system, the legal system and business. His whole worldview is built around the idea that you exploit systems for personal gain, and there’s nothing wrong with doing that because the world’s populated by sharks and you just have to be the biggest shark.”
After running a court that has been complicit in Trump’s defiling our institutions and razing our hallowed spaces, Chief Justice John Roberts seems belatedly alarmed.
“That construction is likely unlawful,” Roberts wrote in his dissent last week from his fellow Republican justices’ ruling that the president’s ballroom behemoth — with taxpayers on the hook for over $300 million — can slouch toward completion. Noting that the president was “likely” infringing on Congress, Roberts added, “Today’s decision is no victory for the separation of powers.”
The White House is the People’s House. Chief executives are transient tenants. Its “stately simplicity,” President Teddy Roosevelt once said, “is an expression of the character of the period in which it was built, and is in accord with the purposes it was designed to serve.” Safeguarding it, he said, gave us continuity with our past.
Roberts used that quote in his dissent, as well as a line from Winston Churchill: “We shape our buildings, and afterward our buildings shape us.”
Trump was a builder, but he is such an egotist he can only view buildings — and reflecting pools — as reflections of himself. When he built Trump Tower, he tore down the Art Deco friezes on Bonwit Teller despite promising them to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Just so, he bulldozed the East Wing and tore up both of Jackie Kennedy’s gardens before Congress or historic preservationists had a chance to weigh in.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson calls this a “catch me if you can” approach.
The Supreme Court protects the outlandish outlaw by palavering about whether the architectural historian who brought the case has “standing” to do so. Yet shouldn’t any American have standing to challenge Trump’s desecrations? Trump ludicrously blasted the preservationists fighting to stop the ballroom as “TREASONISTS.”
As he casually divides and undermines America, he obsesses on using Krazy Glue to affix gold crap to the walls of the Oval Office or plotting to plant 47 maple trees in Lafayette Park to honor himself. He got us into a war he has no clue how to get out of, yet spends his time mulling redecorating projects, gold gewgaws, his new helipad and his replacement of the asphalt driveway at the White House with granite.
There are so many pathetic scenes of the Supreme Court and Republicans in Congress caving in to Trump — on his war in Iran that he calls “small potatoes” and that JD Vance risibly claims is not a war; on his attempts to disenfranchise voters; on trying to hijack the Postal Service to obstruct those voting by mail; on plotting to sell of a chunk of Yosemite to a private developer; on allowing the killing of endangered wolves and the secret slaughter of wild horses; on trying to slap his name back on the Kennedy Center; on his petty, vindictive renaming of Lake Ontario as “Lake America,” in the midst of the U.S.-Canadian trade war, even though it’s not even named for the Canadian province.
Now Trump is breaking ground for his solipsistic, Napoleonic Triumphal Arch — never mind that it lacks federal approval and that the gold angel on top might endanger planes flying in and out of Reagan National Airport.
O’Brien thinks the most tragic thing is that the Supreme Court now has a conservative majority that believes in the unitary executive and is getting roadblocks out of the way to give the president more latitude, at the very moment we get a Caligula who desperately needs roadblocks. Roberts issued the ruling in 2024 giving Trump near-total criminal immunity, and that makes him complicit in Trump’s egregious behavior.
Roberts gave Trump the runway, and now he’s objecting. But it’s too late.
“And that’s the lesson of everybody who doesn’t understand who Donald Trump is,” O’Brien said. “He’s simply there to pick your pocket.”
