Donald Trump is putting an overly literal spin on the words in his presidential seal — e pluribus unum, meaning, “out of many, one.”
In a head-spinning week, the president further focused his presidency on benefiting the one — himself — while looking even more oblivious to the many — the millions of Americans trapped in an affordability crisis.
And even normally pliant Senate Republicans aren’t standing for it.
Every president flexes power to pursue policy and political goals, some arising from their own obsessions. But Trump is going further than any of his recent predecessors to use his office as a vehicle of personal power.
In the week’s most extraordinary move, Trump used his executive power to extraordinary personal advantage, with his Justice Department “forever” barring IRS audits into past tax affairs of the president and his family.
The declaration was among terms of a controversial settlement arising from a $10 billion Trump lawsuit against his own government over his leaked tax returns. It’s troubling because it appears to involve a president using his unique authority to award himself a right not available to other citizens.
Another part of the settlement involves the creation of a $1.776 billion fund to compensate citizens who claim they were victims of weaponized justice in the Biden administration. This may be the most tangible example of Trump’s campaign mantra in 2024, when he told huge rallies, “I am your retribution.”
Fears the plan could enrich hundreds of people convicted in the US Capitol riot of 2021, when some Trump supporters beat up police, perturbed even the rubber-stamp Republican Senate majority.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche postponed a trip to Minnesota to highlight alleged Democratic corruption to mount a damage control operation.
But Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a top appropriator who is hoping an anti-Trump backlash won’t sweep her out of the Senate in November’s midterm elections, said: “I do not believe individuals that were convicted of violence against police officers on January 6 should be entitled to reimbursement of their legal fees.”
North Carolina GOP Sen. Thom Tillis, who has the luxury of bluntness because he’s about to retire, said of the plan: “This is just stupid on stilts.”
And Louisiana Sen. John Kennedy added: “I just don’t know how this puppy dog will work. I’m not sure where the money’s coming from. I’m not sure who’s going to decide.”
Former Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell was even more caustic. “So the nation’s top law enforcement official is asking for a slush fund to pay people who assault cops? Utterly stupid, morally wrong – Take your pick,” the Kentucky senator said.
The revolt would not have happened had not Trump set out to pursue an eye-popping personal priority — rewarding supporters who backed his false claims of 2020 election fraud. But it backfired badly, since the impasse led to the Senate leaving town for the Memorial Day recess without passing one of his priorities — a huge immigration enforcement funding package.
Ballroom drama extends the optics issue
One key to Trump’s success is his shamelessness. That might sound like a criticism. But it’s a quality that frees him from conventions, delights his supporters and allows him to do exactly what he wants.
Most presidents, if accused of pursuing a personal vanity project worth millions of dollars at a time of nationwide economic stringency, might try to keep it under wraps. Not the 45th and 47th president. He’s proud of it, as he showed when enthusiastically leading reporters on a tour of his White House ballroom project, soon to rise from the hole left by the antique East Wing.
“What I do best in life is build,” the president said Tuesday, while showing off plans for the ornate edifice and revealed the startling news that the roof will also house “the greatest drone empire” to protect Washington.
Trump’s critics have blasted his ballroom as corrupt and an abuse of power. They decry his program to litter Washington with structures meant to ensure his personal legacy, which will tower over the city long after he’s left office. A massive triumphal arch that will destroy monument sight lines near the Potomac is another example.
Trump insists that such projects are not all about him, but rather part of a long-overdue beautification project that will epitomize a proud and ambitious nation and a capital city that past presidents allowed to grow decrepit.
“I’m making a gift of the ballroom,” the president said, referring to the private corporate donations he said will finance the project and ignoring the multiple ethical problems this raises. But Trump also wants millions of dollars of taxpayer cash channeled to the Secret Service to fund a bunker and security upgrades under the ballroom.
He insists it’s not a boondoggle but rather a service to the nation that could protect presidents for “hundreds of years.”
“We’re making a gift to the United States,” Trump said Thursday. “Not for me because I’ll be gone — you know, I’ll be gone and you’ll have somebody else in.”
Should Trump get the benefit of the doubt? Perhaps he is sincere. Still, his administration’s spree of naming buildings after the boss — such as the US Institute for Peace and the Kennedy Center — undercuts a more magnanimous view. So do banners of his face that now adorn several federal buildings in the capital.
And even if Trump’s motives are purely patriotic, it says something about his priorities that he’s fixated on such matters while this week declaring that rising gas prices, caused by his war in Iran, amount to mere “peanuts.”
All of this offers Democrats an easy opening. Democratic Sen. Chris Van Hollen, for example, blasted Trump’s nutty soundbite while he was standing beside the site of his “gold plated, taxpayer funded ballroom.” He wrote on X, “Trump first, working Americans last.”
If the ballroom is a gift, most Americans could do without it, according to a Washington Post/ABC News/IPSOS poll in November that showed 56% opposed the decision to tear down the East Wing and build a ballroom.
If the optics don’t seem iffy to Trump, they do to Senate Republicans, who are revolting against both his ballroom and the weaponization fund. The president didn’t seem to know exactly how to respond, when asked about this novel show of steel by the Senate during an Oval Office appearance Thursday.
“I don’t know. I really don’t know. I can tell you, I only do what’s right,” he said.
Could Trump’s hyper-personal presidency backfire?
The furors over the ballroom and the compensation fund threaten to worsen Trump’s political plight as he suffers historically low approval ratings, and polls show Americans blame his policies for worsening their economic prospects.
The president is sometimes his own worst enemy. This week’s flurry of controversies overshadowed the efforts the White House is making to convince Americans that the president really does recognize their frustrations. These include the expansion of the Trump RX website designed to lower drug prices, which will now feature 600 generics, including cholesterol and diabetes treatments.
Ironically, the GOP Senate revolt came in a week when the president once again harnessed his dominance of the MAGA base to show his power to punish lawmakers who he believes have wronged him. Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie became the latest traditional conservative to lose to a Trump-backed primary challenger after defying the president on Iran and the Epstein files. It was significant that the president slammed him as “disloyal” just before the election.
Another Republican, Texas Sen. John Cornyn, is now in danger of losing his primary after Trump backed his challenger Ken Paxton. Cornyn’s apparent transgression, after months trying to butter up Trump, is not being sufficiently fanatical about his support. Trump said the incumbent was “a good man” but added that he was not “supportive of me when times were tough,” and he accused Cornyn of being slow to endorse his 2024 White House run.
Putting himself first in this context might come back to haunt Trump, since many Democrats believe their best chance to win a critical Senate seat in Texas is a race against Paxton.
These new victims of Trump’s retribution campaign — a list that also includes Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy — only add to the impression that the president sees his position less as a way to enact policy change to transform the country than as a vehicle of personal power.
This is not a new trend. The last 16 months have bristled with examples of Trump apparently using his office to benefit himself. This includes his pressuring of big law firms, which resulted in hours of pro bono representation, and his acceptance of a luxury Boeing 747 from Qatar to serve as a new Air Force One — which is being updated at taxpayer expense.
Trump’s critics, meanwhile, accuse him of using his position to benefit his own businesses — for example, this year’s G20 summit of world leaders which he announced last year will be held at his Doral golf resort in Florida.
Such critiques won’t shake the commitment of Trump’s most loyal supporters, many of whom revere him as the one political figure who heard their angst about a political system and a globalized economy they believe left them behind.
But his critics think he’s in it for himself. And the president is giving them plenty of evidence in a quintessentially self-absorbed second term.
