From using the White House’s South Lawn to shill cars for his biggest campaign donor to demanding taxpayer-funded ads that claim he victoriously closed the southern border, President Donald Trump is demonstrating that, as he stated in his first term, he has “the right to do whatever I want.” That’s his twisted interpretation of Article 2 of the Constitution, which describes the power of the president.
The president of the United States is not a king. He’s not a monarch ordained by a god.
Yet the president of the United States is not a king. He’s not a monarch ordained by a god. As former President Barack Obama said in a “60 Minutes” interview in November 2020, the “president is a public servant.” The person elected to that office should represent and serve the public’s best interest — not his own.
As mass protests against the Trump administration take place across the nation, let us remember the historical role and responsibility of the president and what others who’ve held the office have had to say about the responsibility that comes with the position. “The President is merely the most important among a large number of public servants,” former President Teddy Roosevelt wrote in a May 1918 editorial in The Kansas City Star. In 1954, former President Harry Truman said, “I would much rather be an honorable public servant and known as such than to be the richest man in the world.”
The president is supposed to serve us, the American people. Not just the people who voted for him or who donated to his campaign or inauguration — but all the people. Toward that end and in keeping with America’s long-standing policies, Trump should be working to preserve and strengthen our democratic society and democracies around the world — not undermining them by playing nice with dictators.
The American people elected Trump and have entrusted him to serve their bests interests. “Public service is a public trust,” reads Executive Order 12674 from 1989, spelling out one of the primary principles of ethical conduct for government officers and employees. President Thomas Jefferson even asserted, “When a man assumes a public trust, he should consider himself as public property.”
You just have to laugh at the idea of Trump — who wants to privatize public services from the U.S. Postal Service to education and even sell off public lands to private interests — ever considering himself public property. The absolute, fiendishly calculated chaos he has unfurled in the first weeks of his second term proves that serving the public’s best interest was never a part of his — or, let’s be honest, Project 2025’s — agenda. In that way, Trump, who has always loved flaunting his wealth, is the opposite of Truman.
In that 1918 editorial, Roosevelt asserted it was as important that the public “blame [the president] when he does wrong as to praise him when he does right … in rendering loyal, able, and disinterested service to the nation as a whole.”
The problem is that Trump and his supporters don’t always appear to be committed to codes of ethical conduct or the law. And Trump has shown over the course of his career that he doesn’t take accountability for his actions. “Deny everything” is one of the lessons he learned from his lawyer and mentor Roy Cohn. Trump has decimated independent federal agencies likely because they are units of accountability — specifically in terms of offering oversight and regulation — in our government system of “checks and balances.”
Trump has shown over the course of his career that he doesn’t take accountability for his actions.
Notably, Roosevelt’s words about the president being the most important public servant were not directed to then-President Woodrow Wilson but to his fellow Americans to encourage them “to tell the truth about [the president’s] acts. … Any other attitude in an American citizen is both base and servile. To announce that there must be no criticism of the President, or that we are to stand by the President, right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public.”
In other words, we, the American people, are responsible to each other to secure the health of our democracy. This means we must elect to office presidents who are committed to public service, and if we fail at that, then we must use our First Amendment rights to protest against them.
They’re there to serve us, not the other way around.