On Dec. 24, 2008, President George W. Bush revoked the pardon he had granted a day earlier to Isaac Robert Toussie, a developer in Brooklyn who pleaded guilty to mail fraud and making false statements to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
What prompted Bush’s change of mind? Among other things, The Daily News had disclosed that Toussie’s father, Robert Toussie, had contributed $28,500 to the Republican Party, which, according to the White House, “might create an appearance of impropriety.”
Fast forward to 2025.
In early April, Elizabeth Fago attended a $1 million-per-person Trump fund-raiser at Mar-a-Lago. On April 23, Trump signed a full pardon for her son, Paul Walczak, a nursing home executive.
Walczak had pleaded guilty to failing to pay the I.R.S. $7.4 million in taxes withheld from his employees’ paychecks. According to the Department of Justice, he used the money to buy a yacht and make “personal purchases at retailers such as Bergdorf Goodman, Cartier and Saks. During this same time, he also did not pay $3,480,111 of his business’s portion of his employees’ Social Security and Medicare taxes.”
The pardon saved Walczak from serving an 18-month prison sentence and paying $4.38 million in restitution.
In the Trump administration, contributing money to his campaign, to his inauguration or to a special Trump project such as the East Wing ballroom appears to be one of the factors qualifying convicted criminals for special treatment when seeking a presidential pardon.
The contrast between Bush and Trump raises the following question: How does Trump get away with doing things, repeatedly, that would have been disastrous for previous presidents, Republican and Democrat?
Neither the Republican administrations of Ronald Reagan or George H.W. Bush or George W. Bush nor the Democratic administrations of Bill Clinton or Barack Obama would have survived intact if they and their families started a multibillion-dollar business supported by foreign interests similar to the Trump Organization’s cryptocurrency operations or issued pardon after pardon to drug dealers, campaign contributors and political supporters on the scale Trump has engaged in.
In thinking about this question, I put together a long and constantly growing list of answers. They are not mutually exclusive but collectively complementary. Together, they are the ingredients for a stew of corruption.
In no special order, here they are:
The lack of guilt felt by Trump. Enforcement of and obedience to norms in a democracy require recognition of the importance of those norms. Trump shrugs those norms off. In most but not all of these cases, he is unapologetic and transparent about what he is doing, enabling him to avoid the trap that ensnared Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton, both of whom discovered that the cover-up is often worse than the crime.
The news media, which has become polarized into pro- and anti-Trump camps, effectively gutting its role as an enforcer of accountability.
The costs of polarization. Structurally, educational polarization has turned the Democrats into the party of so-called cognitive elites, engendering middle- and working-class suspicion of the party’s motives. For both left and right, partisan polarization, in turn, has turned both truth and facts into subjective concepts subject to partisan and self-interested definition.
The liabilities of the opposition. Democratic overreach — encapsulated in the term “wokeness” — has severely damaged the party’s moral credibility, making it harder to critique Trump productively.
Structural frailty. American democracy and the Constitution are not equipped to deal in an effective and timely manner with a president who aggressively and willfully tramples the law.
The Supreme Court’s conservative majority. The court has, with some recent exceptions, failed to fulfill its role as enforcer of restraints. The majority’s support of the unitary executive theory combined with such rulings as Trump v. United States have effectively approved presidential criminality.
A supine Republican Party. Republican majorities in the House and Senate have abandoned all semblance of institutional and constitutional integrity, passively allowing Trump to wrest away their powers over taxing and spending, turning Congress into a collection of sycophants.
The distribution of economic growth. The stagnation of conservative rural and exurban MAGA counties since the Great Recession, in contrast to the renewed progress of liberal urban and coastal counties, has convinced many voters in the slow- to no-growth areas that the system is rigged against them and liberals are doing the rigging.
For an overarching analysis of the contemporary dilemma over American democracy, it would be difficult to match or improve on a Nov. 18 article in Political Science Quarterly, “What Donald Trump Has Taught Us About American Political Institutions,” by Eric Schickler, a political scientist at the University of California, -Berkeley.
Schickler directly addresses the question posed in this column:
Generations of political scientists have viewed the American constitutional system and its surrounding pluralist civil society as stable touchstones that safeguard against the threat of authoritarian leadership.
Capitalizing on changes that go back several decades — the rise of nationalized polarization, the development of the unitary executive theory, and the growing sway of populist conservatives within the Republican Party — Donald Trump has demonstrated that the sources of countervailing power in the U.S. political system are far more fragile than previously understood.
Trump has prevailed upon congressional Republicans to surrender their core constitutional responsibilities, has eviscerated critical foundations of the modern administrative state, and upended the relationship between the federal government and major civil society actors.
The Trump administration, Schickler writes, has confirmed an argument that
some conservatives had been making since the New Deal: a big national government that has extensive regulatory and spending tools can use that leverage to bend societal institutions to its will. These conservatives just did not anticipate that it would be an ostensibly conservative president who used that leverage to exert authoritarian control.
Trump, Schickler contended, has revealed a core constitutional weakness of American democracy: the inability of threatened individuals, institutions and constituencies to unite in opposition to an authoritarian leader, the “collective action problem,” as it has come to be known:
Faced with a president willing to use arbitrary power to reward and punish civil society actors — and a compliant Congress and Supreme Court — a diverse set of actors has each decided it is in their self-interest to defer to unprecedented, and in many cases illegal, demands from the president.
Transformative presidents often if not always make their mark by destroying elements of the “old order,” Schickler notes, but Trump stands apart
in being willing to destroy essentially any element of the old order — leaving aside the bond market, evidently — to achieve dominance. This willingness to impose serious harm on multiple, key sectors of civil society — wealthy corporations, media companies, and universities among them — provides unique leverage.
Roxanne Rahnama, a fellow and lecturer in political science at Stanford, described in an email how the reinforcing interaction of contemporary trends works to Trump’s advantage:
Nationalized polarization has fundamentally changed congressional incentives and eroded the separation of powers and capacity to check the president.
When members’ donors, activists and media ecosystems operate nationally rather than locally, Republicans face extreme pressure to align with Trump and his supporters to survive primaries. Nationalized polarization has impacted incentive structures in ways that pre-empt punishing norms violations.
In Rahnama’s view, one answer to the “the bigger question about Trump ‘getting away with doing things’” suggests that “traditional accountability mechanisms are failing simultaneously: Congress’s incentives to check Trump are constrained by nationalized polarization, the court grants immunity, and a third piece of the argument is how much of civil society has capitulated.”
Sean Westwood, a political scientist at Dartmouth, has a another take, writing by email:
The defining paradox of this political moment is not the durability of Donald Trump, but the hollowed-out authority of the institutions meant to check him. Observers often wonder how he weathers scandals that would have capsized any predecessor. The answer lies less in his unique political alchemy and more in the complete immolation of the credibility by his opposition.
The Democratic Party and its cultural vanguard have spent nearly a decade hyperventilating over every transgression, enforcing a rigid cultural orthodoxy misaligned with average voters, and gaslighting the public about the visible cognitive decline of the previous president.
They have cried wolf so often, and with such performative hysteria, that the American electorate has gone deaf.
Not only have voters “gone deaf,” Westwood argued, but the arguments Democrats and liberals make are incomprehensible to the electorate at large: “While the political class debates the ‘unitary executive’ and the legacy of the Federalist Papers, they are speaking a dialect of procedural virtue that just doesn’t resonate with the public.”
The tragedy, Westwood continued,
is that by focusing on the abstract threat of authoritarianism, the Democrats miss the tangible threat of incompetence. If Trump’s tariffs spike inflation, or if his deportations rot crops in the fields, he loses support not because he violated the Constitution, but because he failed his primary job: keeping the lights on. The Democrats are trying to prosecute him for malice when they should be prosecuting him for malpractice.
Trump gets away with it not because the voters want a dictator, but because they have stopped listening to the prosecutors.
While Westwood points to partisan failure, others cite institutional and constitutional failure.
Jacob Grumbach, another political scientist at Berkeley, responded to my inquiries by email:
We can look back at many longer-term causes of these trends — deindustrialization, immigration and diversification, technological change and both party establishments’ inability to implement durable political and policy solutions to these problems. But the most important thing to understand at this point is that the U.S. Constitution, once considered the most durable in the world, was easily broken.
Grumbach described the nation’s vulnerabilities:
Congress, the Supreme Court, the administrative state and civil society were each assumed to be powerful checks on the executive. Each has failed dramatically.
Congress no longer has an incentive to check a president of the same party because of the nationalization of fund-raising, media and the interest group environment.
The Supreme Court has, in large part due to norm erosion in Congress and the White House, a very conservative supermajority that is both aligned with and afraid of checking the current executive. The administrative state turned out to be easily destroyed through unconstitutional actions like DOGE and impoundment.
Finally, American civil society’s decentralization made it easy to pressure individual corporations, law firms, media outlets and unions to “bend the knee” and pre-empt a more coordinated resistance.
Another source of Trump’s apparent immunity from the consequences of scandal lies in the way he has overturned the traditional relationship between a president and his party.
Daniel J. Galvin, a political scientist at Northwestern, wrote by email in response to my queries:
Historically, parties selected presidential candidates largely on the basis of demonstrated commitment to collective party goals and shared beliefs, typically signaled through prior service to the party and in government.
Trump’s 2016 overthrow of the Republican Party establishment, Galvin wrote, resulted in
a reversal of accountability. Where presidents were once accountable to their parties, the Republican Party is now accountable to Trump. For most congressional Republicans, loyalty to Trump now far outweighs commitment to Congress as an independent institution or to the fragile constitutional system of checks and balances.
For many Republican incumbents, this subordination comes naturally, according to Galvin:
Roughly 59 percent of current congressional Republicans entered office after Trump did. He does not need to threaten or bully them; many were selected precisely for their loyalty to Trump and to MAGA. In this sense, the party has truly been remade in his image.
Galvin summarized his analysis:
In short, had parties not abdicated their most important role — selecting candidates who were, and would reliably remain, loyal to the party — Trump would never have come close to the presidency. That is why the danger of lawlessness and corruption in the White House will persist even after Trump exits the scene.
In response to my query asking for his views on the list of factors contributing to Trump’s immunity, Hans Noel, a political scientist at Georgetown, outlined a series of modifications and shifts in nuance by email:
In the case of Trump’s lack of guilt, Noel wrote,
I’d put it slightly differently. A lot of norms and proper behavior, in a democracy or in the office or anywhere, are enforced by informal reputational costs. We don’t like it when people don’t approve of us.
It’s not simply that Trump feels no guilt. It’s that he doesn’t care about reputational costs from the kind of people who don’t approve of what he is doing. I think he does care a lot about what at least some people think about him, but his reaction is usually to double down and insist he’s winning, rather than adjust his behavior.
In the case of Trump’s transparency, Noel continued,
He’s signaling not only that he sees nothing wrong, but that you shouldn’t see anything wrong either. His defenders can say, if this was so wrong, why would he be so transparent about it? I also think Trump may in fact not think there is anything wrong with what he is doing, since he sees the world in a very transactional way.
In his seminal 1993 book, “The Politics Presidents Make,” Stephen Skowronek, a political scientist at Yale, argued that such presidents as Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan stand apart for reasons that have gone largely unrecognized:
For better or worse, the American presidency has proven itself most effective politically as an instrument of negation . … It has functioned best when it has been directed toward dislodging established elites, destroying the institutional arrangements that support them and clearing the way for something entirely new.
The presidency is a battering ram, and the presidents who have succeeded most magnificently in political leadership are those who have been best situated to use it forthrightly as such.
I asked Skowronek where Trump would fit in this analysis. He replied by email:
Sad to say, I think the quoted passage fits Trump perfectly. Trump has drawn out the power of the presidency as an instrument of negation, a battering ram breaking down the old establishment. He revels in that role. His political authority rests squarely on his authority to repudiate.
If Trump stands out from other great repudiators in American presidential history, it is for the absence (so far) of any effective push back capable of re-establishing a boundary and using that boundary to begin rebuilding another, different system of collective control.
In other words, while most historians and scholars of the presidency rank Trump at or close to the bottom on any list of presidential greatness, this wantonly destructive man has mimicked the strategies of such greats as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. In doing so, he will, unlike them, leave the nation worse off than it was when he took office.
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