A rubber-stamp president?
If Donald Trump won’t be able to trumpet that the largest crowd in human history assembled to celebrate his resurrection, perhaps today’s Capitol Rotunda gathering marks the greatest assembly of billionaires Washington has ever seen.
On Friday, January 20, 2017, Trump signed his first executive orders in the Oval Office shortly after his inaugural parade ended. Note that he needed his chief of staff to point out where on the order his signature was required:
Trump loves spectacles. But having made so many promises about the major achievements he will make on Day One (like ending the war in Ukraine in “24 hours”), he clearly needs a spectacle that will overshadow the multitude of day-one promises he can’t keep.
The solution: more than 200 executive orders.
While the press today furiously tries to dissect the contents of these orders, I have two much more basic questions:
1. Has Trump actually read all or any of these orders — orders that were crafted by Stephen Miller and all the interest groups that drafted their own texts? After all, Ted Gistaro, a veteran CIA analyst who served as Trump’s daily intelligence briefer during his first term said Trump “doesn’t really read anything.”
2. Even with his all his presidential pens neatly lined up, simply writing his signature 200 times in one day would be quite a feat, which begs this question: After doing a few performance signatures in front of the cameras, will Trump’s solicitous aides spare their boss’s right wrist by providing him with a rubber stamp? Seriously.
And this raises a constitutional question: Trump’s far-reaching legal impunity (gifted by the Supreme Court) notwithstanding, can Donald Trump’s signature be assumed to carry the legal authority of the POTUS if there is no independent evidence that it’s a signature and not a rubber stamp?
I’m sure Stephen Miller and many other White House staffers have the skill and chutzpah to use the presidential rubber stamp whenever they might deem it necessary.
How could Trump differentiate between orders he signed without reading them from orders that never even passed through his hands?
If all these questions sound way too conspiratorial, let’s not forget that today marks the end of a presidency in which dutiful staffers managed, for several years, to cover up the president’s mental infirmity.