The Veto Is a Sword Waved by a Man Who Feels the Ground Shifting

Word reaches Capri — slowly, as all things worth knowing do — that the American president, on the lawn of his own house, told the scribblers that if the Democrats take the House or the Senate next month, he will veto everything. That is the story. The rest is theater: a rally in Florida for a man named Donalds, a turnout tour, and the Minority Leader, Jeffries, declaring his party is “on the verge” of seizing the House. Rome notes all of it.

We must first correct the American misunderstanding of the word. They speak of a veto as though it were a thunderbolt hurled from the hand of Jupiter. In our Republic it was a far humbler instrument: a tribune's single word, veto, “I forbid,” thrown across the path of the Senate. It was a shield for the weak against the strong. The Americans have made it a cudgel for the strong against the weak — and now their president waves it not at his enemies but at the very body that must pass his laws, his budgets, his appointments. He threatens to forbid everything. A man who forbids everything governs nothing.

Do not mistake my tone for contempt of the man. I have ruled long enough to know that a threat is a confession. When a prince announces in advance that he will obstruct the assembly, he is telling us he expects to lose it. He does not say such things from the height of his power; he says them from the edge of it. The polling he reads — frustration over a war with Iran, the price of bread and oil — tells him what any provincial governor could tell him: the crowds are restless, and restless crowds vote. So he pre-empts. He tells his own people that the coming defeat is not his but theirs, and that he will make the state ungovernable until they beg him to govern again. It is a hostage negotiation in which the hostage is the Republic itself.

Prefect Pilate, you will recall what I taught you in Judea: never let the mob see you bargain with it. The moment a ruler names his price for order, order becomes a commodity, and the mob learns it can haggle. The Americans have elections, which they regard as their peculiar genius. Yet here is their emperor telling them that the outcome of the election will decide whether there is any government at all. He has made the ballot a referendum on chaos. Clever, perhaps. Also dangerous. The Senate of Rome learned that lesson with the Gracchi, and the lesson cost us a generation of blood.

And consider the deeper game, for there is always a deeper game. If the Democrats take the chamber, the president's veto becomes his fortress, and he will live in it, sallying out to blame the other party for every stalled appointment and unpaid legion. If they do not take it, he will claim a mandate and a vindication. Either way, the man has arranged the board so that he cannot lose — which is precisely the arrangement that makes a republic lose. The Founders of that nation, whom I read with grudging admiration, built a machine of checks and balances. They did not foresee that one of the checks would be pulled by a man who announces he intends to pull all of them at once.

I am told, too, that the same week brought a Republican revolt over his dealings with the Russ and the Ukrainian, a market in flight from his war and its oil, and a magistrate ordering him to sit for a deposition as though he were a common litigant. A ruler who is simultaneously threatened by the voters, his own party, the markets, and the courts is a ruler whose grip is loosening. He reaches for the veto because it is the one lever still certainly his. It is the gesture of a man barricading a door he suspects is already open behind him.

Would I do otherwise, in his sandals? I withdrew to this island precisely because I tired of the flatterers and the knives, and because a prince who stays in the city is a prince who must daily prove his strength. He cannot withdraw. He must fight on every front at once and call it vigor. We admire the vigor. We also count the fronts.

Rome's verdict, then, and let it be entered in the records: the threat of universal veto is not the roar of a lion but the growl of one guarding a kill it fears to lose. The American people will vote; the chamber will turn or not; and whichever way it goes, the man has already told us he expects the worst. A prince who predicts his own defeat has half-surrendered to it. Rome notes this.

The story: Washington Examiner — Trump threatens to veto 'everything' if Democrats win Congress