A MODEST PROPOSAL FOR PRESIDENT TRUMP

Updating Jonathan Swift

By Ralph Nader and Bruce Fein

April 27, 2025

We are Harvard Law graduates. We have read the lengthy and comprehensive ultimatums you have oinked to owlish Harvard University sub. nom. President Donald Trump, aka King Donald. The ultimatums aim to reduce this institution of higher education, older than the U.S.A., to a fiefdom under your monarchical rule. As modest students of medieval history, we see that students would be demoted to serfs, faculty would be reduced to vassalage, but the role of Lord of the Manor is still unoccupied.

Your ambition to fly to that aerie is transparent. We have a MODEST PROPOSAL for your consideration.

Law professors are exalted if not deified at Harvard. They are the best and brightest law professors in the land. Doubting Thomases should just ask the professors. They are specialists in law but amateurs in lawlessness, terra incognita to them. That’s where you outshine all others like daylight doth a lamp--in range, depth, rewards and modes of escape that put Houdini to shame.

For some unfathomable reason, you have been immodest about your awesome knowledge in this fast-expanding area of legal immunity. We make this claim after reading your statements – about twenty – where you boast of your unsurpassed mastery of such subjects as “trade,” “technology,” “drones,” “construction,” “devaluation,” “banks,” – “renewables,” “polls” and even “the power of Facebook.” (See the book, “Wrecking America: How Trump’s Lawbreaking and Lies Betray All” by Mark Green and Ralph Nader, 2020). Even Leonardo de Vinci would be green with envy.

Missing, however, is the subject of LAWLESSNESS. You have engaged in over 3000 lawsuits. You have been sued under tort law. You have been indicted under criminal law. You flout the United States Constitution as regularly as the rising and setting of the sun. In all this, you have demonstrated an escapist talent that even legal giant Clarence Darrow would have thought unimaginable. No sheriff has ever caught you. Only one prosecutor has ever convicted you. E. Jean Carroll won two civil tort cases with damages that are still on appeal. Indeed, holding you to the law is like attempting to handcuff an eel!

One of your remarkable tactics is interminable stalling. Another is publicly and vituperatively attacking judges and other judicial personnel with impunity. As we know from our studies, such violent, insolent language in the United Kingdom would have landed you in contempt of court and a jail term.

Here is our MODEST PROPOSAL to fill the position of LORD OF THE MANOR, without impinging on your Day Job, golfing and signing executive orders with the speed of lightning with your eyes shut. With your permission, we will approach the Dean of Harvard Law School and request that he appoint you as a VISITING FULL PROFESSOR OF LAW CONDUCTING THE FIRST AND ONLY COURSE IN LAWLESSNESS – its nature, function and uses, including the roles of stare decisis and res judicata. It would be the largest class in Harvard Law School history, overflowing our largest auditorium, AUSTIN HALL.

YOU would provide, effortlessly from your extraordinary memory, empirical knowledge never revealed and analyzed like a mother lode of archeological discoveries.

Your self-awareness is exceptional, having proclaimed in 2019 – “Then I have Article II, where I have the right to do anything I want as President.” You have openly yearned to better Napoleon’s self-coronation. To know the law, it is necessary to know outlaws. This is especially true for you, Mr. President because you once declared, “I know more about courts than any human being on earth.”

Going deeper, you are eminently qualified to lecture on regions of lawlessness that you stoke with illegal arms shipments and unconstitutional presidential wars. If it weren’t for a blunder on Signal, who would have known you had taken us into an aimless war with the Houthis?

Alfred Nobel was a pauper compared with Elon Musk, your sidekick in shredding the rule of law. We think you should task Mr. Musk to establish a Musk Prize in LAWLESSNESS and crown you as the first and only recipient. It’s the least Musk can do after you became a pitch man for Tesla on the White House lawn gratis. It is altogether fitting that your receipt of the Musk Prize would violate the Domestic Emoluments Clause of the Constitution. What’s the Constitution among friends?

We anticipate your affirmative response. We understand fully if a condition of your acceptance is teaching the course by Zoom from the Oval Office, which you have fittingly turned into a crime scene. Should you wish to have your lectures streamed to a wider audience, the Law School has the requisite facilities.

Your exalted title “Honorable Visiting Professor of Law, Donald J. Trump” along with your presiding over the White House would earn you the status of LORD OF THE MANOR. You would be addressed by all members of the Harvard University community as “MY LIEGE.” We would advise you to issue an Executive Order ending the constitutional prohibition on titles of nobility.

We look forward to hearing from you.