May 31, Jeffrey Engel, David Gergen director of the Center for Presidential History at SMU Dallas, for a commentary examining how the judicial system designed by the founders held up to political pressures in a case against a former president — and the rule of law prevailed. Published in the Dallas Morning News under the heading How would the nation’s founders view Trump’s conviction? https://tinyurl.com/bhp2s2zw
Donald Trump has now become the first former president convicted of a felony, and the men who wrote the Constitution would be pleased to see the system they designed held up.
No doubt they would be saddened to learn that any high-ranking national leader fell afoul of the law. But they would not be surprised, because they designed a political system with human fallibility as its first principle, and thus with accountability in mind for even the most powerful among us.
When considering an office designed with the morally unimpeachable George Washington in mind, Benjamin Franklin observed at the Constitutional Convention that “the first man put at the helm may be a good one.” Yet “nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.”
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