Earlier this month, a television journalist asked Donald Trump, “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?” Trump answered, “I don’t know.” The interviewer then asked, “Don’t you agree that every person in the United States is entitled to due process?” The president again replied, “I don’t know.”
Donald Trump “is not a man who respects the rule of law, nor one who seeks to understand it,” writes J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in a new article for The Atlantic.
Luttig argues that, in the first few months of his second administration, Trump has proven himself an existential threat to the rule of law, his presidency recalling the tyranny from which the nation sought to free itself in establishing the Constitution.
“The 47th president of the United States may wish he were a king,” Luttig writes. “But in America, the law is king, not the president.”
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