There was a moment at Donald Trump's chaotic first press conference as President-elect last week that offered a disturbing insight into the dark place to which America is headed over the next four years.
In responding to a question about disentangling himself from his business empire, Trump basically told the assembled journalists that he doesn't need to do it.
"I have a no-conflict-of-interest provision as President," said Trump. "So I could actually run my business, I could actually run my business and run government at the same time."
While Presidents and other federal officials are, in fact, bound by ethics and federal disclosure rules, Trump is actually not completely wrong here. He has no legal obligation to separate himself from his various business enterprises or even his larger financial holdings.
What requires a President or any public official to disentangle themselves and avoid even the appearance of conflicts of interest are the norms, customs and traditions that have long guided the actions of America's political leaders.
Understanding these unwritten rules of propriety and their larger personal responsibilities in the context of public service, Presidents and hundreds of other public officials have created blind trusts, divested their holdings or released financial information. Because that is the basic tradition of modern American politics.
This willingness to abide by such political norms is perhaps the most important feature of American governance. Our Constitution, our laws and our governing institutions provide a basis for the proper functioning of democracy. But these institutions are only as strong as the willingness of political leaders to abide by them and to ensure that they don't become debased or corrupted.
Herein lies the fundamental problem that is now upon us with a Trump presidency. He doesn't respect these norms. He doesn't understand them.
And the party of which he is a member, which controls Congress, has shown no interest in ensuring that he lives up to them.
As a result, destructive behavior, from directly profiting off public service and intimidating and investigating political enemies in a manner that would have made Richard Nixon blanch to bringing back torture and attacking the very credibility of news organizations who report things that Trump doesn't like, could become fully normalized.
None of this should come as a surprise. After all, Trump's presidential campaign was a near-daily, and fairly gleeful, exercise in political norm-shredding.
This was a candidate who never turned over his tax records, even though presidential candidates had done just that for 40 years, out of respect for the public's need to understand a presidential aspirants potential financial conflicts.
Constrained by what?
(YURI GRIPAS/REUTERS)
Trump is under no legal obligation to disclose his taxes, but since we don't know Trump's financial links we also don't know his connections to foreign banks or foreign leaders and the ability of these actors to blackmail him. Going forward, it's hard to imagine why any candidate for President would release their taxes.
In light of Trump's candidacy and victory, it's also hard to imagine why future candidates would feel any fealty to the truth and not simply lie and mislead on an almost daily basis.
It's hard to imagine why they would avoid talking about jailing their opponents or musing that they'd refuse to concede if they lose.
It's hard to imagine why they'd feel reluctant to use a steady stream of racist, xenophobic and misogynist statements to demonize whole groups of Americans and foreigners if they believed it would be in their political interest to do so.
After all, Trump did all these things and it was seemingly not enough of an impediment to stop him from winning the presidency. The rules of political campaigns that have existed for decades are quite likely to be discarded - and inevitably our democracy will be further degraded, and the electorate will become more polarized than even it is today.
All this, however, is an issue for four years from now. In the meantime, we have to grapple with a more pressing fear: that the same candidate who regularly ignored basic campaign norms will ignore basic governing norms. If the two-and-a-half months since Trump was elected President are any indication, that is where we are headed.
Trump has openly questioned the integrity of the voting system by saying that 3 million illegal votes were cast for his opponent, Hillary Clinton. Trump has also repeatedly said that he won a landslide victory and that his win was one of the biggest in American history. Of course neither of those assertions are true.
In reality, he lost the popular vote by 3 million ballots, and his Electoral College win was relatively slim by historical standards.
While the norms of presidential transitions are perhaps slightly less expansive than other democratic norms, one has long remained sacrosanct: America has one President at a time. In practice, that means the President-elect holds his powder until he takes office and doesn't wade into policy discussions.
Trump, however, has openly conducted domestic and foreign policy during his transition. With Vice President-elect Mike Pence, he worked out a tax deal with Carrier to keep the company from shipping 800 jobs out of Pence's home state of Indiana to Mexico. He interjected himself into U.S.-China policy by taking a congratulatory phone call from the Taiwanese president — and putting in question America's One China policy.
He openly criticized the Obama administration for its abstention from a United National Security Council Resolution on Israeli settlements and apparently colluded with the Israeli government in an effort to block the resolution.
On Russia and its hacking of the Democratic National Committee, he has consistently questioned intelligence community assessments identifying Russia's involvement. He has even praised Vladimir Putin, the man responsible for the cyberattacks, for showing restraint in responding to Obama's imposition of sanctions over the incident.
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Anti-Trump protests erupt during inauguration
While these are among the worst of his actions, Trump has also upended, and with very little resistance, one of the nation's most essential democratic norms: civilian control of the military. By picking James Mattis, a recently retired general, as secretary of defense, he's undermined the symbolic ideal that the Pentagon should be run by a civilian. At the same time, he's appointed another former general, John Kelly, as head of Homeland Security.
Indeed, Trump's entire approach to his cabinet has gone against the grain of longstanding political custom. He has appointed individuals like Rex Tillerson for State, Ben Carson at Housing and Urban Develoment and Nikki Haley as Ambassador to the United Nations. All have little experience in the issues handled by the agencies or embassy they would head.
He's picked far-right politicians, business leaders and activists, like Ryan Zinke for Interior, Scott Pruitt at the EPA, Besty DeVos at Education and Andrew Pudzer at Labor, who are openly hostile to the mandate of their agencies.
And he's selected Jeff Sessions to be attorney general, even though 30 years the Senate rejected him for a federal judgeship because of openly racist statements and beliefs. Trump has made no effort to bring moderate views into his cabinet or offer an olive branch to his opponents.
In fact, if anything Trump has used his bully pulpit (primarily Twitter) to mercilessly attack his political opponents, corporations whose actions he disapproves, actors and actresses who've been critical of his behavior and even private citizens who have disagreed with him. It should almost go without saying that such actions are not normal in any American political context.
He has also shunned the media. At his combative press conference he openly derided a major news organization, CNN, as being a "fake news" outlet because he doesn't like their reporting.
This is what is ultimately so concerning about Trump's actions over the past two months. He's given no indication that he believes the normal rules of either campaigning or governing apply to him.
In no area is that more true than when it comes to his personal finances and potential conflicts of interest.
Trump will not divest himself of his business holdings; he won't create a blind trust, and he won't release his taxes so that the depths of his conflicts are fully understood and appreciated.
As he made clear earlier this month, in bragging about his decision to turn down a $2 billion from a developer in Dubai, he was still being offered real-estate deals as President-elect — and wanted credit for rejecting them.
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Donald Trump sworn in as 45th President of the United States
Indeed, he has met repeatedly with business partners and allowed his children, who will be running his business after he becomes President, to sit in on high-level transition discussions. He's also violated the spirit of anti-nepotism laws by making his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, a top White House advisor.
The opportunity for corruption is simply astonishing. Because Trump fully knows the extent of his business holdings, he also would fully understand how his decisions as President could impact them. He would also know if any individual or company or government was trying to use those business interests to curry favor with him.
In fact, we have no way of knowing if Trump has investments in the companies that he criticizes or praises on Twitter — and is using the drop or rise in stock prices that comes from his statements to personally profit.
Already Trump is almost certainly in violation of the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits any president from accepting gifts or payments from foreign governments. Any foreign guest staying in his hotels; any transactions made by the Trump Organization with a foreign entity; any favorable regulatory decision for an overseas Trump hotel would create a constitutional crisis.
Most Presidents would do everything they could to avoid such a situation because of the appearance of conflict and the assumed mandate to place the nation's needs above their own. But nothing requires that. It's not clear that any individual has standing to sue the President or to force him to cease and desist.
That power resides solely with Congress.
Here is perhaps the most dangerous aspect of Trump's disregard for political norms. Congress could require Trump to divest himself. They could force him to be more transparent.
And if he failed to act, they could remove him from office.
But we know this is not going to happen, because congressional Republicans, by and large, have shown utter indifference to Trump's steady stream of norm violations. Either they don't care, because Trump as President gives them the opportunity to push forward with their ideological agenda, or they're too afraid to speak up and risk alienating Trump's supporters.
If Trump is allowed to continue doing all that he has done so far in the transition — and does all that he seems inclined to do once he takes office — without any check from Congress, it will fundamentally, perhaps permanently, erode our democratic institutions. America may be the oldest democracy in the world, but we've held that honor because of an adherence to basic and agreed-upon customs and norms. A democracy that cuts itself off from those traditions is a democracy on a slippery slope to oblivion.
Cohen is a writer on American politics and the author of "American Maelstrom: The 1968 Election and the Politics of Division."
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