Trump Hasn’t Learned From Watergate
Trying to operate outside the executive branch never works out well for presidents. There’s a reason for that.
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Photographer: Al Drago/Bloomberg
As more details emerge about President Donald Trump’s plot to pressure the Ukrainian government to investigate his political opponent, it’s becoming clear that this scandal has something very much in common with both Watergate and Iran-Contra. All three episodes involved a president attempting to bypass the regular executive-branch bureaucracy to get something done. And all three episodes resulted in a fiasco of ineptitude.
Presidents are tempted to bypass the bureaucracy because departments and agencies, in the U.S. system, are empowered in many cases to refuse presidential requests — and in other cases, they can create so many delays that they might as well be refusing. That’s not because of some nefarious “deep state.” It’s because these agencies have masters both in the White House and on Capitol Hill (and in many cases in the courts as well), and because their ultimate allegiance is to the law, not to elected officials. This can be immensely frustrating even to well-intentioned presidents trying to do perfectly legal things. It’s no less frustrating when what the president wants is of dubious legality or if an agency simply isn’t authorized to do it.