Critics of President Donald Trump have often used the word “unpresidential” when describing his over-the-top antics . But legal scholar/author Laurence H. Tribe, in a November 18 article for Newsweek, stresses that with impeachment hearings underway, it is becoming more and more obvious that Trump is way beyond “unpresidential” — he has become the “anti-president” that Founding Father Alexander Hamilton warned about in the 1780s and 1790s.
“More than unpresidential, Trump represents the perfect exemplar of what Alexander Hamilton darkly envisioned when he described the danger that a demagogue might one day assume the presidency and require removal through the awesome power of impeachment,” explains the 78-year-old Tribe, who teaches constitutional law at Harvard University. “Such a demagogue, Hamilton prophesied, would be ‘a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortune, bold in his temper…. despotic in his ordinary demeanor.’”
Hamilton, Tribe adds, feared the emergence of a charlatan who would “take every opportunity” to bring the federal government “under suspicion” and “throw things into confusion” — and Trump, according to Tribe, fits that description perfectly.
View the complete November 19 article by Alex Henderson on the AlterNet website here.