Donald Trump's fights with fire marshals show why he's dangerous
Twice in a matter of days, Donald Trump has picked a fight with a local fire marshal, accusing these officials of imposing arbitrary, politically motivated limits on how many people may attend his rallies.
On Friday, Trump attacked the fire marshal enforcing the fire code in Colorado Springs — "probably a Democrat," Trump said — shortly after he had been rescued from a stuck elevator by the Colorado Springs Fire Department.
On Monday, in Columbus, Ohio, he accused the fire marshal of limiting rally attendance to 1,000 people "purely for political reasons," calling the marshal's actions "politics at its lowest."
https://twitter.com/mims/statuses/760189141199970304
Entire trump gaggle just now pic.twitter.com/E76oadIoiq
On some level, this seems like just another story of Trump getting angry for a trivial reason — though of course, as any experienced real-estate developer should know, fire codes are not trivial, and capacity limits are set to ensure that safe evacuation in case of a fire is possible.
But the real reason this story matters is what it shows about what Donald Trump would do as president.
Fire marshals are bureaucrats, charged with enforcing laws that are sometimes inconvenient. If Trump won't listen to a fire marshal who says that his proposed number of attendees at a rally would violate a fire code, then will he listen to civil servants or military generals who tell him that his proposed actions are illegal?
Of course, we already knew the answer to that question: Trump has said that military officers will carry out war crimes if he orders them to.
If we give Trump the power of the presidency, then he'll do a lot more than rant to reporters when bureaucrats won't bend to his will. He'll order them to ignore laws that he doesn't like. And in some cases, those laws will be much more important than fire codes.
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