I have been suggesting that the “public trust and confidence” analogy between public commitment to court processes and fairness and public politics process and fairness might be useful.  The idea is that we need to find the way to talk about political fairness being more important than any particular outcome just like we have done so in the courts.

Here is an additional if somewhat different parallel.

At the same time as public trust in the courts became an issue, so did business and corporate trust.  Here the issue, at least for large cases, was speediness and efficiency.  Here the courts responded with the creation of business courts, designed to focus appropriate resources on big cases for big business.  I think that this initiative is perceived to have worked.  It was not the outcomes that generally worried big corporations, it was the delay and  uncertainty.

Trump’s recent moves to tear up the world financial system can already be seen to be provoking huge angst in these companies — internationally,  not just nationally.

I have long believed that he real reason Nixon fell was not Watergate, but that he and his apparat were holding up corporations for donations, using governmental power and the threat of its use to get campaign contributions.  To return to the public trust and confidence analogy, its not that corporations want fairness and predictability between rich and non-rich, but they depend on it between rich and rich.  They do not want Putinism.

I suspect we  will see a replay in the corporate response here.