Member-only story
There’s No Coming Back From the Norm-Breaking at the RNC
How many Hatch Act violations can one gathering include? The Trump White House seems determined to find out.
Only minutes before the Republican National Convention began on Tuesday, one speaker was removed from the program for sharing a grotesquely anti-Semitic thread laced with conspiracy theories. That wasn’t the weird part.
Instead, if the second night of the RNC is remembered for anything, it will be the seeming joy with which legally enforceable norms of American politics were swept away.
President Donald Trump—who said just last year, “I have an Article Two, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president”—put his panoply of constitutional powers to work as television programming for a partisan political convention. First, Trump pardoned Jon Ponder, a convicted bank robber who found religion and started a nonprofit. Then, he participated in a naturalization ceremony of five immigrants with acting DHS Secretary Chad Wolf. Both events were held in the White House.
This follows videos of Trump meeting with frontline workers and freed hostages that aired as part of Monday’s programming, both of which were also filmed at White House. That was norm-breaking in and of itself, and it may have implicated White House staffers in violations of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in some political activities. There is no precedent for a president engaging in official functions and explicitly conducting the business of being the nation’s chief executive as part of a partisan political convention.
Trump was not the only administration official to shatter norms this week. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo became the first person to hold his office in memory to address a political convention—and he did so in an address taped in Jerusalem from the roof of the King David Hotel. Pompeo’s remarks seemed to violate not just the Hatch Act but State Department guidance issued…
