The American Presidency needs to die to be reborn
a clear Single Point of Failure, Trump is the symptom of a hyperPresidency gone awry
Dalia Lithwick in Slate had choice words for Trump, the weakest President in a long while:
it is worth recognizing that Trump has managed to shrink slowly down to a small manageable size simply by being ever more himself. Be it his military action against the caravan that wasn’t, his wall that wasn’t, his raking that wasn’t, or his inflated election claims that weren’t, the deflections and distractions seem to come faster and faster. But the fall of 2018 saw truth able to get its boots on before a falsehood could travel very far — maybe because the lies are more transparent now, or maybe because we are finally getting better at this. The final factor in Trump’s diminution had to be the appalling (!) White House (!) statement defending the Saudi Arabian royal family from his own CIA’s finding that they had been complicit in the murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Most Americans, as well as their allies and foes, still have a rose-tinted view of the Presidency, forged in WWII by the formidable personality of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and previously by Roosevelt’s cousin Teddy. Few remember the inconsequential Presidents that have littered history: who can actually remember anything worthwhile accomplished by Presidents Garrison or Arthur ?
The hyperPresidency has been a deviation from the Founders’ original vision for the chief executive. The first body of government referenced in the US Constitution’s Article 1 is the Congress, NOT the President.
Jon Lovett’s satirical 2015 article in The Atlantic on Trump’s Presidency actually has a deeper meaning:
In what Trump supporters called the “Christmas Coup” and what everyone else called a historic act of national preservation, President Obama signed into law a bill passed with overwhelming bipartisan support (with the exception of a few House Republicans and Ted Cruz, who abstained) which reasserted congressional primacy over the republic and stripped away the presidential prerogatives that had accrued over the previous century. In a talk at the Heritage Foundation, Chief Justice John Roberts, speaking only hypothetically of course, suggested such a law would survive judicial review.
John Dickerson, also in The Atlantic, wrote a momentous piece on how the American Presidency had become an impossible job for just about anyone:
We expect presidents to be deal makers. Even when the opposition has calcified, they are supposed to drink and dine with the other side and find a bipartisan solution. Trump promised that his decades in the real-estate business would make him an especially able negotiator, but on health care, taxes, and immigration, he hasn’t much bothered to trade horses with Democratic lawmakers. [..] Today we notice when the president doesn’t show up. We are a president-obsessed nation, so much so that we undermine the very idea of our constitutional democracy. No one man — or woman — can possibly represent the varied, competing interests of 327 million citizens. And it may be that no man — or woman — can perform the ever-expanding duties of office while managing an executive branch of 2 million employees (not including the armed forces) charged with everything from regulating air pollution to x-raying passengers before they board an airplane.
The burdens of the office had indeed accrued over decades and Trump has appeared as the symptom that the “system” doesn’t work anymore, due to the conflicting and almost-impossible-to-bridge interests of a divided society. Dickerson’s point is spot on: America is President-obsessed because the pageantry of the office has been taught for generations as being what’s needed to “glue” society in good and bad times.
Newsflash: this pageantry is long gone, whatever honor was left in the office vanished with a blue dress in 1998 and Obama was a “last call” before the sunset.
America, get used to your institutions working with a weak President because the era of the respected bully pulpit will NOT come back.
What’s next ? a return to the Founders’ original idea: a President as chief executive as a primus inter pares, a sage to be used to guide the process but not overbear it.
How likely is this to happen ? Should Trump be reelected in 2020 (and he might be), count on the last shreds of political capital linked to the White House to disappear, durably. What needs to happen is the renaissance of an activist Congress, complete with a new generation (hello Alexandria Ocasio Cortez) of lawmakers genuinely interested in governing vs preening and showboating.
Here’s to hoping !
