Grotesque on Pennsylvania Avenue: Season 2 review

There’s no honour, they say, among thieves. Criminals, in other words, can’t be expected to be loyal even to each other. So I suppose it does Donald Trump some honour that, a convicted criminal himself, he’s declared that he’ll release the criminals convicted for attacking Congress on 6 January 2021.

This shouldn’t, however, trouble anyone who believes that Trump’s loyal only to himself. He believes those criminals acted out of loyalty to him and that’s the only kind of he really appreciates. So he responds with loyalty to them. 

As he moves back into the White House, we need to review one of the major criticisms he faced during the election campaign. It seems clear that he isn’t going to overthrow democracy, if by that we mean some kind of violent overthrow, like Benito Mussolini’s 1924 March on Rome in Italy, or Francisco Franco’s mutiny of 1936 and the three-year Civil War that followed in Spain.

Instead, following the recent fashion explored in Hungary and Turkey, the trick Trump’s likely to adopt is to keep chipping away at democracy until all its substance has been sucked out and the empty shell collapses. His allies have already started that process, with moves to undermine republican values.

You do it my way

The specialist in mediaeval history Jay Rubenstein talks about the 12th century English politician, John of Salisbury. Rubenstein tells us:

John wrote that a king is ‘a law unto himself’ but that at the same time he was ‘a servant of law.’

The thinking was that the king was the fount of all law and therefore could not be made subject to it but, precisely because of his privileged position on the law, he was its servant, the man charged with making sure it was preserved and obeyed. 

Since that time, Britain has moved a long way down the road towards democracy, and towards establishing an essential element of such a democracy, the rule of law. A great part of the process was limiting the power of monarchs. One king, Charles I, was even executed for trying to assert his power over Parliament. He was, indeed, condemned by a court which, he pointed out, was a legal contradiction in terms: courts sat by the king’s authority, so how could a court sit in judgment on the king?

Gradually, parliament took increasing power to itself, reducing the authority of the monarch. Even within parliament itself, the elected part, the House of Commons, increasingly dominated the House of Lords, which had initially been more powerful.

The process still has a way to go, however. As far as the rule of law is concerned, and the power of the monarch, there’s more work to do. As the jurist Catherine Barnard points out, even today ‘the monarch is immune from prosecution, even for parking offences’.

The British monarch’s immunity from prosecution is hard to reconcile with the democratic principles the country aspires towards. But that kind of thing would be even stranger to discover in a republic, like the United States, which fought a war to free itself from Britain and its attachment to that all that stuff.

That’s what made it so shocking when, on 1 July of last year, the US Supreme Court decided, by a majority made up entirely of Trump appointees, that Presidents have immunity from prosecution for any ‘official act’ carried out as part of their duties. That includes, for instance, acts relative to command of the military, to the execution of law, or control of the executive branch of government in general. What would happen if Trump used his entirely legal control of the military to illegally kill political opponents? Would he be covered by this immunity?

One result is that the federal cases pending against Donald Trump for criminal behaviour, for instance for inciting the insurrection on January 6th 2021, were dismissed. What would be the point of proceeding with them? They would be thrown out anyway, because of his immunity from prosecution.

In other words, the United States embraced, through that decision, an old principle of monarchical and not of republican government, turning back towards a long-outdated attitude from which Britain ought to have, but still hasn’t quite freed itself.

That’s no coup d’état. But it’s certainly a step towards hollowing out democracy.

The process didn’t stop there. The next stage has turned out grotesque to the point of appearing comic. In a grim way.

Back in 2020, at the end of his previous presidential term, Trump decided that the amount of data being collected on individual Americans by TikTok made it a potential threat to the US, because of its Chinese ownership. He issued an executive order to force it to sell to an American or close down.

This was a pretty dubious action to take for at least two reasons. The first is that if there’s one constitutional right Americans defend with almost as much passion as the right to own guns, it’s free speech. Now TikTok wasn’t being attacked for its contents. Even so, removing a vehicle for self-expression by a community now 170 million strong, does kind of feel like a limitation of free speech.

In addition, the use of the executive order is hardly democratic. It feels like a royal decree. It depends on the personal whim of the president.

The incoming Biden administration withdrew the order. Instead, it had Congress enact actual legislation to achieve the same goal. That was challenged in the courts and the case went right up to the Supreme Court, which decreed that it was legal.

The anti-TikTok legislation went into effect on 19 January 2025.

Trump should have been over the moon, right? What he’d tried to do by executive order had now been achieved by legislation endorsed by the Supreme Court. But strangely enough he wasn’t.

‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds’, said the American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson. Most aspects of Trump’s mind suggest littleness, but certainly not its consistency. He changes view like a kaleidoscope. He discovered in the election campaign that TikTok offered him a vehicle to communicate with young people. That’s something he found useful. Therefore his hostility towards TikTok for its role in allowing Chinese manipulation of personal data sank into secondary importance. 

You see? What serves Trump trumps anything else.

So now Trump is talking about simply not applying the law against TikTok. The Constitution explicitly requires the president to execute the law so he can’t choose not to. But hey, if he can’t be prosecuted for any official act as President, how can he be forced to apply a law he no longer finds convenient?

Let’s summarise. He tried to ban TikTok, by Executive Order, one of the more monarchical and least democratic of the powers available to US Presidents. Now he wants TikTok back and is willing to save it by ignoring the duty laid down for him by the constitution, and resorting to the tactic of simply not applying a law that doesn’t suit him – though it once did.

Confusing? Well, that’s the way Trumpworld always is.

So we have Trump planning to pick and choose between laws. That’s just the kind of thing a powerful monarch does. But not the President of a democratic republic.

See what I mean about chipping away at democracy? How long will the US be governed by truly democratic, republican principles? Or, to put it another way, how can such principles survive if the Trump people keep accumulating power in an increasingly monarchical presidency?