Will Donald Trump destroy the Presidency??

President Donald Trump’s order to his secretary of state to declassify thousands of Hillary Clinton’s emails, along with his insistence that his attorney general issue indictments against Barack Obama and Joe Biden, takes his presidency into new territory, until now occupied by leaders with names like Putin, Xi and Erdogan. Trump has long demanded quite publicly, often on Twitter, that his most senior cabinet members use the power of their office to pursue political enemies. But his appeals this week, as he trailed badly in the polls and was desperate to turn the national conversation away from the coronavirus, were so blatant that one had to look to authoritarian nations to make comparisons. He took a step even Richard Nixon avoided in his most desperate days, openly ordering direct immediate government action against specific opponents, timed to serve his re-election campaign.

Trump’s vision of the presidency has always leaned to exercising the absolute powers of the chief executive, a writ-large version of the family business he presided over. “I have an Article II, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president, but I don’t even talk about that”.

Now he is talking about it, almost daily. He is making it clear that prosecutions like vaccines for the coronavirus are useless to him if they come after November 3. He has declared, without evidence that there is already plenty of proof that Obama, Biden, and Clinton, among others, were fueling the charges that his campaign had links to Russia, what he calls “The Russia hoax”. And he has pressured his secretary of state to agree to release more of Clinton’s emails before the election, reprising a yearslong fixation despite having defeated her four years ago.