Is it a violation of their oath of office if a president is a racist? I don’t think that would be a good thing, but the short answer would be no. Even if you believed that Trump is the most racist President since before the Civil War, being a racist is not a crime, and it is not a violation of the Constitution. Courts don’t rule on “oath violations” anyway. That is the job of the voters and of Congress. The court decides whether a specific executive action violates a constitutional provision or a valid statute. When a court finds an executive action unconstitutional or unlawful, that action could be interpreted as a violation of the executive's oath. The oath requires loyalty to the constitutional and statutory limits. In my opinion, when historians analyze many of the Trump-era actions that the courts have found to be unconstitutional or unlawful, future generations will ask why he was ever elected.

Probably most presidents had unconstitutional rulings that could be interpreted as a violation of their oath of office. Federal courts ruled that the NSA’s bulk phone metadata program, implemented under Bush but expanded by Obama, violated federal law and likely the Constitution, violating the 4^th Amendment. This was a real overreach of surveillance authority. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Obama’s 2012 NLRB recess appointments were unconstitutional because the Senate was not actually in recess. This is one of the clearest violations by any modern President. The EPA Clean Power Plan was stayed as unlawful by the Supreme Court. It mattered because it set limits on executive agencies. Obama’s DACA Expansion was ruled unlawful under the Administrative Procedure Act. Even though it is affected by immigration, it was actually about the process and legal authority. Obama did have policies struck down as unlawful, but he was never found to have violated his oath of office.

No matter what the Republicans may tell you, no court or oversight body found that Biden violated his oath. His administration has had real, and legally determined, overreaches. There was a CDC moratorium on evictions during the COVID pandemic, implemented during the Trump administration, and expanded under Biden, that was ruled to exceed statutory authority. The Supreme Court ruled that OSHA lacked the authority to impose a nationwide vaccine mandate on 84 million workers. His Student Loan Forgiveness Plan was ruled unlawful because the courts said that it exceeded statutory authority. He also had DHS immigration Policies ruled unlawful in specific cases; this ruling was about legal process, not ideology. Like Obama, Biden did have polices struck down as unlawful. He was also found to have never violated his oath of office. Neither engaged in mass constitutional defiance comparable to the 147 members of Congress who attempted to overturn certified electoral votes.

Let's now look at Bush. George W. Bush’s presidency produced some of the most significant confirmed by the courts, inspectors general, and by bipartisan commissions. There was the warrantless surveillance program, which was authorized by Bush after 9/11, that was ruled illegal by the federal courts. It was one of the clearest, most consequential violations of Federal Law by any modern administration. We had the “Torture”, or what some liked to call the “Enhanced Interrogation”, which violated both U.S. and international law. This was one of the most serious legal and moral breaches of the post WWll era. Then there was the Bush Administration’s lying about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. This may not be classified as a legal violation, but it was a documented breach of truthfulness and executive responsibility that had enormous consequences. 4400 American deaths, hundreds of thousands of Iraqi deaths, trillions in long-term costs, and the destabilization of the Middle East that it hasn’t recovered from yet. There were also the Abu Ghraib and Detainee Abuse that were violations of U.S. Military law. Bush was never personally charged, but these were real, documented violations under his administration.

When you compare the Bush, Obama, and the Biden presidencies, you should come away like I did, that the two democratic presidents were like choirboys compared to Bush.

Now we come to Donald Trump, and I can honestly say that we have never seen a president like him before.  A president takes an oath to follow the Constitution. That is the deal. That is the job. Trump, though, has kept pushing past the lines in that document that protect all of us. He has tried to do things that Presidents are not allowed to do, like cutting off funds to cities on his own, blocking legal oversight, and trying to change how citizenship works without Congress. Courts, many of them with judges that he hand-picked, have had to say “No, you can’t do that”. Then there is ICE. Under Trump, ICE was told to “go hard,” and they did. Too hard. They go into homes without real warrants. They grab people off the street without a clear cause. They ignore judges. Cities sue them because the rules were not being followed. When the people with badges break the rules, the whole system starts to slip. Put together, this is not just one man pushing the limits. It is a whole setup where the top (the Trump Administration) ignores the rules, and then the force on the ground (ICE) follows that lead. When a president just shrugs off the Constitution, the agencies under him start to shrug too. When that happens, regular people lose their rights, and not just the folks that ICE goes after.

Our Constitution is not a right or left document. It is a document the is supposed to protect all of us. It is the document that actually defines what the United States of America is supposed to be. When a president or an agency acts like the rules don’t apply, the country gets weaker, not stronger. America only works when the people in power follow the same rules the rest of us have to.