Trump Should Not Be Allowed to Take the Oath

This piece ran as a newspaper op/ed in mid-January, 2025.

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What Can It Mean for a Man to Take an Oath He’s Already Taken and Violated?

The Oath Is Important

That oath is something we Americans should revere. Our Founders put it in the Constitution: it requires every President to swear to protect and defend the order our Founders were creating with the Constitution. So long as those who took that oath honored it, generations of Americans to come could remain a free people.

All those who are given – temporarily – the powers of the state commit to protecting that constitutional order from any threats (as well as to using those powers use it in strict accord with the Law and the Constitution).

History gives no guarantees. But the oath was one more barrier to lawless power taking over. It protects us from tyranny by committing those wielding the powers of the state to defend the structures of Democracy and the Rule of Law.

We should treat the oath as if it means something.

But now we face an unprecedented problem: the President-elect, Donald Trump, took the presidential oath in 2017 and then proceeded to violate it in more ways and more profoundly by far than any President in our history. {See Note # 1.]

What Must Not Be Ignored

So what do we do? Do we just go through the usual ritual of the President being sworn in and ignore Trump’s having already shown his “sacred” promise is worthless, given in bad faith? (And even now, expressing intentions that would also violate the oath.)

The usual inauguration has the President Elect putting his hand on the Bible and swear an oath that ends with “So help me God!” The defense of the Constitution, our Founders were saying, is a “sacred” task.

To pretend that Donald Trump is performing a sacred American rite, when he’s already shown that his oath-taking is a farce and a lie, would dishonor the oath, and thus the Constitution, and thus what’s sacred.

Do we want to ignore that Trump’s oath means nothing? Or do we insist that something sacred shouldn’t be made into a farce and a lie.

The Oath is supposed to mean something! Therefore, Trump should not be allowed to take the oath at his inauguration. [See Note #2.]

Because Trump won a free and fair election, he must become President on January 20. (The people have the right to make their choice, however ugly, or even catastrophic.)

But while the election was legitimate, and so requires “the peaceful transition of power,” his taking the oath he’s already broken would make a mockery of the oath-taking our Founders made part of that transition..

It is our duty, as Americans, to pay attention to the constitutional meaning of the moment, where the powers of the Presidency are being assumed by a President-elect who threatens the survival of American Democracy and the Rule of Law.

He has shown – and announced – himself to be the enemy of what the oath says he will protect and defend: a free society where no one is above the law, and where the rulers the people choose are limited – by law and by Constitution — in what they do with their power.

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Notes:

Note # 1: Trump was repeatedly lawless as President. When Trump tried to overturn the 2020 Election – to seize power against the will of the people — he violated his oath even more dramatically than when he tried to extort an American ally, to get illegal help for his personal quest to stay President and thereby damage American national security.

It’s true that Trump never got convicted – through the prescribed legal process –of crimes that violated his oath. With his two impeachments, the Senate Republicans he dominates prevented conviction. Then, when he was criminally indicted, far from seeking the opportunity to clear his name, did everything he could to prevent his trials—and, on the main crimes, he succeeded.

But we as citizens are not jurors, confined to the processes by which trials are conducted to arrive at the truth. Indeed, our responsibility is to draw conclusions based on the evidence publicly available. And we can have no doubt about Trump’s guilt—having more evidence about Trump’s guilt than about anything else in our public arena.

No well-informed citizens can have any uncertainty about whether Trump violated his oath — from the evidence presented at the impeachments, to the January 6th committee hearings, to the “speaking indictments” charging Trump with dozens of crimes, to what we’ve witnessed with our own eyes.

Note # 2: This is proposed not with any expectation that Trump’s inauguration will be conducted any differently from all the other presidential inaugurations in the history of the United States. No way that will happen—that half of the American electorate who elected Trump to be President wouldn’t tolerate our national attention being drawn to their having chosen a criminal and oath-breaker to be the most powerful man in the United States.

But it would only compound the danger of this historical moment for the extraordinary nature of this moment to go unremarked. Hence this proposal, a small contribution to preserving the role of truth in the realm of power in America.