Guant\u00e1namo Bay? Imperialism? Alliances with billionaires? Those shocked at the president\u2019s early moves have forgotten what came before<\/p>\n
The dust briefly settled, only for it to be kicked up once again. Donald Trump\u2019s flurry of executive orders<\/a> \u2013 causing chaos on everything from foreign aid to world trade \u2013 is rapidly rocking and reshaping domestic and foreign policy. And the temptation is, yet again, to think of Donald Trump as an exogenous shock to US democracy. But look closer, and you will see not a rogue president taking a hammer to a hitherto stable political order, but a history of the erosion of norms that paved the way for him.<\/p>\n Political norms are the scaffolding of democracy, enforced not by the law, but by a sort of social consensus. They are not codified, strict mechanisms for regulating political facts \u2013 such as the separation of powers \u2013 but the agreement that such things should be respected and observed. A clear case in point is the president\u2019s ability to issue pardons. And Joe Biden\u2019s pardoning of his family members<\/a> was as much an injury to norms as Trump\u2019s pardoning<\/a> of those convicted after 6 January.<\/p>\n Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n Continue reading…<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Guant\u00e1namo Bay? Imperialism? Alliances with billionaires? Those shocked at the president\u2019s early moves have forgotten what came before The dust briefly settled, only for it to be kicked up once again. Donald Trump\u2019s flurry of executive orders \u2013 causing chaos on everything from foreign aid to world trade \u2013 is rapidly rocking and reshaping domestic … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-32210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32210\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news2shorts.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}