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June 16 - October 12, 2020
The American presidency is in trouble. It is overburdened, misunderstood, an almost impossible job to do. President Trump is a part of that story, but he also obscures it. One of the problems with the presidency is that it has become such a celebrity office that it is defined by the personality of the occupant. But the problems with the job unfolded before Donald Trump was elected, and the challenges of governing today will confront his successors.
As a president-obsessed nation, we undermine the very idea of our constitutional democracy by focusing so much on one person.
Meanwhile, Congress, a president’s necessary partner, has increasingly relinquished its role as an institution that tackles the country’s big problems.
In campaigns, we reward candidates for behavior antithetical to the qualities, behaviors, and habits needed to perform well as a president. We encourage impulsive, winner-take-all displays of momentary flash to win a job that requires restraint, deliberation, and cooperation.
“One reason there are so many candidates for the Democratic nomination for President is that there is no longer much certainty about what qualifies a person for the role,”
The Great Depression and the Second World War presented challenges that only a president could meet. During his time in office, FDR issued 3,522 executive orders, almost surpassing the total that had been issued by the thirty presidents who preceded him.
As the political scientist Matthew Dickinson notes in his assessment of FDR’s request to expand the size of the executive office, Roosevelt not only accumulated power in the office, he created a new habit. In the future, Americans were “more likely to look to [the president] for solutions.”
“More and more legislative authority is delegated to the executive branch every year,” complained Republican senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska in a floor speech in September 2018. “Both parties do it. The legislature is impotent. The legislature is weak.”
Eisenhower believed that if the federal government preempted the local duty to care for neighbors, it would jeopardize the core American value of Americans giving back to their communities. “I regard this as one of the great real disasters that threatens to engulf us, when we are unready as a nation, as a people, to meet personal disaster by our own cheerful giving,” Ike said in 1957. “Part of the reason is this misunderstanding that government is taking the place even of rescuing the person, the individual, and the family from his natural disasters.”
No matter how far a president wanders, or is banished from the noisy end of the room, a crisis can instantaneously put the presidency at the center of American life again. In a flash, the comforts of civilization and progress are removed and a president is tested on all of the qualities of the office—policy, political, and symbolic. The entire country is watching, needing, and grading him.
According to the author and criminologist Grant Duwe, in the sixty-five years before the 1966 Texas tower shooting, there were just twenty-one public mass shootings in which four or more people were killed.19 In the fifty-four years since then, as of February 2020, the number has increased by more than eight times, to 175 public mass shootings, and the attacks have become increasingly deadly.20
“The standard in the executive branch was supposed to be different, higher, than for the legislative and judicial branches,” wrote Bill Bennett in The Book of Virtues.10 He was right. John Adams, who helped create that standard, agrees: “Because power corrupts, society’s demands for moral authority and character increase as the importance of the position increases.”
If a president whipped up the crowd, “the passions…not the reason, of the public would sit in judgment,” wrote Madison in Federalist No. 49. “But it is the reason, alone, of the public, that ought to control and regulate the government. The passions ought to be controlled and regulated by the government.”
President Truman reaffirmed this principle during his tenure: “You can’t divide the country up into sections and have one rule for one section and one rule for another, and you can’t encourage people’s prejudices. You have to appeal to people’s best instincts, not their worst ones. You may win an election or so by doing the other, but it does a lot of harm to the country.”
Members of Congress represent the diversity and breadth of America. Durable solutions to the toughest problems can come only through a system that passes laws informed by that diversity and in which the process makes everyone feel heard whether they win or lose. A president acting alone can’t replicate that diversity of representation.
When Barack Obama won reelection in 2012, he carried Pennsylvania by three hundred thousand votes. The state’s Democratic congressional candidates collectively outpolled their GOP rivals by nearly one hundred thousand votes. But because Republicans had designed political lines to concentrate Democratic votes in just a few districts, Republicans still won thirteen of Pennsylvania’s eighteen House seats.
These organizations provide the money to pay for the campaign ads and digital strategies that get more expensive every year. In just the last ten years, the average amount raised to run for a House seat has increased by 50 percent to almost $2.2 million. The average raised for a Senate race has increased by 85 percent to almost $6 million.
Congressional and presidential candidates pulling money from the same pots grow more unified and aligned in their thinking and behavior because they’re courting the same tiny audience of power brokers. Increasingly, the national issue voters focus on in both House and Senate races is the presidency. In 2018, the president was not on the ballot, but 60 percent of registered voters—the highest percentage in recent midterm elections—said they used their vote to send a message about President Trump.45 In 2010, 52 percent said the same about Barack Obama.46
As parties calcify, ideological outliers disappear from within their ranks. According to the political scientist James Lo, conservative Democrats in Congress are now more liberal than the most liberal Republican House members; the most liberal Republican member of Congress is more conservative than the most conservative Democrat. There is no overlap. By contrast, in the 1960s, at times, 50 percent of lawmakers overlapped ideologically.
When appropriators in Congress can’t determine where funds go, the president and his cabinet secretaries get to decide how to allocate the money. Earmarks were also the currency that gave lawmakers a reason to vote for bills that contained items the other political party liked, which encouraged bipartisanship: A member would tolerate something she didn’t like if she was allowed to benefit from the passage of a line item that benefited her constituents and therefore benefited her politically.
In a YouGov poll in May 2019, eight in ten who identified with a party did not believe that those across the aisle share the same values. Two-thirds of Republicans regard Democratic policies as bad or dangerous (with 40 percent calling them “dangerous”). Nearly as many Democrats say the same about GOP policies: 63 percent say they are bad or dangerous, with 36 percent using the term “dangerous.”54 In 2016, according to a Pew Research Center survey, 55 percent of Democrats and 58 percent of Republicans viewed the other party in deeply negative terms. That was a considerable increase from 2000,
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Wright’s resignation marked another ascension in Gingrich’s rise to power, as he educated his colleagues in the win-at-all-costs mindset. One of Gingrich’s key tactics was demonizing Democrats. They weren’t just wrong, Gingrich deemed them “evil” and “enemies of normal Americans.”7 As Gingrich once correctly said, “The number one fact about the news media is that they love fights. When you give them confrontations, you get attention; when you get attention, you can educate.”
For decades after 1932, Democrats were essentially the majority party in Congress. Between 1980 and 2018, however, the Senate majority has changed hands six times. The House majority shifted four times during the same period. Political scientist Frances Lee has argued the constant back-and-forth has fundamentally changed the incentives for members because every election offers a chance for a change in party control. “Intense party competition for institutional control focuses members of Congress on the quest for partisan political advantage,” writes Lee. “Members and leaders of both parties
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“If you act like you’re the minority, you’re going to stay in the minority,” House Republican Whip Kevin McCarthy told his GOP troops in 2009 after Obama was elected. “We’ve gotta challenge them on every single bill.”18 In the Senate at about the same time, Mitch McConnell said his main priority as the leader of the minority was to make Barack Obama a one-term president.19
The instability of Congress is now the new normal in American politics. A hero president might break through the current system and make it work better, but it’s not clear that the current system is susceptible to heroism or in a mood to elevate that kind of hero. Plus, the search for a presidential savior is itself a sign of how far off track things have gotten. The framers hoped to create a system which would force balance in all the ways the current system has come to work against that balance.
THERE IS NO REFEREE IN a pickup basketball game. Players abide by a common understanding of the rules of the game, which keeps it from turning into rugby. Every player presses their advantage, but when there is an obvious foul, the injured party speaks up, the person who committed the foul fesses up, and an accommodation is made. Play ball. The interruption is so short that the players’ sweat barely has time to cool. The commitment to individual success and team success does not override the broader spirit that is necessary for the game to be played. This is also how the founders conceived of
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An equivalent behavior threatens the presidency. The founders expected that presidents would act with energy, but that they would also show deference. There would be clashes, but a virtuous president would abide by the spirit of the balance. In this conception of the office, the president would be an advocate for his branch, but also a steward of the larger separation of powers system. When another player cried foul, the president would not press his interest to the maximum extent. This would keep the pickup game going.
In many areas, the president is encouraged to push because Congress either doesn’t act or has shown it will give in when a president pushes. “Congress chose to abdicate by choosing not to govern,” says NYU public service professor Paul Light. “It has totally acquiesced to the White House.”8
President Trump knew he would face no real opposition from his Republican allies in Congress when he denied Congress’s will and diverted money to build a border wall or blocked congressionally mandated money for Ukraine.10 The Government Accountability Office found that Trump had delayed that money illegally, but his allies in Congress were not concerned that he had usurped their authority. When Trump was impeached by the House for doing so, they compounded this acquiescence by supporting and in some cases applauding his lawyers’ claim that Congress had no right to check any presidential abuse
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In 1938, the idea of senators swaying in such synchronicity moved former president Herbert Hoover to a Nazi analogy. “Mr. Hitler also has a parliament,” said Hoover. “You may not know it. It was also once upon a time an independent arm of the German government. But Mr. Hitler has rearranged its function. I quote him: ‘Individual members may advise but never decide; that is the exclusive prerogative of the responsible president for the time being.’
Lockstep unity between a president and members of Congress in the same party would lead to “the malignant growth of personal power,” warned Hoover. “Liberty never dies from direct attack. No man ever arises and says ‘Down with Liberty.’ Liberty has died in 14 countries in a single score of years from weakening its safeguards, from demoralization of the moral stamina of the people….If we examine the fate of wrecked republics throughout the world we find their first symptoms in the weakening of the legislative arm. Subservience in legislative halls is the spot where liberty and political morals
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The balance of powers system exists to do more than simply check the inevitable abuses of power. When Congress has a say, it brings in representation of a more diverse range of viewpoints. When it comes to war, for example, a president may want to act. Her job is to move, and everyone is looking at her. But members of Congress represent the districts and states where constituents have been fighting those wars for two decades. It is the “most exact transcript of the whole society,” as delegate James Wilson put it.38 They have a better understanding than the president about how those people
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Or, as Ronald Reagan put it: “I’d learned while negotiating union contracts [as president of the Screen Actors Guild] that you seldom got everything you asked for. And I agreed with FDR, who said in 1933: ‘I have no expectations of making a hit every time I come to bat. What I seek is the highest possible batting average.’ If you got seventy-five or eighty percent of what you were asking for, I say, you take it and fight for the rest later, and that’s what I told these radical conservatives who never got used to it.”31
A presidency that works in partnership with a Congress embracing its role as the strong first branch of government might not only make better laws, but will keep the country from turning to more violent options, as Ronald Reagan pointed out at a tribute to Tip O’Neill in 1986: “The fact of our friendship is testimony to the political system that we’re part of and the country we live in, a country which permits two not-so-shy and not-so-retiring Irishmen to have it out on the issues rather than on each other or their countrymen.”
Running for president requires begging for dollars much of the time. According to Federal Election Commission data compiled by The Washington Post, together Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton raised close to $2.4 billion—the most on record—for the 2016 presidential election.
“We tend to think that the leader is going to solve the problem,” says retired four-star army general Stanley McChrystal, who made a study of leadership after his military career. “It’s not the leader solving the problem. It is the team solving the problem, the interaction between leaders and followers. And so we’re much healthier if we pull back from the idea that the leader is all powerful.”11
“No matter how good you are as president, you are overseeing two million people and a trillion-dollar-plus budget, and the largest organization on earth,” said Obama. “You can’t do it all by yourself. And so you are reliant on really talented, hardworking, skilled people, and making sure they’re all moving in the same direction, and doing it without drama, and not worrying as much about who is getting credit, and creating all those good habits inside of an organization that I think are critical.”21
According to a Brookings Institution study, in the first three years of the Trump administration, it lost 82 percent of its “A-team” White House staffers, a category that refers to the top noncabinet officials. That set a record. Thirty-eight percent of those key spots experienced “serial turnover.” A president who promised to hire “the best” presided over a firing and shuffling process unprecedented in the White House.
By one estimate, Trump’s staff is as small as the White House staff has been in twenty years, in line with Calvin Coolidge’s preference for the federal workforce. When asked how many people work in the White House, the thirtieth president reportedly answered, “About half.”
This inclination helps explain why the American National Election Study found that 13 percent of Trump voters in 2016 backed Obama in 2012.13 A Washington Post analysis after the 2016 election found that of the nearly seven hundred counties that twice voted for Obama, one-third had gone to Trump.14
Another Trump veteran describes what it is like to encounter the bureaucracy: “The problem presidents have when they come into office is they all have their own feelings about engagement with the world, but they walk into this fifty-thousand-person department that wrote the policy on Ukraine, Afghanistan, and the world. They own the policy; it’s their life’s work. You look at the National Security Council and it’s made up of many of the same people who own and believe in our existing foreign policies. So you have these discussions with a president who doesn’t want to be screwing around in
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In December 2018, the president announced on Twitter that the United States was withdrawing from Syria.33 Nobody in the administration—not his National Security Advisor, not the head of the CIA, not the chairman of the Joint Chiefs—knew about his decision. Less than two weeks before, Secretary of Defense James Mattis and Brett McGurk, the president’s special envoy for the coalition fighting ISIS, were in Canada trying to persuade the seventy-nine-member global coalition to stay in the fight. McGurk had also explained during a State Department briefing a week before Trump’s announcement why it
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This isn’t just rhetoric. It’s bad for business when the president gives the Fed the business. A paper published by the National Bureau of Economic Research found “The average effect of these tweets on the expected fed funds rate is statistically significant and negative…market participants believe the Fed will succumb to the political pressure from the President.”47
In 2019 the president shut down the federal government when he couldn’t reach a deal with Democrats on funding his border wall. “If we don’t get what we want, one way or the other,” he promised congressional leaders, “whether it’s through you or through the military or whatever you want to call it, I will shut down the government.”48 This cost $3 billion, according to a partial accounting by the Congressional Budget Office.49 Other costs not counted in the tally included disruption to private enterprise which relies on government business and permits. Roughly one million government contractors
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It will be allowed that, in an operation so all-important as that of an election of a President, every process should be regulated with the utmost exactness and precision; and, yet, there is scarcely an officer, great or small, important or unimportant, in the State government, or in the United States Governments, who is elected or appointed by a rule so undefined, so vague, so subject to abuse, as that by which we elect the Chief Magistrate of the Union.2 —SENATOR MAHLON DICKERSON, AMENDMENT TO THE CONSTITUTION, 1818
For Jefferson and his colleagues, public opinion was the starting point of governing, but not its end. Reason and deliberation were necessary to refine public opinion. Politicians were not supposed to be mere instruments of the mob. The “republican principle…does not require an unqualified complaisance to every sudden breeze of passion, or to every transient impulse,” wrote Hamilton. When “the interests of the people are at variance with their inclinations,” it is the representatives’ duty “to give them time and opportunity for more cool and sedate reflection.”
Increasingly, both parties bound their national convention delegates to the outcome of the primaries, inserting a structural barrier to block meddling by party elites who might have made a different choice than the rank and file who expressed their preferences in the primaries. Under these rules, if the people spoke, the party insiders could not unwind their decision in a back room.
As voters gained more control over the nominating process, the standard for the office became whatever voters settled on the standard being at the time of the election. “When we elect someone who hasn’t spent time in politics it’s not just that we are electing someone with no experience in the job,” says Harvard’s Gautam Mukunda, whose book Indispensable studies the essential characteristics of great presidents and leaders. “We are electing someone where we have no information to judge whether they are able to do the job.”
In 1950 the American Political Science Association published a report on the health of political parties as concern grew that presidents were dominating the political system. Their conclusion about trends halfway through the last century sound almost as prescient as Kennedy’s about television: “When the President’s program actually is the sole program…either his party becomes a flock of sheep or the party falls apart. In effect this concept of the presidency disposes of the party system by making the President reach directly for the support of a majority of the voters. It favors a president
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Truman’s new technique in addressing the people was illustrated by his extemporaneous speech for the National Conference on Family Life. He spoke with complete lack of formality and undoubtedly succeeded in communicating his ideas to the audience in a personal manner. That sort of address certainly holds his listeners more effectively than the reading of a set speech which has been prepared and combed over carefully by presidential advisers. It is said that the President intends to employ this new technique when he makes his tour of the West….Mr. Truman cannot get away from the fact that his
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