Milbank: Actions may be legal, but it doesn’t make them right

That dangerously distorts the president’s role. Just because it’s legal for a president to do something doesn’t mean it’s right. A president could do all kinds of things that are legal but disastrous. Our system relies on having a chief executive who practices some self-restraint.

He can fire the FBI director, even one leading an investigation of him — though reports that he pressured James B. Comey to drop the investigation of former Trump aide Michael Flynn, if true, suggest possible obstruction of justice. He can have all kinds of undisclosed business conflicts of interest and use the presidency to enrich himself. He can share secrets with adversaries, compromising the cooperation of allies. The assumption is — or was — that a president wouldn’t.

“The troubling fact is the president has sweeping authority to wreak virtual havoc on this country and the world if he chooses to do so,” said George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley.

A president could, if he chose, legally release the names of all covert operatives spying for the United States around the world. He could start a war if he claimed an imminent threat. He could close the White House to all reporters and visitors, end all contacts with the media and declare any information — even information already published in newspapers — to be classified.

Certainly, a president could be impeached — but that wouldn’t stop him in the short term.

A need for human virtues

Institutional restraints — checks and balances — “can never fully obviate the need for certain human virtues,” Christopher Nadon, a government professor at Claremont McKenna College, wrote recently for the conservative Weekly Standard. Chief among these: self-control. The Founding Fathers, Nadon told me, wrote often of the president guided by “honor” and “decorum” and reined in by public scrutiny and humility. “They certainly thought the type of person who would get through to that office would have self-restraint,” he said.

The Constitution gives the president both specific powers (veto, appointments, treaties) and inherent powers. Modern presidents have stretched the bounds of executive authority. George W. Bush claimed powers to conduct military trials and even to torture detainees. Barack Obama tested the bounds with executive actions on health care and immigration.

Those abuses seem quaint now that we have a president governing with a terrifying combination of impulsivity and ignorance. McMaster, in the closing lines of his briefing Tuesday, offered an admission about the intelligence Trump gave Russia: “I should just make, maybe, the statement here that the president wasn’t even aware, you know, where this information came from.”

So Trump gave secrets to Russia — but that’s OK because he didn’t know what he was doing. This is supposed to make us feel better?