Donald Trump's pecuniary presidency

In what amounts to a lament about the apparent shallowness of the California gubernatorial campaign, former Obama functionary Ben Rhodes reminds that the constitutional authors predicted our current national predicament.  

Benjamin Franklin portrait

The closing argument at the Constitutional Convention came from Benjamin Franklin. His speech defended the virtue of compromise itself. In it, he implored the delegates to rally behind an imperfect document as the best possible result. 

He also offered a warning. The new government “can only end in Despotism, as other Forms have done before it, when the People shall become so corrupted as to need Despotic Government, being incapable of any other.”

That hits awfully close to home. Old Ben had our number. We find ourselves confronted by a choice between accepting the flamboyant thievery of Donald Trump's regime or showing the character to seize the reins of power to construck something closer to opportunity and justice for us all.

New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie has wise words to describe our predicament.

... what manner of presidency has Trump devised for himself?

You could call it the pecuniary presidency, a presidency not devoted to the public good or to the preservation of the Union or even to some narrow ideological crusade, but to the quest for personal enrichment. A presidency devoted to the aggrandizement of a single person, not to satisfy a grand design for the nation but to squeeze a few million here and a few billion there out of the public coffers for your own benefit.

This isn’t the “honest graft” of Tammany Hall — corruption as the price paid for public improvement. It is petty theft. It’s stealing from the Treasury and using your authority, enhanced by the baroque theories of your allies on the Supreme Court, to make yourself unaccountable. It is government as protection racket and the president as mob boss (a role that Trump has clearly embraced).

The pecuniary presidency is a new frontier in the history of the office, the culmination of all that was dangerous about the vast concentration of power in a singular executive — “in all governments in which there is sown the seed of the rule of one man, no checks, no bars can prevent its growing into a monarchy or a despotism if the empire is extensive,” warned “a Maryland farmer” in the spring of 1788, on the eve of ratification — and the particular project of a particular man whose lust for gold rivals that of Cortés. ...

The founding generation knew that greed for gold might overthrow their handiwork. The country has seen this again and again, as when the great wealth of Southern planters provided a justification for human slavery and the great wealth of industrial capitalists undergirded the immiseration of working people for profit. Again and again, the mass of people had fought back, insisting we can be better than this. 

Donald is just an ordinary crook, robbing us every which way. The challenge of the moment is whether the majority of us can find the civic virtue to reform a system which makes rule by such a con man possible?