Outlaw President?
Jim Read for the AHS
Americans have long been fascinated by outlaws, especially in times of economic hardship, when many outlaws have been perceived (accurately or inaccurately) to be on the side of the people against the rich and powerful. Woody Guthrie’s 1939 ballad “Pretty Boy Floyd” preferred the outlaw who will “rob you with a six-gun” to the banker who robs you “with a fountain pen,” because the six-gun robber would never “drive a family from their home.”
To my knowledge, no one ever proposed electing Pretty Boy Floyd president of the United States. Yet Donald Trump has somehow harnessed this attraction to outlaws in his drive to secure unprecedented and apparently unchecked presidential power, which he professes to exercise (as he phrased it in his January 2025 inaugural address) for the benefit of “our magnificent law-abiding citizens” by crushing “a radical and corrupt establishment.” But Trump himself is not exactly law-abiding, and his supporters admire precisely his refusal to play by the normal political and constitutional rules.
Image: 1933 Wanted Poster for Charles “Pretty Boy” Floyd, Courtesy of the Federal Bureal of Investigation
And yet a large majority of Americans continue to express reverence for the U.S. Constitution, though this same majority possess little understanding of what the document actually says (as reported in a 2023 survey by the Annenberg Public Policy Center). Before we begin admiring rule-breakers in high office, we might want to survey what these constitutional rules are, and why the constitution’s framers put them in place.
The framers made clear that they were establishing a republic. What does that mean? At minimum, it signified a complete rejection of hereditary monarchs. But more broadly, it meant that no one, including holders of powerful elected office, were above the law. As John Adams phrased it in drafting the constitution of Massachusetts, the republican principle was “a government of laws, not men.”
The framers of the U.S. Constitution specifically incorporated that principle in creating the office of the presidency. Among the duties assigned to the President by the United States Constitution is to “take care that the laws be faithfully executed” (Article II, Section 3). Though presidents inevitably enjoy some degree of discretion in executing federal law, the Constitution does not permit a president simply to ignore the laws. Nor can a president unilaterally repeal whatever federal laws and abolish whatever federal agencies that president does not like. Repealing a law, and abolishing a federal agency or program, follows the same constitutional process that was required to enact that law in the first place: legislation to that effect must be introduced in Congress, where the relevant committees conduct public hearings on the merits of repealing that particular law or agency. That legislation must then pass both the full House and Senate. Only then can a president sign legislation repealing that particular law or agency. All of our federal agencies and programs -- for example, the Department of Education, Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services, Agency for International Development, and more -- are established, authorized, and funded by legislation passed by Congress. The mission of these departments and agencies is to implement the laws, under the guidance of the President, who is himself duty bound to “faithfully execute” those same laws.
Presidents are constitutionally obligated not only to faithfully execute the laws, but even more importantly, to respect the constitutional processes grounding all our laws and political institutions. Upon inauguration, a president takes an oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States” (Article II, Section 1). These and many other constitutional provisions make clear that the President of the United States is not a king, unilaterally pronouncing the laws, much less a dictator permitted to act arbitrarily, without any legal restraint whatsoever. The legislation grounding Social Security, for example, gives the president some discretion in deciding how benefits are to be adjusted for inflation. But no president has constitutional power to access individual Social Security records and say, “I hate that guy! No Social Security benefits for him.” Arbitrary action of that kind would be self-evidently incompatible with guarantee of “due process of law” in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution, with the Fourteenth Amendment’s “equal protection of the law” clause, and indeed with constitutional government in any form.
What I have summarized above is basic U.S. civics, Constitutional Law 101 of the kind that is taught (or at least is supposed to be taught) in high school. The above-mentioned 2023 Annenberg Survey suggests either that these constitutional basics were not taught, or if taught did not stick, for a large segment of the American public. But I suspect another, even more troubling development has shaped our current politics: that a large segment of the American public may have ceased to care about these constitutional processes, and indeed, has come to admire a powerful leader who refuses to be bound by laws and constitutions. Failures of civic education direct our attention to an obvious remedy. How to remedy admiration for political outlaws in high places is less evident.
Donald Trump is fundamentally lawless -- lawless in his own conduct, and in the example he sets for his supporters and imitators. He is untethered by constitutional restraints, for which he has nothing but contempt. A catalogue of his lawless acts and attempted acts would of course include his exhorting a large mob of supporters to assault the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to halt the constitutionally-prescribed tabulation of electoral votes, and his recent blanket pardon of all those who participated in that large and very public crime. But it would also include his failed attempt, as early as July 2020, to “postpone” the 2020 presidential election; his unsuccessful effort, after he lost the 2020 election, to get the U.S. military to declare martial law and “re-run” the election under his own supervision; and his well-known effort to pressure the Georgia Secretary of State of Georgia to arbitrarily add to his vote count exactly the number needed to win that state. More recently, during the 2024 presidential campaign, Trump flaunted his lawlessness by announcing that, if elected, he would become a dictator, “but only on day one.” (He was telling the truth about aspiring to be dictator, but of course lying about it only lasting a day.) Recently he posted an image of himself wearing a crown, with the caption, “Long Live the King!” He assumes he will pay no political price, and indeed will boost his support, by publicly spitting on the Constitution.
In the month since he has taken office in his second – and score-settling – term as president, he has signed executive orders presuming to repeal the Fourteenth Amendment’s clause granting citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States,” (Civics 101, presidents cannot rewrite the Constitution); abolishing the U.S. Department of Education (which in a “normal” political world would require an act of Congress), and given the world’s richest man, who holds no discernible public office, unchecked access to the U.S. Treasury, the Social Security System, and to the personal financial information, bank accounts, and employment history of every resident of the United States.
Moreover, Trump now maintains that neither his own actions, nor those of his “advisor” Elon Musk, are subject to judicial oversight. It is an open question at this point whether Trump would honor any court ruling striking down his actions. We often assume that would be tyrants operate in the darkness, avoiding public scrutiny, and with Trump and Musk this is already occurring in many critically important areas. But what is most shocking about Trump is the degree to which his contempt for legal and constitutional constraints has been fully public, indeed trumpeted, as a virtue. He knows his crowd. And yet his lawbreaking is as remote as possible from the 1930s-era outlaws who (at least in legend) stood up against the wealthy and powerful. Trump and Musk more closely resemble the wealthy and powerful of Woody Guthrie’s day who robbed you with a fountain pen, though now employing flash drives and a team of youthful hackers.
“Outlaw President” – this could be the name of a Wild West show at a state fair. And Trump has brought to the presidency many of the moves and gestures and plot lines that one might find in a Wild West show. Certainly he knows how to play the part of the admired outlaw, and the crowd loves it. The crowd at the fair might have second thoughts, however, once they discover that the gunfighters onstage are using live ammunition, and have begun firing into the grandstands.
To return to my question about whether Americans need a refresher course in civics: yes, they do. But the remedy must go beyond relearning facts about the U.S. Constitution. It also requires renewed commitment to the fundamental moral and ethical principle underlying our republic: that no one, and especially those in high office, are above the law. Millions of Americans, every day, repeat, “I pledge allegiance, to the flag, of the United States of America…” But how often do they give any thought to the next line: “…and to the Republic for which it stands.” Those are the words I would like to shout at the top of my lungs.
At some point, significant numbers of Americans will discover the deeply negative consequences, for themselves personally and for the community as a whole, of indulging lawless action on a mass scale by men who openly aspire to dictatorial power. I hope at that point Americans will rediscover, late but not too late, why the United States was established as a republic, and what that word means.