Democrats Cry "Fiduciary Duty" and They Are Right
Trump said that the board of the Kennedy Center, which he chairs as president, had voted "almost unanimously" in favor of this position. This should not come as a great shock, given that the president had himself removed many of the board members in recent months and replaced them with his own appointees. Those he did not appoint, it appears, voted against him. Democratic Congresswoman Joyce Beatty voted against Trump's plans and then, rather amusingly, issued a public statement accusing the president of breaching his fiduciary duty to the institution.
The concept of fiduciary duty is an interesting one, but it sits awkwardly with the generally understood makeup of Donald Trump's psychology. It presupposes that a person in a governance role has a duty to serve the best interests of the institution, or entity, over which they have stewardship, rather than their own.
This is not, to put it mildly, how the sitting president appears to see the world.
A Pattern of Behavior
This latest intervention came, after all, just a week after the president gave a speech at his party's Midterm Convention in Texas. During the course of that speech, Trump promised to pay $5,000 to every American citizen of voting age, conditional on his party winning the midterm elections. That proposal, which would cost over a trillion dollars, would be paid for with borrowings from the US Treasury, already $40tn in debt.
Of all the institutions in the world, the presidency of the United States might be the one with the greatest fiduciary duty. Its holder has extensive responsibilities which go far beyond narrow personal or partisan interests. Since the advent of the nuclear age, the US president has had a fiduciary duty to peace in the world and to preventing nuclear war. He, or she, has a duty to uphold the US Constitution and manage the economy as best he can.
For a holder of that office to essentially pledge to bribe the electorate with its own money, far-fetched as that scheme may be, is perhaps the perfect example of how the current president does not understand the concept of fiduciary duty.
The Federal Reserve Is Not Immune
The president's attitude to interest rates is another example. On the same day as he was announcing that he would essentially take the Kennedy Center hostage, Trump berated his own Federal Reserve for its decision to hike interest rates.
"Interest rates should be 1%", he posted on Truth Social.
Few sane economists, if any, would agree with President Trump on this. US prices are already spiking as a result of his war in the Gulf, with diesel and gasoline prices hitting new highs. To cut interest rates, as he proposes, would create a short-term burst of economic growth at the expense of medium-term inflation. Yet it is not hard to see the appeal for Trump: a sudden burst of economic growth, right before the midterms, might serve his interests well.
For Trump Supporters, Competing Attitudes
Donald Trump has, broadly, two categories of supporters. The first group, his base, appears entirely comfortable with his conduct in office on these matters, either because his actions hurt their cultural enemies, in the phrase "make the libs cry", or because they see them as esoteric ephemera unrelated to Trump's central mission of Making America Great Again™.
The second group, however, is more troublesome. These are the formerly principled conservatives who twist themselves into pretzels trying to avoid defending this conduct directly. Instead, they focus on the limited power of the presidency and insist that institutions are working as they should. Note, they say, that Trump was prevented from renaming the Kennedy Center by the courts. Thus, the system is working.
Yet as recent events demonstrate, the power of the courts is limited. They have been able to prevent the president from renaming the institution. They have not been able to prevent him from taking it hostage and threatening its destruction. Similarly, while the Federal Reserve has thus far resisted Trump's demands for lower interest rates, and Congress has thus far rejected his plans to spend trillions on electoral bribes, these barriers to autocracy hang by a thread. The president, after all, retains the power to appoint members of the Federal Reserve.
A Long Term Risk, in Plain Sight
What is depressingly clear, however, is that for many such conservatives, political partisanship Trumps principle, pardon the pun. Were a Democratic president doing merely a fraction of what the current incumbent is attempting, these same conservatives would be taking to the barricades to stop him, warning darkly of the fall of the constitutional order.
For voters, meanwhile, the midterm elections offer a rare chance to draw definitive lines around Trump, constraining him somewhat over the final two years of his term. At the moment, polls suggest voters are likely to take that option. In many ways, the partisan Republicans who have indulged the president's worst instincts have only themselves to blame. It will be their seats that turn blue in November. Not his.
