The Hardest Job in the World: The American Presidency

by John Dickerson

The president’s censures as a civilian have become uncanny predictors of his future behavior as president. Just about everything he once identified as unpresidential he has now done: attacking Syria without congressional approval; golfing excessively, including during an emergency; campaigning while in office; criticizing Bob Woodward; bantering with a rapper during a national emergency; and replacing his chief of staff three times in the first two years.29 “Repubs must not allow Pres Obama to subvert the Constitution of the US for his own benefit and because he is unable to negotiate w/ Congress,” he wrote on November 14, 2014.30 Five years later, on February 14, 2019, President Trump announced executive action to fund his border wall, circumventing the will of Congress after negotiations crumbled.

Creating an excuse structure for basic partisanship invites the opposite party to do it as a response, which already crept into the 2020 Democratic primary as candidates promised executive orders and administrative actions to undo Trump’s actions. On the left, the existential threats from climate change, mass gun violence, and the human rights abuses of children held in cages at the border are sufficient emergencies to flatten anyone making structural objections to how a Democratic president might use the office. If Democrats use Trump techniques for their ends, it would invite a similar response to continue the cycle. This escalation was all foretold by the authors of the Constitution.

Butler worried that the presidency contained a Washington weakness. Affection for Washington, and for the office made in his image, allowed delegates to project appealing qualities upon the office that it did not inherently have, or lulled them into letting down their guard in protecting the future against encroachment by designing presidents. Washington injected virtue into the marrow of the office, but would that make the nation vulnerable in the future to a poisonous president who would inject something darker?

In short, they argue, winning at all costs has costs and the ends for which their former allies are sacrificing themselves will increasingly become the president’s personal preferences, making them harder to defend.

“What can the next Democratic president do that you won’t look like a hypocrite for criticizing?” No doubt there are some plausible policy answers to this. After all, Trump hasn’t pushed socialized medicine—at least not as president. But in terms of almost every other metric of the president’s role and responsibilities, Trump’s most unequivocal defenders are leaving themselves stranded on a very small parcel of ground to stand upon once the Trump presidency is over. And their new attitude toward the issue of character barely leaves enough ground to stand on one foot.”13

The poll asked “Is Donald Trump a good role model for children?” Only 21 percent of the respondents said yes. Despite Trump’s rock-solid support in the Republican Party, only 50 percent of Republicans said yes.15

A 2020 Washington Post investigation found that the role model is being followed. After reviewing 28,000 news stories, they found that Trump’s words had been used by students to put down their peers and teachers at least three hundred times since the start of 2016. Three-quarters of those attacks were directed at people who were Hispanic, black, or Muslim.16

This is a long way from the Mike Pence who argued that members of a president’s party had a duty to abandon a president who lies, even if the lies were about private matters, as they were in Bill Clinton’s case. “If our leaders flinch at this responsibility,” wrote Pence in the late 1990s, “they would do well to heed the Proverb ‘If a ruler listens to lies, all his officials become wicked.’ ”21

Even when there is bipartisan cooperation the president has told the opposite story. The president told his audiences the opioid bill passed with “very little Democrat support.”20 The vote was 98 to 1, with only Republican Senator Mike Lee of Utah opposing it. The House passed it 393 to 8. Even a rare bipartisan achievement was not framed that way.

When you negotiate and debate, you do it in such a way that you recognize that the other side has a right to speak. While making a point, you address yourself to the argument and not the personality. Views are attacked, but not the other person’s self-esteem. “Character is not the enemy of self-expression and personal freedom, it is their necessary precondition,”22 Wilson wrote, because without these there cannot be an exchange of ideas or orderly familial and communal lives.

Having an effective government is like an airbag. When things go really, really wrong you want it to be there.3 —GAUTAM MUKUNDA

I have interviewed thousands of voters over the years as they assess candidates for office. Those voters are a source of hope and vision and durable faith in our country, but their approach cannot be called systematic. They say they don’t like negative ads, but they repeat the claims made in them. They are critical of the news, but their opinions are shaped by what they hear on cable TV. They claim they are independent, but they have voted for one party all of their lives. They say they don’t care about the candidate horse race, but it consumes their conversations.

We also accept solutions that are momentarily pleasing but have long-term costs. We applaud presidents who issue executive orders that work for our team but ignore how they ultimately weaken Congress. Executive orders can also build up the appetite for a savior from the other team who will sashay in and graft on their own executive orders. “That’s basically the only way to govern now,” the Democratic strategist Andrew Feldman told Politico in 2019 about executive actions. “It’s kind of a way of life.”13 Governance by executive order is frantic and fragile and makes it harder to address America’s biggest problems.

Included in our interrogations should be some discussion of the domestic costs of military action. Debate moderators press candidates about how they are going to pay for their domestic programs, but they rarely raise the issue when it involves spending on military adventures. This allows the belief to flower that national security is somehow too important to be limited by prosaic matters of accounting. But President Eisenhower, whose military record perhaps gave him the standing to make that case, drew the connection directly: “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”18

IT TAKES TOO LONG FOR the president to get his team on the field. FDR’s cabinet was confirmed in fifty-five minutes. Now it takes months.

Restore the American Tradition of Reform ONE OF THE BEST WAYS to repair the presidency is to stop focusing on it. We take all of our problems to the presidential complaint window, but on certain matters, we’re going to the wrong office entirely. We should be looking to other institutions—Congress, state and local government—and looking at the electoral process that picks those lawmakers. Those are the institutions where we can effectively address many of our national challenges. Some of them need repair to be in a position to fulfill their duties.

Congress must reassert itself again, taking the lead in writing legislation to meet great national needs and at least weighing in on enormous questions like war and peace. This would relieve pressure on the executive and return to the model the founders designed.

The Senate filibuster, which allows any senator to engage in unlimited debate until sixty votes are found to stop it, should be reformed, suggest analysts like Ezra Klein, in order to allow legislation to flow and to put senators on the record on key issues so voters know where they stand. Senators of both parties say they would like to vote more and be judged on the votes they take, rather than let their leaders limit what comes to the floor because votes on the record might hurt vulnerable senators and imperil a party’s majority status.

The unintended consequences of past reforms should give us humility about advocating for new ones. Advocates of term limits for members of Congress say they would reduce the influence of lobbyists and wealthy interests who have control over lawmakers because they provide the financing for their campaigns. Perhaps, but lobbyists will be happy to be rid of lawmakers with expertise so they can hoodwink the newcomers. Reducing experience also empowers administrative employees who don’t change with administrations.

IT IS POSSIBLE TO REVERE the founders too much. They had many flaws. They wrote a document that sought to ensure liberty while it institutionalized slavery. Excessive reverence for the founders also makes our debates lazy. We hold an opinion, search for the founder’s quote that affirms it, and wait for the applause from people who agree with us on Twitter. But a quote from the founders is not the last word. They couldn’t even agree with one another. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison fought over George Washington’s authority to declare the United States neutral in a war between Britain and France. They helped write and sell the Constitution, but they disagreed about what it meant not long after it had been ratified.

Instead, we should interrogate the thinking behind the founders’ work to see if it applies today. Their view of power, for example, was based on a notion about ambition and its rapacious unstoppable character. They feared ambition not because it made leaders a bore at the dinner table, but because their understanding of history made them believe that unbridled ambition inevitably corroded republican government.

Americans are better than our political class. The group More in Common, which seeks to repair America’s political divide, commissioned extensive polling to examine the actual contours of America’s landscape. It found that much of our polarization is driven by roughly one-third of the population, ideologues on both wings who are highly engaged with social media and their causes.

If polarization is not the natural condition of most of the country, then defining our national life by the views of those who are political obsessives is a misrepresentation of American national life and also affects that life, creating a profound weariness that cripples the will to participate in public affairs. Those of us in the press have an obligation to be clear that America is not defined by its most partisan citizens.