For decades, presidents avoided even the appearance of profiting from their office.
Harry Truman refused to lend his name to any business, even in retirement. Richard Nixon so feared a brother might profit off their ties, he had his phone tapped. And George W. Bush dumped his individual stock holdings before taking office.
Donald Trump is taking a different approach.
The family real estate business is undergoing the fastest overseas expansion since its founding a century ago, each deal potentially shaping everything from tariffs to military aid.
Led by Eric, and his brother, Donald Jr., the family business has expanded into cryptocurrencies with ventures that brought in billions of dollars but raised questions about whether some big investors received favorable treatment in return.
We need to elect someone who, among other critical traits, is comfortable with approving bills to limit their own power and the power of their successors.
I don’t believe that will actually be possible.
More likely will be a congressional supermajority forcing through such bills. At any rate there are already laws supposed to stop many of these grifts, but they are not enforced.
Yeah, there’s an outside chance that we elect enough progressive candidates to force some action. Definitely unlikely though, as long as money is speech. Its like the silver spoon is a megaphone now. Or a whole news organization.
If an individual person can limit their own power, the next person will be able to strip those limitations just as easilly.
What we need is more direct democracy instead of just relying on representatives to do the right thing.
That’s not necessarily true. We would need the next president to be proactive about working with Congress to design meaningful restraints on the presidency so that they can draft the legislation and the president sign it into law. That way the next next president wouldn’t be able to unilaterally cancel all of those safeguards.
Trump didn’t unilaterally cancel the safeguards, though. He spent a decade forming a government of sycophants across all three branches of government. Combine that with the recent Supreme Court (6-3 conservative) ruling that the president is essentially immune from prosecution for a crime if it’s an “official act” and Congress (both branches being majority Republican) essentially giving Trump unlimited power by means of not pushing back in any meaningful way, and you get a leader who is allowed to act in a unilateral way. Without that decade of sycophancy buildup, Trump wouldn’t have the ability to act unilaterally.
We need to prevent this from ever happening again, and our current system just isn’t built for that. We need direct democracy. We need a hard wealth cap. We need to prevent a few people from having extreme amounts of power over a populace.
I’d like to see the ability to recall a sitting president added. Waiting for congress to step in is getting ridiculous.
And we should be able to directly pass laws, bypassing all branches of the government (including the Supreme Court).
That is fucking dangerous
So is entrusting all power to representatives, who, as we’ve seen many times over, inevitably become corrupt and/or drunk with power.