So That's What 'Make America Great Again' Means
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From New York Times Opinion, this is The Ezra Klein Show. I feel like I've been watching two different presidential transitions take place. There's been the official one with all of its pomp and its pageantry, the one we call the peaceful transition of power. I watched Vice President Kamala Harris preside over the certification of the election she lost. I watched President Joe Biden welcome his successor, President Donald Trump, back to the White House. I watched every living former president assemble under the Capitol rotunda to honor Trump's second inauguration. What a difference to four years ago when a mob stormed the Capitol, when Trump sought to upend the election results and upon failing, did not attend Joe Biden's inauguration.
This transition, the official transition of presidential power, this transition has been orderly. But there has been this other transition happening too. A transition not of power, but of political system. A transition in the rules and expectations of power. I understood Joe Biden's pardon of Hunter Biden. Hunter had become a particular fixation of the Trumpist right, and the idea that they would unleash their revenge on him individually seemed all too real. Joe Biden has already lost two children. Others may disagree. I had trouble begrudging him his refusal to potentially lose a third. But then came so many more pardons, culminating in pardons of Anthony Fauci and much of Biden's family. And it wasn't just pardons. There was the refusal to enforce a ban on TikTok that Biden himself had signed into law, Biden's bill. And alongside that came this bizarre decision to announce that the Equal Rights Amendment was now ratified as Virginia had accepted it in 2020, becoming the 38th state to do so. But that wasn't true. It wasn't ratified.
Congress had set a deadline of 1982 for ratification. The opinion of Joe Biden's own Justice Department is that Virginia's late act is meaningless. The ERA is not ratified, whatever Biden said. And the Biden administration, they know it. Biden did not direct the archivist of the United States to add the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution. And Xi quite reasonably did not. He said the Constitution was changed. It lies now unchanged. All of this was a very strange substitution of press stunt for policy process. All of it felt like an effort to make the president in his final days seem more powerful and more consequential than he really was. And why did it wait until the final days? If it was so worth doing, then do it earlier and defend it.
Changing the Constitution under a controversial theory, it's not what you do on your way out the door. The Biden of 2020 would have done none of this. In key cases like the family pardons, he said he would not do this. And then he did it. This feels in its own way like Biden's submission to the new regime. The powers of the presidency are whatever the president can get away with. And I'm not naive, I cover this professionally. I know that presidents have been testing the limits of their authority since the dawn of the Republic. But for a president whose core message was about the preservation of America's constitutional democracy, and not just that, but the informal norms and values that scaffold that system, for he to leave in this way was a profound message on its own.
Maybe the message was cynicism. Maybe it was arrogance. but maybe it was acceptance. It is clear that things are to be done differently now. The beginning of Donald Trump's second term certainly revealed a president who intends to govern based on what he can get away with. Trump declared birthright citizenship invalid, unilaterally changing the clear language of the Constitution and daring the courts to stop him. He's giving TikTok a reprieve from the clean language of the law so he can save it. He is pardoning the January 6th rioters. He's renaming the Gulf of Mexico to be the Gulf of America, Denali to be Mount McKinley. I was struck in Trump's inaugural address how almost everything mentioned was an executive action that he himself would take and the courts would decide to accept or reject. He talked little of laws he wanted to persuade Congress to pass. What interests Trump is what he can do alone.
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