Banish Trump to the Anticanon
Tallying up the lengthy list of constitutional harms done by the Trump administration’s extraordinary deployment of National Guard troops and other federal agents to disrupt peaceful protests in Washington, D.C., earlier this month, it is hard not to include the fear that this president has set yet another precedent that could warp the nature of the American presidency. After all, what past presidents have done unquestionably shapes the way the presidency runs today, both in setting norms of day-to-day operations inside the executive branch, and in shaping how the public understands what behavior counts as “presidential.” Indeed, the Supreme Court that interpreting the words under Article II of the Constitution without recognizing “the gloss which life has written upon them” would now count as part of the canon of presidential precedent?
