Donald Trump likes to test the limits of the system. It has long been the norm that the president appoints men and women with experience, competence, probity and character to his cabinet and staff. Not all presidents have succeeded in this, but it has been a largely consistent aspiration.

In his first term, Trump appointed patriots — men like Gen. John Kelly, Mark Esper, John Bolton and Gen. Jim Mattis — who pushed back against the most extreme and ill-advised of his executive actions. For this, they were punished with a Trumpian “you’re fired.” Trump obviously does not want this to happen again.

This time around, Trump has appointed people to his cabinet whose cardinal virtue appears to be loyalty to him — not to the Constitution. They have no appetite to push back against Trump’s desires to round up immigrants and deport them, arrest his political enemies, use the military against the American people and dismantle what he calls the “deep state” of government.

Journalist Maggie Haberman, who has studied Trump closely for over a decade, says of his most controversial cabinet appointments — such as former Rep. Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, Robert Kennedy Jr. and former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard — that he wants to “shock and overwhelm the system so they can maximize what the system will tolerate.”

Trump likes to beat the system, and the legal system has proved itself inadequate to deal with his crimes, effectively holding him above the law. He learned how to do it from his mentor, the disgraced lawyer Roy Cohn, and then improvised to perfect the approach.

© The Hill