Trust fund traitor

by Steve Schmidt - Sep 27

Donald Trump accepted a trust and betrayed it.

The presidency was placed in his hands for a limited time. He swore to faithfully execute its duties and preserve, protect and defend the Constitution. The oath did not transfer ownership of the country. It imposed an obligation to serve it.

Air Force One is a loaner. The White House is a loaner. The authority to command the armed forces, appoint public officials, and speak in the name of the United States is a loan. Every president eventually gives it back. That is the arrangement. Donald Trump has spent his political life acting as though the arrangement does not apply to him.

He has treated the public trust as private property. The government’s power becomes an instrument for rewarding loyalty and punishing defiance. The dignity of the office becomes a stage set for his vanity. He wants Americans to look at the presidency and see him, until they can no longer tell where one ends and the other begins.

But none of it belongs to him. It belongs to us.

That includes the money. Congress appropriates public funds through laws. A president does not get to regard the treasury as his personal account, or the laws governing it as optional because he dislikes what Congress decided. The Government Accountability Office describes the obligation plainly: a president must generally spend appropriated funds unless the law authorizes withholding them. The principle is older and larger than any budget dispute. The people’s representatives decide how the people’s money is spent. A president carries out the law.

It includes the institutions. The Justice Department does not exist to protect one man from consequences. The military does not exist to perform one man’s will. The White House does not become a family business because a family lives there for four years. Every official who enters public service assumes a duty beyond pleasing the person who appointed them.

And it includes our right to vote. That right belongs to us. It is how we grant power, limit it and take it back. A president who treats an election as an affront to his desires has lost sight of the first fact of a republic: the voters are his employers.

I know that many Americans saw Donald Trump clearly from the beginning. They recognized the appetite, the cruelty and the greed. He has stolen from them, too. Every day consumed by his grievances is a day taken from the work the country needs done. Every public institution bent toward his purposes is something taken from the people who built it, pay for it and depend on it.

Yet the most outrageous aspect of his betrayal may be what he has done to those who believed in him.

I think of the farmer who heard a promise that someone in Washington would finally understand his life. The tradesman who believed Donald Trump respected the work of his hands. The union man and woman who thought he would stand beside them when it cost something. They were entitled to believe a candidate who asked for their trust would honor it. Their votes were real. Their hopes were real. Their loyalty was real.

They will never have a seat at Mar-a-Lago. He played them all.

Some came to him through a more desolate path. They had been so poisoned by the American media that they came to believe in nothing with astounding force. They distrusted every institution, every expert, every promise from public life. Donald Trump did not heal that distrust. He cultivated it. He made himself the exception to every rule by which they judged anyone else.

All it took to announce the transformation was a cheap red hat. He told them it meant they were taking their country back. Then he used their faith in him to claim the country for himself.

There is no honor in mocking those people for having wanted someone to fight for them. There is also no honor in leaving the deception unnamed. A man who asks working Americans to see him as their champion owes them more than a performance of solidarity before he returns to the people who can buy a place at his table.

Look at the family around him. It is grotesque: a pack of wild-eyed grifters who have brought extraordinary shame and dishonor to the American presidency. They have moved through public life as though proximity to the office were an inheritance, a credential and a commodity. The spectacle would be ugly in any wealthy family. Attached to the presidency, it is a desecration.

Donald Trump taught them the central fraud. If the public can be persuaded that the man and the office are the same thing, then service to the country can be replaced by service to the family. Criticism becomes disloyalty. Scrutiny becomes persecution. An election defeat becomes an injustice that must somehow be undone. The republic shrinks to the size of one man’s demands.

This is why the word trust matters. It describes a relationship with duties. It reminds us that power was given for a purpose and can be taken away. The president is entrusted with the office because no one owns it. His family has no claim to it. His supporters have every right to demand that he keep faith with them, but their devotion cannot make the office his property.

Nor does opposing him require us to surrender hope for those who voted for him. He wants that division to become permanent. He wants Americans who see the fraud to despise Americans who fell for it, and Americans who fell for it to feel they have nowhere else to go. That keeps attention off the person who made the promises and broke the trust.

We can refuse the trap. We can say, without hesitation, that the farmer and the union worker were betrayed. We can say that their votes belong to them, as ours belong to us. We can demand a government whose officers know whom they serve.

Air Force One will carry another president. Another family will leave the White House. The office will outlast Donald Trump, but only if we insist upon the distinction he has worked so hard to erase.

He accepted a trust and betrayed it.

The country still belongs to us.