President in name only

Stop referring to him as “the president.”

The Founders were quite clear: any president must swear and affirm an Oath of Office to protect and defend the Constitution.

You’d think they believed that a habitual, inveterate, compulsive, vicious liar, a man utterly without shame in his constant prevarication, could not be president.

Back when lower courts, through several iterations of anti-immigration executive orders, blocked each diktat from the Oval Office, Quinta Jurecic of Lawfareblog mused that the nation’s administrators of justice, reflecting on the gravity of the Oath, felt that he who had sworn it lacked “civic virtue,” and was not entitled to normal presidential deference.

The squatter who currently, through a catastrophic quirk of the Electoral College, holds the highest office of the land in Babylonian captivity, had formal authority but was as lacking in moral authority as he was lacking in dignity, judgment, and common human decency.

How many kinds of disgusting does one have to be to so besmirch the noble office once held by Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln, cavorting on the national stage, smirking, bullying, threatening, hurling kindergarten epithets at the press, the judiciary, at petitioners for refuge?

Each time we attach the name of a high office to a miserable creature who stiffed his contractors, defrauded citizens who sought to better themselves with a fake university, and betrayed the marriage vow with playmates and porn stars, we impute the virtue of the presidency to one who has none.