We are looking at the possibility of electing a criminal to be our president. So what do we do if or when that happens? We have been here before. And it has been the people who stopped the criminal.
‘What Do You Do When a Criminally Minded Person Is President?’
Corey Brettschneider’s new book couldn’t have landed at a more auspicious moment. The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It, went on sale last Tuesday — the day after the Supreme Court’s ruling in the election interference case against Donald Trump that gave presidents broad immunity for their “official acts.”
Brettschneider, a professor of politics and constitutional law at Brown University, writes about five past presidents who “posed great threats to democracy” by pushing the limits of legality — John Adams, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson and Richard Nixon — and the citizens who responded by pushing back in an age-old American pattern of constitutional crisis and recovery.
Adams, after all, had prosecuted people who criticized him, Buchanan “colluded with the Supreme Court to deny constitutional personhood to African Americans,” as Brettschneider outlines. Johnson urged violence against his political opponents while heightening white supremacy in the wake of the Civil War, Wilson “nationalized Jim Crow” and Nixon, of course, committed criminal acts in the sprawling Watergate scandal. “When the president does it,” as the 37th president (in)famously said, “that means it is not illegal.”
In response to these executives’ attempts to weaken or outright eliminate the checks on their power, citizens fought back — from abolitionist Frederick Douglass to journalists Ida B. Wells and William Monroe Trotter to Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg and others — recommitting to the Constitution and stoking what Brettschneider calls “democratic recovery.”
Brettschneider reminds us that we were warned from the beginning this could happen.
“Revolutionary War heroes such as Patrick Henry predicted that the office was so powerful that a president with authoritarian ambitions could simply lay claim to the ‘American throne,’” Brettschneider writes, noting that “the power of the presidency has always been a loaded gun, one that threatens American democracy itself. Patrick Henry’s warning has always been relevant.” And it has arguably never been more relevant than it is right now.
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