For more than 250 years, the presidency and the country have rested on a simple foundation, the oath. They are just 35 words spoken by every president with a hand on the Bible, promising to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” The oath is supposed to be the anchor that keeps the office tied to the rule of law, no matter the pressure, no matter the politics. But the system was never designed for a president who uses lawsuits as a regular political and personal tool by filing cases against media companies, state officials, private citizens, and even federal agencies within the Executive Branch.  My memory goes all the way back to the Eisenhower Administration, and I have never seen anything like it. Legal analysis and historians note that no previous president has sued his own government while simultaneously asserting broad immunity from the laws that bind everyone else. That combination alone pushes the presidency into territory the framers of the Constitution never imagined. But then, how could the framers even have begun to predict that the Supreme Court would give the President the immunity of a king? How could the framers have envisioned Trump?

I have to ask, have any of you ever heard of a president anywhere suing his or her own government for 10 billion dollars? Just thinking of what Trump is doing just blows my mind. He has filed a lawsuit against the IRS for 10 billion dollars, a department of the government that he controls. The Department of Justice, which he also controls, must defend the IRS. In this situation, Trump controls the Defense, the Prosecution, the Defendant, and the Plaintiff. That is where the oath came back into focus.  Because when a president sues a department he controls, which is also being defended by a department he controls, while claiming immunity from accountability, something is really off. Just let that sink in for a minute. That is not a partisan argument; it is a structural contradiction. In fact, to me, this is one of the biggest conflicts of interest I have ever seen, and it puts our Constitution at risk, in my opinion. Whether it is truly legal or doesn’t matter to me because this is what real corruption looks like.

I have read that constitutional scholars say the system is bending under pressures it was never designed to handle. How could the framers have anticipated this? The framers assumed a president would act like a president, not like a greedy private litigant locked in constant legal combat. They assumed the oath would keep the office tethered to the constitutional limits. I don’t think that they imagined the party politics in Congress where a political party would put itself before the Constitution. I don’t think they ever imagined a sitting president would drag the Executive Branch into court, or claim broad immunity from oversight, or challenge the legitimacy of internal checks. I think that the framers assume that the checks and balances they left in place would do their job and protect the Constitution from the abuse it is experiencing today.

I have tried to wrap my head around this, and I just find it so hard to believe that this is not a bigger story than it is. I would think this money grab would even unsettle Fox News because that is what it is, one big money grab. The president sues an agency that he is in charge of for 10 billion dollars. The Justice Department, which he is also in charge of, has to defend the agency from the president's personal lawyers. Trump talked about things being rigged? Now that is what I really call a rigged game, and he is the one who has rigged it. There is no way that the president can lose. He controls both sides of the negotiations. He gets to negotiate a settlement with himself. I try to think about it from other angles, but that is the only way that I can describe it. How can something like this be legal? How can something like this not be described as anything but corrupt? Since the government is supposed to belong to the people, do we have a president elected by the people suing the people who elected him? It is mind-boggling.

Maybe we should start looking at how other countries handle situations like this. Germany uses independent prosecutors who do not report to the chancellor. France allows investigations to continue even when prosecution is paused. Israel permits indictment of a sitting prime minister. South Korea allows investigation, impeachment, and prosecution. These systems evolved because they recognized a simple truth: no democracy can function if the head of the government can place himself beyond accountability.

We here still rely on norms, unwritten expectations about how a president will behave. Those norms are now being tested in ways that the system was never built to withstand. We have a president who is one of the most lawsuit-heavy figures in the country, exposing cracks in the Constitution that were always there but never stressed. The oath is the only remaining safeguard, and if that oath is treated loosely, the entire structure starts to bend.  So, I ask this question: Do those 35 words that the president says actually mean something still, or are they some ceremony that no longer has any real meaning? Does this pattern of behavior look like someone honoring the oath to protect the Constitution, or someone pulling at the threads that hold it all together? Does Congress still care if the Constitution is preserved and protected or not?

A president who sues his own government while claiming immunity from the laws that govern everyone else forces the nation to confront a hard truth: the Constitution was never designed for a presidency that behaves this way. I don’t think that even 20 years ago we could have imagined what has been done to our Constitution by this presidency.  And once the presidency moves outside the boundaries the system was built for, the burden shifts to the public and to Congress, to decide whether the structure must evolve or whether we will continue relying on norms that no longer hold.