Imagine for a moment that Donald Trump is telling the truth when he says that his efforts to get the Ukraine and China to investigate the activities of Joe Biden’s son, Hunter, for which the younger Biden seems to have reaped rich rewards, was not politics, but an attempt to root out corruption.
Is exposing corruption what we want the president of the United States to do?
Mr. Trump obviously remembers that he was elected on a promise to "drain the swamp," and he could, with some justification, say that’s precisely what he's seeking to do.
The president’s critics certainly repeatedly claim that he is the liar-in-chief, and that his presidency is not about serving the country, but about improving the value of Trump's brand.
What's the reality here?
The president claims that the Trump business empire is actually declining in value while he serves as president, and there has been nothing published refuting that claim.
It's equally undeniable as author Peter Schweizer has shown, that American politicians, including the Biden family, the Clinton family, and even the Bush and Obama families, have left office with considerably greater assets than prior to entering government service.
This has certainly gone on for decades, if not since the nation's beginning, and it's obviously significant that the Framers believed that corruption was, indeed, the most insidious danger faced by any government, but most of all — republics.
Once the people of a republic surrendered to licentiousness and luxury, it was believed, it was doomed, the people would eventually lose their liberties, and a dictator would emerge.
This, in the belief of the Framers, was what had happened to ancient Rome, and we might well ask ourselves if the Framers got it right, and what is now happening to us bears some resemblance to Rome 2,000 years ago.
Rome succumbed to decadence, and one could look at the sixties and seventies in this country and wonder whether the same thing happened to the United States.
An American culture that turned to self-actualization, a secular public square, and unbridled consumption and excess spawned a government that expanded welfare benefits, redistributed wealth to an unparalleled degree, and accumulated funds so vast that it is no surprise that much of this largesse may have ended up lining the pockets of the unscrupulous.
Not only dishonest American public officials, but those parasitically feeding from the government's trough — lobbyists, favored economic sectors and industries, privileged domestic and foreign "non-profits," powerful despots and oligarchs in other nations —received billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains.
The rise of the Tea Party beginning in 2009 and culminating with Donald Trump’s election in 2016 is the long overdue reaction to what Washington had become.
It should come as no surprise that the special interests adverse to the public good — the denizens of the swamp — should strike back, and the current impeachment drive is best understood as the latest such effort.
Quite possibly beginning with the George H.W. Bush administration in 1988 it became difficult to characterize the rise of the administrative state as the product of one political party, and the growth of the federal government accelerated dramatically and dangerously under what came to be understood as a "uniparty," an unholy alliance of establishment Republicans and Democrats committed to preserving the status quo and its attendant perquisites.
With Donald Trump’s election, however, and now at an impressive pace, the Republican party has increasingly come to stand for reversing the growth of the federal leviathan, returning power to the state and local governments and to the people themselves.
This is slow and difficult work, but it's nevertheless happening.
In a surprising development the Republicans are today’s populist party, and the Democrats are the party of preserving the prerogatives of the bureaucracy, as well as its concomitant abuses.
For whatever mysterious reasons, the Democrats have been aided in their work, and President Trump has been stymied in his, by a mainstream media virtually completely committed to the Democratic Party cause.
And so it is that after the failure of an attempt to link the president to Russians, to obstruction of justice, to xenophobia, to misogyny, or racism, we now have a manufactured scandal accusing him of seeking wrongly to use the power of the presidency to enlist the aid of foreign leaders for political purposes.
So complex, so devious, so far-flung, and so international is the scale of current American corruption, however, it is no surprise that uncovering the facts will require the cooperation of other nations.
The president, in other words, is doing just what he promised, and doing what the national media refuses to do, or even to acknowledge.
Stephen B. Presser is the Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History Emeritus at Northwestern’s Pritzker School of Law, the Legal Affairs Editor of Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, and a contributor to The University Bookman. He graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and has taught at Rutgers University, the University of Virginia, and University College, London. He has often testified on constitutional issues before committees of the United States Congress, and is the author of "Recapturing the Constitution: Race, Religion, and Abortion Reconsidered" (Regnery, 1994) and "Law Professsors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law" (West Academic, 2017). Presser was a Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy at the University of Colorado's Boulder Campus for 2018-2019. To read more of his reports — Click Here Now.
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