The dust briefly settled, only for it to be kicked up once again. Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders – causing chaos on everything from foreign aid to world trade – 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.
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 – such as the separation of powers – but the agreement that such things should be respected and observed. A clear case in point is the president’s ability to issue pardons. And Joe Biden’s pardoning of his family members was as much an injury to norms as Trump’s pardoning of those convicted after 6 January.
