When Will We Ever Learn?

When Will We Ever Learn?/7 October 2022

? I have been watching very carefully as our contemporary politics shows its ugly face in courtrooms in New York and elsewhere, as well as at hearings in Washington, D.C.?

Was it not Nixon who suggested that “If the president says it is legal, then it is legal“? That is about as delusional as Donald Trump‘s suggestion that he can declassify documents with a magic wand without respect to whether he’s in office. Judge Cannon forgets that the former president is now a citizen, the same as me and whoever is reading this article.?None of us is above the law.

? Look at Harry Truman as he headed back to Missouri?.?David McCullough reports that Harry Truman addressed well wishers at lunch after the inauguration of Dwight Eisenhower suggesting “I am just plain Mr. Truman now, a private citizen” and then found his way to a train that brought him back home.

? McCullough has written of the simple life which Harry Truman led when he returned to Independence, Missouri, living in the house that his wife had inherited from her mother.?They were not poverty stricken but hardly living the kind of life as we have seen recent presidents enjoy.

After much study and reflection, I have decided that we have elevated so many of our elected officials in so many ways – for example, by providing them and their families security for the rest of their lives.?that we have reversed the Washingtonian example of heading back to the farm, like Cinncinatus whose name is often invoked given his unique role in Roman history.

I am not sure my tax dollars should be used to coddle Donald Trump or any of his predecessors and their families in the way which is common today.?I think it undemocratizes our democracy. When Joe Biden came to the Kennedy Library last month, UMass Boston closed for the day. Was it necessary?

I fear it takes a Donald Trump, who appears to be quite confused as to the powers of the presidency, to get our nation to remove some of the accoutrements of the office and return it to the intent of the founders.

Perhaps, we should all read Arthur Schlesinger’s volume from some 50 year ago – The Imperial Presidency – to remind us that excessive uses of power have occurred in prior times and that many of these issues are not new!