Trump Is Creating a True Constitutional Crisis…

It’s worth stepping back and stating in plain language just how profoundly President Trump is corrupting our political system right now. Several new media analyses take a stab at this — see this CNN piece or this New York Times take — by correctly suggesting that Trump’s total defiance of oversight poses a massive challenge to our constitutional order.

But they aren’t quite grappling with the magnitude of what we’re seeing. That’s only half the story.

So let’s try it this way. Trump is not merely staking out an absolute refusal to cooperate with any and all lawful subpoenas, on the deeply absurd grounds that the House’s impeachment inquiry is illegitimate, as the White House counsel has argued.

Rather, Trump is adopting that stance while simultaneously claiming the absolute right to bend large swaths of the government toward his goal of rigging the next election on his own behalf. Thus, Trump is declaring absolute authority to use extraordinarily corrupt means to avoid facing a fair election next year, while also declaring total immunity to any and all congressional efforts to prevent him from rigging that election, or even to hold him accountable for it.