AILSA CHANG, HOST:
A word that you hear a lot when people talk about President Trump is norms - usually about how many he's breaking or ignoring. NPR senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson has the story on what norms are and what it means that Trump is treating them differently than past presidents.
MARA LIASSON, BYLINE: To learn about norms, I called up Norm himself - Norm Eisen, that is - who was President Obama's special counsel for ethics; in effect, the designated defender of norms in government.
NORM EISEN: Norms are the principles, the values that guide good functioning in government. But they're not laws.
LIASSON: Principles like not making money off the presidency or using the levers of government to punish your political enemies or threatening to prosecute your predecessor for treason - all of which Trump has done. Presidents are not legally bound to abide by these norms, but at least until now, they've tried to, says Trevor Potter, former Republican chairman of the Federal Election Commission.
TREVOR POTTER: They're self-restraints to prevent ethics violations, unethical activity, to increase public confidence in the government. And the reality is that they only work if the president cares about them and the president's people enforce them.
LIASSON: And, says Norm Eisen, President Trump does not care about them.
EISEN: Presidents were held back both by self-restraint but also by a sense of shame or a fear of consequences that Donald Trump doesn't have.
LIASSON: Presidents in the past have sometimes been the subject of ethics controversies, but no president has made the kind of money - hundreds of millions of dollars, for instance - on cryptocurrency at the same time his administration is regulating the crypto industry. Then there's the norm, says Trevor Potter, that the president should not order his Justice Department to go after his political enemies, as Trump has done.
POTTER: That's an enormous change. It's a violation of a norm. It's a violation of policies by the last umpteen presidents.
LIASSON: Another norm Trump has broken - respect for the other two coequal branches of government. Eisen points to the case of TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform.
EISEN: Donald Trump's behavior vis-a-vis TikTok is, in a sense, the violation of the ultimate norm.
LIASSON: It's the ultimate norm, says Eisen, because Congress, by big bipartisan majorities, passed a law to shut down TikTok. Then the Supreme Court unanimously upheld the law. But...
EISEN: Donald Trump has chosen to ignore it. So he's created a new negative norm - catch me if you can.
LIASSON: For Trump supporters like Paul Kamenar, the lead counsel at the National Legal and Policy Center, a conservative ethics watchdog group, Trump is merely reasserting the proper authority of the executive branch.
PAUL KAMENAR: Now, some may say that he's breaking norms, but I think if he is, that's a good thing in order to assert a vigorous executive president.
LIASSON: And that's pretty much how Trump himself views his powers.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Then I have an Article II where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.
LIASSON: In the past, there may have been political consequences for norm-breaking - congressional hearings, headlines screaming scandal - but that's unlikely to happen now. Still, there might be practical, real-world consequences for violating some norms, in particular the economic norms, such as respecting the independence of the Federal Reserve.
JENNIFER BURNS: That's a norm that Trump is breaking.
LIASSON: Hoover Institution fellow Jennifer Burns says President Trump's norm-breaking attacks on Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, threatening to fire him if he doesn't lower interest rates, could backfire.
BURNS: If the central bank is perceived to be politically controlled, then one might feel they're lowering interest rates, not because the economy is on track, but because the president has forced them to lower interest rates and the president's forced them to back away from keeping their eye on inflation.
LIASSON: A less independent Fed could, Burns says, cause inflation to go up, ultimately causing investors to back away from the United States if it no longer looks like the most stable place to put their money. So what happens after all these norms are gone?
EISEN: We're at a fork in the road. Will we go the route of other elected officials, other presidents saying, well, I'm going to violate the norms like Donald Trump did, consequences be damned? Or will they say, oh, the American people don't like that.
LIASSON: Norm Eisen isn't sure what happens after Trump. That will depend on whether American voters are comfortable with a more powerful, less restrained president who makes his own rules and norms.
Mara Liasson, NPR News.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.
