• No president has ever had the FBI establish 10 credible charges of criminal and prosecutable obstruction of justice against him , as Mueller ’ s investigation did against Trump .
• No president has ever tried to have his own vice president assassinated .
• No president has ever publicly asked a hostile foreign power for help getting elected .
• No president has ever publicly praised a hostile foreign intelligence service while trashing his own intelligence and police agencies .
• No president has ever lied to the American people about American soldiers being injured in an attack by Iran , a pandemic , or just made stuff up in press conferences and speeches , including 30,000 + other documented lies , destroying Americans ’ faith in the political process .
• No president has ever told the American people that our election systems are corrupt and shouldn ’ t be trusted .
Instead , every American president except Trump has looked to past presidents for precedents about how to behave in office , and in almost all cases have followed those precedents , sometimes for better and sometimes for worse .
The first and most famous precedent was set by George Washington who , after two terms in office , voluntarily surrendered the office rather than bowing to the then-popular sentiment that he should stay in office until he died .
Every president thereafter followed that precedent and voluntarily left office after two terms , until Franklin D . Roosevelt was dealing with the twin crises of the Republican Great Depression and World War II and chose to ignore President Washington ’ s precedent .
When FDR ran for that third term in 1940 , Republicans howled about how he ’ d “ broken precedent ”; it was a scandal and an outrage , they said , totally “ un-American ,” but he defied precedent and got elected anyway .
When FDR ran for a fourth term in 1944 , the GOP acted like they thought the republic was going to end . I still remember my Republican father solemnly telling me , when I was a kid in the 1950s , how FDR had “ tried to establish a oneman dictatorship in America .” It was an article of faith in the GOP , and still is in many circles .
Thus , when Republicans took control of Congress in the election of 1946 , the 1947 Congress put forward the 22nd Amendment to prevent any future president from breaking the “ George Washington Precedent .” It became law after 3 / 4ths of the states ratified it in 1951 .
Lying America into a war was a precedent that , as Abraham Lincoln angrily pointed out , was established by President Polk with the War against Mexico in 1846 . President McKinley
70 x The Trial Lawyer continued the tradition by lying us into the Spanish-American war in 1898 with a little help from William Randolph Hearst .
President Lyndon Johnson lied us into a war in Vietnam , and Richard Nixon followed the precedent by lying about his “ secret plan ” to end the war in Vietnam .
George W . Bush and Dick Cheney doubled down , feeling safe they could get away with it now that the precedent was so well established , by lying us into a war in Iraq .
On the other hand , when Bill Clinton tried to establish the precedent of a president lying to a grand jury and getting away with it , both the criminal and political systems of this country called him to account . He had his law license suspended for five years , paid a $ 25,000 fine , and was impeached .
That precedent hasn ’ t stood , which may come to haunt Trump .
Precedent is , to use a Bidenism , a BFD . Once a president breaks precedent , he ’ s establishing an entirely new standard for presidential behavior , and the country can either accept that as the “ new normal ” or , like Republicans did in 1998 and 1947 , push back and punish the president or cement the earlier precedent into law .
Donald Trump has spent six years now breaking American political and legal precedents , from trashing captured veterans to inciting racial and political violence to embracing autocrats while metaphorically pissing on our allies .
No president has ever done such things , at least not out in the open . And when past presidents have broken precedent in secret , there have been serious and destructive consequences for our democracy .
For example , Nixon cut what LBJ and Senator Everett Dirksen called a “ treasonous ” deal with the South Vietnamese to blow up the 1968 peace agreement LBJ had worked out , because Nixon that year was running against LBJ ’ s vice president , Hubert Humphrey , and the peace deal was going to be the cornerstone of Humphrey ’ s campaign .
America didn ’ t learn about Nixon ’ s treason until the LBJ library released their tapes of Johnson , Dirksen and Nixon ’ s phone discussions in 2008 , but apparently the Reagan campaign knew of it .
In 1980 , according to the then-president of Iran , Reagan ’ s campaign pulled the same trick , promising the Iranians military spare parts and missiles if they ’ d just ignore President Carter ’ s efforts to negotiate a hostage return until after the election . The Iranians took the military hardware and released the hostages on January 20 , 1981 as Reagan was putting his hand on the bible to be sworn in as president … to the minute .
Trump continued that precedent of Republican presidents coordinating with foreign governments to win elections when he publicly invited Russia to hack the DNC ’ s and Hillary Clinton ’ s servers .
Precedent is a big friggin ’ deal . It matters . Unless punished or made illegal , criminal precedent in the White House reshapes American politics and the nature of our country itself .
Imagine if Nixon ’ s crime had been revealed and he ’ d been outed as a traitor before 1980 ; Reagan ’ s campaign manager ( and