He did not set his heart to seek God.
II Chronicles 12:14
When a leader sins, the name of Heaven is profaned.
Babylonian Talmud Yoma 86:a
How can Trump do the most harm?
By breaking laws, or behaving as if
societal norms simply don't matter?
Jewish Scriptures, which serve as the theological foundation for Christianity and Islam, suggest that President Donald Trump is comparable to some of the Torah's most memorable leaders - especially several of the kings who ruled over the ancient nation.
Lest Trump pleasure in this, this comparison does not reflect praise for the current Commander-in-Chief of the United States, though he undoubtedly would appreciate being mentioned in the same breath as powerful biblical figures. For example, one of them, Saul, the first king of Israel. As history proved, he was judged by G-d to be unfit - too impetuous, too selfish - to serve as king; G-d eventually removed the throne from him. More comparisons may be made between Trump and such individuals as Jeroboam and Rehoboam, sons of King Solomon, whose own reigns as king ended in disgrace; and Korach, leader of the desert rebellion against G-d's selected agents, Moses and Aaron.
These men of royalty in time fell from Divine favor; their reputations tarnished. They shared a common trait, one aspect of behavior that betrayed a weakness of character, a fatal flaw that removed them from positions of influence and ruined their legacies - that trait, which Trump shares to an unparalleled degree for a U.S. President, and is certain to leave his reputation in tatters: a contempt for precedent.
All of them, the Torah figures and the U.S. President, failed to show respect - rather, they demonstrated blatant disrespect - for the actions that had come to be expected of a nation's highest leader. These kings did not honor precedents; they negated the tradition of obeying customs - those, if not encoded in laws or judicial rulings - that had guided their predecessors. They behaved, technically, within the letter of the law, but violated its intent and spirit. In this vein, Trump's repeated actions have conveyed the message that accepted precedent can be cavalierly disregarded if it stands in the way of one's agenda.
A master of plausible deniability, Trump is on firm legal ground in doing this - he does not face impeachment for being a breaker of precedent.
Trump recognizes no binding precedents. His tacit assertion: anything that is not explicitly forbidden is permitted, and that "He who saves his country does not violate any law" - a self-serving, myopic attitude that finds no basis in U.S. law or the Constitution, and is sure to end in failure.
While the discredited kings of Israel tested G-d's patience, Trump tests the nation's. His MO: by skirting the boundaries of actions that are sanctioned by law, by the Constitution, or by various courts (essentially by thwarting the intention of established legal-political practices and norms of personal behavior), Trump has followed a constant path of behavior.
While not outright engaging in constant illegal, unconstitutional, forbidden-by-the-courts actions, he has flouted normative patterns of action, shown contempt for the behavior of previous Presidents, and made clear, that in constantly stalling, bullying and resorting to countless judicial appeals, he considers himself the ultimate arbiter of what is permitted. Just as rebellious Jewish leaders in the era of the Torah paid no attention to G-d or to His prophets - Trump is setting himself above precedent, the national legislature, and the nation's court system.
While he presumptuously ignores precedents, he lessens his office's reputation at home and his nation's respect abroad.
This is Trump's ultimate shortcoming. Though he sometimes steps over the line of proven illegality, paying no attention to legislative enactments or to court rulings, he has done something more risky to the health of the republic - he has established a culture that regards laws and the Constitution and decisions of various judiciaries as permeable, carrying no more strength than the paper, or parchment, on which they are written. This attitude of hubris permeates downward, empowering a culture of disrespect for tradition; in this Weltanschauung, only unfettered power matters.
He essentially does not necessarily break or abrogate precedents - he simply acts as if they do not exist, or do not apply to him.
Who's gonna stop me? I make the rules! As King Louis XIV apocryphally said, "I am the state."
A familiar path for someone who recognizes no power stronger than his. To paraphrase Lewis Carroll's Humpty Dumpty, the words of a legislative body or of a court's judge mean exactly what he says they mean.
In religious terms, Trump, in his secular milieu, has disregarded the concept of minhag Yisroel k'halacha, the customs of the Jewish people rising to the level of mandatory Jewish law. This applies to the wellbeing of any nation. In other words, Trump, and the like-minded members of his administration, have repeatedly ignored accepted ways of governing, and of enforcing the legislation that have prevailed in this country for centuries - and he shows that these precedents have become meaningless and ineffectual.
Precedent plays an important part in the country's political life; the framers of the Constitution recognized that not every eventuality in the country's future could be predicted, and they provided the U.S. with a framework for the executive branch to exercise its power with a degree of flexibility, including an implied respect for the precedents of earlier Presidents, and for abiding by the principle of the country's enlightened self-interest. Following George Washington's limit of his time in office to two elected terms, no term limit existed in legislation; Presidents who came after Washington abided by this precedent - until FDR ran, and won, four times; which prompted the adoption of the 22nd Amendment, which formally limits a President to two terms in office. At that point, minhag became halacha, the weight of political legitimacy making a custom functionally, then officially, binding.
Trump has followed the spirit of FDR's precedent-shattering action. Trump, of course, has talked of finding a way to subvert the terms of this Amendment.
In a like manner, G-d gave members of the Jewish nation that came out of Egypt three millennia ago many guidelines, as well as the ability, over the centuries, to establish new customs when circumstances dictated, even if there is no explicit written source.
Both systems depend on unwritten, inherited norms - neither the Torah nor the Constitution could anticipate every crisis, every nuance, every challenge, that might arise.
Traditional Judaism places great importance on the value of minhag (Berachot 45a, Eruvin 21b, Menachot 20:b), and on the severity of devaluing its significance and its binding influence on the Jewish people. In fact, one prominent 13th-century commentator, the Rosh, stated (Pesachim 4:3) that a practice accepted by the community is like a vow (neder).
The customs that G-d gave the people the power to institute - and once instituted, to perpetuate -- are not minor. They include such taken-for-granted practices as adding a second day of yom tov in the Diaspora, chanting Kol Nidrei on the evening of Yom Kippur, and waiting between meat and dairy meals.
This concept does not mandate that any behavior adopted by the Jewish people can automatically become as-commanded and normative - such acts, which are not stated explicitly in the Torah, cannot contradict Torah prohibitions or undermine moral foundations; they must be long-standing, widely and collectively accepted and practiced consistently by a recognized community. Their authority come from continuity and shared trust. If they meet these conditions, innovative customs achieve permanence.
In other words, practice creates obligation.
Ongoing, unchallenged acceptance of precedents - those that align with constitutional values, and reinforce the separation of powers -- results in behavior that comes to be treated as obligatory instead of optional. Unless, like Trump, a leader rejects precedent.
In the political system of the United States, with its centuries-old system of checks and balances, designed to prevent any branch of government from obtaining the level of power commonly found in autocracies, precedent is the secular equivalent of minhag, customs that begin among the people and come to be widely accepted en masse. In the U.S., this type of precedent is largely the purview of the leadership class - and this is the type of precedent that Trump scorns.
The secular equivalent in the U.S. government is stare decisis (Latin for "to stand by things decided"), which, strictly speaking, refers to one court accepting another court's precedent-creating decision, which ensures consistency in interpreting law. But it extends to the executive and legislative branches, which accord a similar level of respect to traditions within their own chambers abrogating a form of stare decisis undermines trust in legal predictability as well as respect for leadership, weakening stability and inviting abuse.
Judaism offers a large corpus of rabbinical interpretations and prescriptions that put this elasticity into practice, including the comprehensive Shulchan Aruch (the Code of Jewish Law); for the U.S., there are legislation enactions and executive actions. Both systems recognize the vital role that precedent plays.
Trump does not. He is, of course, not a Jew - the opinions of Shulchan Aruch do not concern or influence him; but their insights have universal application, in religious or secular settings.
This is Trump's sin. He clearly fails to respect the people. Or G-d. Or common decency. Precedent be damned!
In acting like this, the President loses his moral authority.
In a Jewish context, the power of precedent stems primarily from amcha, the people. In a secular context, precedent is determined primarily by the actions of the elite, the leaders of the various branches of government. In the former, the offence is individual; in the latter, communal. In the former, the lone breaker of precedent is punished; in the latter, the community.
Jewish history suggests that it is the men at the highest level of leadership -- who are held to the highest level of accountability -- are the people who bear the most responsibility for showing respect for precedent.
The record of men whom the Torah and subsequent Torah scholars consider failures in leadership positions indicates that a flagrant disregard for the guidance of preceding leaders or extant legislation - in the U.S., that would be previous Chief Executives, Congress, and the Supreme Court - ranks with, or arguably ahead of, outright criminality. In other words, the Torah perspective shows, a leader is condemned not only for the laws he breaks, but for his presumptuous attitude about what came before him, about the precedent of earlier leaders, which he considers disposable.
For context -- Saul's sin: while defeating the troops of Agag, the king of Amalek, Saul, for the sake of popularity, allowed the king and the king's prime livestock to live (I Samuel 15), putting his pity on the king before G-d's demand for justice; eventually, villainous Haman, Agag's descendant, tried to commit genocide against the Jews of Persia. Saul did not suffer Divine punishment immediately, but G-d withdrew His spirit from Saul, who eventually lost the monarchy to David. Rehoboam's sin (I Kings 12): he rejected the counsel of the country's elders, who reminded him of the requirement for him to rule as a servant leader; he rejected this overriding precedent; he accepted advice only from people who proved their personal loyalty to him; eventually, the united Jewish kingdom became divided. Jeroboam's sin: against the advice of some prophets, following "his own heart" (I Kings 12-13), he created shrines that were nor ordered by G-d in order to consolidate his power; this behavior doomed his dynasty, including the death of his righteous son Aviyah.
Then there is the case of King David, who, bucking tradition, ordered a census of the nation (II Samuel 24), which indicated a belief in numerical strength rather than Divine protection. In response, G-d sent a plague; David confessed his error, but his status was diminished in the people's eyes. Because he repented, and accepted G-d's sovereignty, David did not lose his kingship.
And Korach, a greedy member of the tribe of Levi? Seeking power, he surrounded himself with people who were loyal to him; then, to expand his wider support while confronting Moses and Aaron, he sanctimoniously lauded the holiness of "all the people" (Numbers 16:3), whom he sought to persuade to rebel against G-d's chosen prophets. While Korach did not obliquely break any Torah commandments, he questioned the very legitimacy of Torah, and of G-d's sovereignty; publicly discredited, he was swallowed by the earth, and many of his rebellious supporters died at G-d's hand.
Or Uzziah (aka Azariah), a king of Judah who tried to usurp the duties of the Priests? Contrary to their protests, he entered the Holy Temple to offer incense (II Chronicles 26), which was their prerogative. For violating this institutional boundary, he was struck immediately with biblical leprosy, but continued to serve on the throne.
Different consequences for different sins.
Consider some other more-contemporary leaders upon whom history now frowns "
Said Lenin, "The dictatorship of the proletariat is nothing but power based directly upon force and unrestricted by any laws." Said Stalin, in a discussion with Churchill about the future of Eastern Europe near the end of World War II, cautioned by the British leader to consider the views of the Vatican, "How many divisions [of troops] does the Pope have?" Said - supposedly -- President Andrew Jackson, in defiance of a Supreme Court ruling that protected Native American tribes, "[Justice John] Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." A common theme: Might gives right. A belief that Judaism does not share - piety confers right.That is why chazal, the Jewish sages, criticized, and G-d punished (often in a delayed manner, to expose the extent of the sinner's sin or give the sinner a chance to repent), the violators of precedent to an equal, or greater, degree than individuals who chose to break the laws of society.
The severe penalty for ignoring accepted tradition, while not clearly breaking a law or ignoring the decision of a court, seems counter-intuitive - isn't the outright violation of legislation or the Constitution a more serious, more dangerous grievance? But chazal do not see it that way; they look at the long-range, society-wide effect of a leader's nefarious actions, which dissolves a society's authority structure and causes legality to be manufactured, rather than transmitted. When this happens, law, whether secular or religious, becomes an instrument of governance, not truth. In Jewish terms, the legitimacy of mesora, received tradition, becomes subsumed by koach, power, replacing consensus with coercion, repressing dissent, making law a relative rather than an absolute value.
Hence, Jewish tradition, which accords great strength to established-and-accepted customs, would regard Trump's flouting of precedent, while serving as a country's leader, as a particularly egregious behavior. The Shulchan Aruch (214, 242) makes this clear - it states the conditions in which minhag becomes binding halacha (Jewish law), and it emphasizes that respect for rabbinic authority includes a rabbi's deference to the people's established practice. But chazal cautioned against each generation creating its own customs, fearing that that practice would corrupt the immutable nature of Torah, redefining holy writ to meet the generation's distinct needs.
In other words, the reach of minhag has its limits.
Are the secular minhagim, the non-binding actions of previous Presidents, tantamount to incumbent behavior that subsequent Presidents have to automatically follow?
Obviously, no. The President inherits great discretion about what power he can unilaterally exert.
But previous Presidents who established the precedent of doing things like releasing their tax records, or dispatching the National Guard only when public safety was clearly at stake, prioritized what was good for the national interest, demonstrating a willingness to sacrifice that President's short-term desires or political gain in order to foster respect among the people who had elected them.
For example...
It's not the end of the world if a vainglorious President pressures his toadies at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to add his name to the institution's title, above that of his assassinated predecessor. But it sends a message - that the legislation establishing the Center, specifying that only an act of Congress could change the name, can be overruled by fiat and ego. I can do what I want!
Thus, it's no surprise that the President would throw his political weight around to put his name on one of the government's most important cultural institutions. That's his established MO - a precedent he does respect. It's a symbol of his limited mindset.
Similarly, it's not a law that the President should treat journalists with respect, or not use his power as a cudgel with which to control or threaten the media, but a President who does this risks endangering or lessening his influence.
Along these lines, it's not written-in-stone (or in the Constitution):
- that the Department of Justice should cease to operate independently of the White House.
- that a candidate for the presidency should take part in his party's public debates.
- that a President should ensure a peaceful transition to the administration of his successor.
- that a two-term President should not discuss serving a Constitution-barred third term.
- that a President should use his power of the pardon judiciously.
- that a President must accept membership in NATO.
- that a President demand that a foreign country surrender its valuable minerals in order to get U.S. aid.
- that a President usurp Congress' budget-making power.
- that a President should put his business assets in a blind trust.
- that a President should not belittle foreign leaders in public settings.
- that a President should not declare a national emergency to enforce his emigration policies.
- that a President should not arbitrarily state that a state of war exists without Congress' input.
- that a President should not make ad hominem attacks on judges or members of Congress.
- that a President should not pressure states to engage in open gerrymandering to favor his party.
- that a President should minimize appointing members of his family to important government positions.
Trump has arrogantly violated all these norms, breaking not (necessarily) laws, but good-faith precedents.
At some point, the ignoring of precedent crosses the line from style into substance, and Trump's style recreates the government in his image. In other words, minhag becomes halacha.
The danger: by paying no attention to (or reinterpreting, to his advantage) what earlier administrations had done, by ignoring the past, Trump is putting the country's future in jeopardy. He sets a tone for the nation: that a people's accepted customs can be breezily set aside by elected officials - and unelected appointees - who, unchallenged unless a referendum removes them from office and the voting public turns against them in the next plebiscite, can work to continue their positions of power. And that people who hold leadership positions can; unchallenged, consider established practices disposable for a moment's gain of ego or pocketbook or accumulation of power.
Chazal warned, and history has shown, that a society can survive broken laws, but it cannot overcome broken norms.
Lest Trump think - assuming that he doesn't seek a third term as President - that, as he has openly wished, that he will be succeeded in the Oval Office, or as leader of the MAGA movement, by one of his sons, or by his Vice President or Secretary-of-State, consider this precedent: Jeroboam, king of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, was succeeded on the throne by his son Nadab, who was assassinated two years into his reign; and no son of Rehoboam, ruler of the Southern Kingdom (Judah), ever became king over a unified Kingdom of Israel.
