President Trump and the Rules, and the Rule of Law: General Outlook

Any president interacts with the law and with lawyers in 100 ways.  It's the nature of the job.  There may be three reasons why I suppose that studying and writing about our new president and the law could be worth it.

First, there's me.  I'm a paralegal trained by a year in college at an ABA-certified program.  A lawyer teaching one of our classes said, There are hundreds of millions of people in the country, but only two or three million of us know how to do legal research.  All the others, if they want an answer to a question about the law, have to rely on sombody else.  So you're acquiring a rare and useful talent.
I love studying the law and believe in our constitutional law system as one of our grand democratic strengths.

The next reason is that President Trump has a relationship to the Rules, society's norms, far different than any previous president, and far different than most of his fellow citizens.  I think he seems to make up his own rules as he goes along, lives in his own realm where, to some extent, The Rules that apply to most of us don't necessarily apply to him.  Also, because of his leadership role in business and in national publicity, he may often be the exception, one of the few, or the only one not required to live by certain rules.  He may turn out to be the sort who can lead the masses into new rules, while laying aside old ones.

To some extent, it seemed like that might be one of the general themes of the 20th century.  Due to warfare, communication, medical progress, scientific progress, and the development of a worldwide culture, lots of the old rules have been lain aside and new ones taken up.  This has been true in health care, in sexuality, in fashion, in the growth of cities, and certainly in government and law, to name only a few.  We live in an Era of Change and it looks like Donald Trump may be able to be an agent of change, perhaps even more than Barack Obama.

The last reason this subject intrigues me is because I suspect that Trump's willingness to cast aside rules and even laws that apparently govern all of us may get him into trouble and keep him from functioning as well as he might as president.  If he breaks enough rules and enough laws and gets away with it, it could be a bad precedent for future presidents and US leaders.  It could be the first steps away from what has for a very long time been a pretty well-working democracy.  I suspect Trump has little inner respect for democracy, and for learning how democracy works best.  One of the best ways, I think, to keep an eye on this is by watching how President deals with both The Rules and the Rule of Law, and to search back and learn how he has dealt with them in the 69 years of his life before he strode out in the middle of the world stage.