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President-elect Donald Trump is looking at blowing through a host of “norms” in his second term, per the talk out of MAGA-world, to which we say “yay — but.”
Thing is, some so-called norms are just the way Washington’s gotten used to working: pieties that need to be defied.
Others are genuine, necessary checks and balances — rooted in the Constitution and in lessons learned these last 235 years.
Trump blew through plenty of the fake ones in his first term, ignoring received wisdom to pull out of the Paris climate accords, move the US embassy to Jerusalem while tossing pursuit of the “two state solution” as central to Middle East peace, tell our NATO allies they needed to up their defense spending or else they were threatening the alliance and so on.
He also played hardball with Mexico to get it to help rather than hinder securing the US border, got serious about sanctioning Iran as he took out its top terror-master, Gen. Qasem Soleimani and even made nice in public with avowed US foes like Vladimir Putin.
And, yes, that last one went down badly with us — but he also paired it with sending lethal aid to Ukraine where the Obama team wouldn’t.
But when it came to actual norms, he respected traditional bounds: Most notably, even when court rulings frustrating his agenda were ridiculous, he heeded them.
That’s a huge contrast with, say, President Biden’s brags about defying the Supreme Court slapdown of his student-loan giveaways, or Barack Obama’s pseudo-legalization of whole classes of illegal migrants.
But now there’s gossip out of MAGA world about crossing those lines — after all, the other side did it.
No doubt: Democrats and the left did weaponize the intelligence community and the Department of Justice against Trump.
Obama holdovers used the laughable Russiagate allegations and other dirty tricks to kneecap his presidency, and then ginned up the Ukraine-phone-call “scandal” to feed his first impeachment; the Biden DOJ waged lawfare on him for years.
But two wrongs don’t make a right: The correct lesson (which Trump’s plainly learned) is to get your own people in place from the start, not to try to use these agencies against your own domestic political foes.
Yes, absolutely the Trump DOJ will need to probe the Pennsylvania election boards now publicly breaking the law in a bid to steal a US Senate seat.
And the apparently lawless Dem fundraising arm ActBlue merits massive investigation.
But that’s about countering real violations — not naming targets for search-and-destroy missions.
Similarly, the idea of using “recess appointments” to hire agency heads who can’t win Senate confirmation is a guaranteed loser: The three conservative justices who voted to strike that down in the Obama years are still on the court, now joined by three Trump appointees who’ll side with them.
And it’d build huge ill-will among senators whom Trump will need to pass much of his agenda, and more broadly among moderate and traditional conservative Americans.
Note that the incoming Senate GOP majority is determined to preserve the filibuster, even though Democrats threatened to nuke it and it’ll slow everything down.
The filibuster has proved a vital check on hasty legislation, protecting the nation from destructive zig-zags depending on which party is temporarily on top. If anything, now’s the time to get Democrats to vote to keep it even when they regain Senate control.
Look: Americans voted for change when they elected Trump, but most of them also voted for a return to normalcy.
If he disappoints them on that front . . . well, the midterms are just two years off.
They certainly expect Trump to set Beltway insiders a’clucking, but in pursuit of common-sense goals — not to serve his whims.
He has a genuine mandate to set the economy, the border and much more to rights; he’ll go down in history as one of the greats if delivers on that.
Trying to seize powers no president has ever had, nor should, would be as disastrous a move as Biden’s decision to listen to the flatterers who told him he could be the next FDR.
English (US)