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President Donald Trump’s attempted removal of Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve’s Board of Governors, on Monday night isn’t the sort of story that will captivate the average American.
But it should — for this simple reason: It is the latest in a slew of incidents in which Trump is operating in legally grey area, testing the limits of what he can and can’t d as president. Or, to borrow my favorite metaphor, stretching the rubber band of democracy in ways it simply has never been stretched before.
See, the Federal Reserve is an independent agency of the federal government. The only way a president is allowed to remove one of the board of governors is “for cause.” Trump has cited allegations that Cook falsified information on two mortgage applications as that cause. But Cook has not been charged with any crime — and is refusing to lave the office, insisting that “[Trump] has no authority to” remove her.
Which gets me to this — the single biggest revelation I have had in Trump’s 2nd term: I assumed that there were a series of laws and regulations that would limit Trump’s ability to follow some of his worst instincts in office.
But, what has become very clear to me in the first 7 months of the Trump presidency is that there are far fewer legal constraints on a president than I assumed. The truth is that most past presidents have operated within a relatively standard definition of the office not because they were bound by law to do so but because they acted in accordance with accepted norms and traditions.
Over and over again during Trump’s second term, I have found myself turning to experts and asking “Can he do that???” And the answer, more times than not, is a shrug of the shoulders.
Because the reality is this: No past president has even tried half of the things — in terms of asserting executive branch powers — that Trump has. And so even the top legal scholars in the country are forced to admit that they aren’t totally sure whether Trump can do what he is trying to do because, well, no president has ever tried it before.
I made a list of these things off the top of my head this morning. This is far from complete but you will get the idea:
Ending birthright citizenship
Mass deportations of illegal immigrants
Defunding various government agencies like USAID
Firing the board of the Kennedy Center and inserting himself as chairman
Demanding that major colleges and universities change their admissions and DEI practices or run the risk of losing hundreds of millions in federal funding
Threatening to take back the Panama Canal
Sending the National Guard into Los Angeles against the wishes of state and local politicians
Wading into New York City’s congestion pricing debate
Threatening major law firms who he claimed opposed him, and demanding they offer pro bono services
Like I said, it’s not a complete list. But it speaks to Trump’s willingness to, well, see what he can get away with. I have long maintained that Trump is effectively amoral he sees only things that work to his advantage and those that don’t.
There is nowhere that the lack of a sense of right and wrong is more apparent than in his willingness to push standards, traditions and boundaries. In Trump’s mind, what’s legal is what you can get away with. And the limit on your power as president is largely dependent on how willing you are to try to expand it.
Lisa Cook isn’t a household name. But Trump’s attempt to remove her is a symbol of his broader approach to the presidency in his 2nd term. And it’s the thing that I have learned — the hard way — in the past 8 months.
