The IPO Market Was Too Good

Yesterday the National Association of Manufacturers called on the vice president of the United States to invoke the provisions of the 25th Amendment, declare that the president “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office,” and remove him from power. The National Association of Manufacturers! I suppose you could imagine a different, funnier world where the National Association of Manufacturers regularly called for the extraordinary removal of presidents because of disagreements over accelerated depreciation of capital assets, but in the actual world we live in this is not the normal sort of political activity that the National Association of Manufacturers engages in. It takes a lot to get the National Association of Manufacturers to endorse deposing a U.S. president.

As it happens, what it took was for that president to send a violent mob to seize the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the results of an election that he lost. As I mentioned yesterday, when Donald Trump was elected in 2016, I wrote that American constitutional principles do not work automatically, through the magic power embedded in some old parchment. “They only work if the human actors in the system choose to follow them and to demand that others follow them,” I said. As I feared, that was the beginning of an extraordinary four-year experiment in which the U.S. president manifestly did not believe in any of those principles, in the Constitution or the rule of law or the separation of powers or the rights of citizens or democracy itself. This experiment was bad! My hope is that it ended yesterday, that enough other people in power finally decided to put the Constitution over the whims of Donald Trump, but really who knows. It seems like the sort of thing that is hard to come back from.