The Atlantic: “…Presidents have been the authors of many informal amendments. George Washington set enduring precedents such as the two-term limit on presidential service (a norm so embedded that after Franklin D. Roosevelt broke it, it was written into the formal Constitution). Andrew Jackson reimagined the president as the direct representative of the people. Abraham Lincoln ruled out secession. But Trump has been broadly reckoned to be a more ephemeral figure. His bark, many said, was worse than his bite. Sure, he broke a lot of norms and probably also some laws; but his oafishness and short attention span made his constitutional incursions easy to repel. Although his political footprint was deep, his constitutional footprint was faint. Such, at least, has been the conventional wisdom. I don’t think that’s true at all. Though he was no Washington or Lincoln, Trump amended the informal Constitution in at least five significant ways. No one of them is epochal or entirely unprecedented, but together they add up to something new, large, and dangerous…”