The Founding Fathers of the US had been fearful of monarchy. They designed a structure that separated and fragmented energy, hoping that no single particular person would ever amass the sort of authority that Britain’s king had loved. Certainly, the Declaration of Independence decried the historical past of the British monarchy as a “historical past of repeated accidents and usurpations.”
But in 2025, People are experiencing an aggressive deployment of presidential energy that many observers worry appears precisely like what the Structure was meant to keep away from. U.S. President Donald Trump has used his workplace to threaten and intimidate opponents. Federal funds have change into a bludgeon wielded towards legislation companies and universities. Via the Division of Authorities Effectivity, Trump has imposed extreme cuts on important businesses and eradicated different packages altogether.
People have been deported to abroad prisons with out due course of. Trump has attacked a number of federal judges and even defied their orders. Based mostly on skinny constitutional grounds, Trump deployed Marines and federalized the Nationwide Guard to ship into Los Angeles regardless of California Gov. Gavin Newsom adamantly opposing his choice to take action.
The president additionally retains joking about operating for a 3rd time period whatever the twenty second Modification. When requested by a reporter if he needed to “uphold the Structure,” Trump responded: “I don’t know.”
Trump’s supporters dismiss the criticism by pulling the “everyone does it” card out of their hat. And it’s true that for many years, each events have relied on expansive govt energy to realize their targets. In that sense, all People are imperial presidentialists. Is Trump actually so completely different from the presidents earlier than him?
The growth of presidential energy has undoubtedly been one of many central developments of the US’ 249 years of nationhood. Although the Structure tried to constrain the chief department, President George Washington nonetheless issued a stern warning in his farewell deal with, as he set the usual by voluntarily relinquishing energy: “It is vital … that the habits of considering in a free nation ought to encourage warning in these entrusted with its administration, to restrict themselves inside their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding within the train of the powers of 1 division to encroach upon one other. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all of the departments in a single and thus to create, regardless of the type of authorities, an actual despotism.”
Congress remained the first supply of political authority via the Nineteenth century, however a number of presidents took a extra forceful function within the polity. Andrew Jackson used his authority to deliver down the Second Financial institution of the US when he vetoed its recharter in 1832. In his first yr as president, with the Civil Warfare violently breaking up the union, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus—refusing to adjust to Supreme Court docket Chief Justice Roger Taney, who, appearing on his personal as a circuit decide, dominated that the president had no authority to take action.
Whereas Nineteenth-century presidents took on a extra distinguished function in civic life, often exerting new types of energy, the twentieth century witnessed a large growth of the chief department’s institutional infrastructure. After World Warfare I ended, President Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Division broadened its energy underneath Legal professional Normal A. Mitchell Palmer by deporting immigrants and accused radicals in 1919 and 1920, in the course of the first Pink Scare.
Between 1933 and 1945, the chief department expanded with Franklin D. Roosevelt within the White Home. Starting along with his first 100 days, Roosevelt created many new govt businesses, such because the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress Administration. Congress appropriated unprecedented budgets for these new authorities our bodies whereas bolstering the Treasury Division by making a mass earnings tax. Roosevelt infamously used the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to intern Japanese People, an train of govt authority that the Supreme Court docket upheld in Korematsu v. United States (1944).
Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry Truman, labored with a Republican-majority Congress between 1947 and 1949 to construct a formidable nationwide safety equipment that included the Nationwide Safety Council, the CIA, the Protection Division, and a dedication to a everlasting battle of containment towards the Soviet Union. Regardless of warnings from some conservatives, reminiscent of Sen. Robert Taft, that Truman and Congress had been constructing a “garrison state,” the voices of govt centralization had been triumphant. Beginning with the Korean Warfare in 1950, presidents would not ask Congress to declare battle earlier than sending troops into fight.
Amid moments of pushback, such because the Supreme Court docket’s 1952 choice ruling that Truman was not licensed to take management of metal factories to stop a wartime strike, Congress steadily allowed presidents to regulate extra coverage areas, reminiscent of tariffs.
In the course of the Fifties and Nineteen Sixties, liberal intellectuals produced books and articles justifying why the nation wanted a stronger presidency than the founders had envisioned. They argued that the US couldn’t rely on a fragmented Congress to make choices in a fancy age of industrialization, urbanization, and world battle.
The complete challenge got here to a head with President Richard Nixon, who took energy because the Vietnam Warfare had already deeply divided the nation. Nixon’s aggressive use of presidential energy shook the religion of those that had extolled the virtues of a robust presidency. The media revealed that Nixon had carried out a secret bombing marketing campaign in Cambodia regardless of vowing to finish army operations in Southeast Asia.
Nixon additionally used the facility of impoundment in ways in which his predecessors would by no means have imagined, refusing to spend huge sums of cash that Congress had appropriated as a result of he believed it was in his political curiosity to oppose the packages. The state of affairs deteriorated additional because the Watergate investigation revealed how Nixon had tried to weaponize the chief department to go after his enemies, threatened establishments, and sought to hinder justice.
Nixon triggered a robust response from Congress, which all through the Seventies handed main items of laws that tried to rebalance energy.
In 1973, the Warfare Powers Act imposed new restrictions on presidents who wished to have interaction U.S. troops in army battle. The 1974 Congressional Funds and Impoundment Management Act centralized budgeting procedures on Capitol Hill to grant legislators extra muscle in shaping deliberations and decreed prohibitions on presidents from with the ability to impound funds in any important means. The 1978 Overseas Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) established strict procedures for the federal government to conduct surveillance of U.S. residents and established a FISA particular court docket that wanted to authorize warrants. Congress additionally handed ethics reforms in 1978 that included monetary disclosure guidelines for govt department officers and the creation of the Workplace of Unbiased Counsel to analyze govt corruption.
However the govt department rapidly regained momentum. President Ronald Reagan used institutional sources to bypass a Democratic-majority Home of Representatives that pushed again towards his so-called revolution.
Reagan issued govt orders that stripped down environmental and office regulation. Below Legal professional Normal Edwin Meese, the Justice Division grew to become an mental hothouse the place conservative legal professionals produced memoranda outlining authorized theories that justified a sturdy understanding of presidential energy. Of their estimation, there have been few exterior constraints on the chief department; the president, furthermore, ought to have whole management over each company and the individuals who work there, generally known as the unitary govt principle. The Iran-Contra affair that broke in 1986 revolved round high officers on the Nationwide Safety Council who used cash generated by secret weapons gross sales to Iran to help the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras, regardless of express congressional prohibitions.
Intensifying political polarization within the Nineteen Nineties and 2000s, which resulted in worsening gridlock on Capitol Hill, incentivized all presidents to make use of govt orders extra regularly. Pissed off with Republican management of Congress after 1994, President Invoice Clinton turned to govt orders to make progress on environmental points; President Barack Obama tackled immigration via a memorandum creating the Deferred Motion for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012 to guard individuals who got here into the US illegally as kids.
Nothing, nonetheless, was as essential to restoring the facility of the Oval Workplace as President George W. Bush’s response to 9/11. Following the assaults, the administration created a brand new nationwide safety equipment, shattering lots of the Seventies reforms.
Utilizing the wartime authority granted to him by Congress with the Authorization for Use of Navy Pressure, Bush centralized coverage underneath the Division of Homeland Safety, licensed intensive surveillance on U.S. residents, established a detention facility in Guantánamo Bay to keep away from interrogators being topic to U.S. or worldwide legislation, and allowed for the usage of “enhanced interrogation”—torture—on suspected terrorists. (Although restoring extra respect for due course of and the rule of legislation inside the new system, Obama left most of this infrastructure intact.)
The tradition additionally appeared snug with the notion that the president was in command of Washington. Regardless of excessive public mistrust within the authorities, there was nonetheless a veneration for the person within the White Home. One of many hit reveals of the interval was The West Wing, wherein the fictional president was idealistic, virtuous, and a strident defender of U.S. democracy.
Political scientists have argued that there’s an asymmetry in how the events use presidential energy. William Howell and Terry Moe wrote in 2023 that Democratic presidents—as members of a celebration that believes within the significance of presidency—eliminate their authority in ways in which don’t threaten the executive state. In distinction, Republicans flip to excessive powers to sabotage the executive state.
When Trump first sat behind the Resolute Desk in January 2017, he inherited large authority, precedents for utilizing his energy, the huge institutional equipment of the chief department, and an workplace extensively perceived as being the middle of U.S. authorities reasonably than an equal department.
Even given the historical past of presidential energy, there are a number of notable variations between Trump and his predecessors. The values guiding Trump essentially differ from these guiding previous presidents. Regardless of important variation in expertise, values, and tolerance for corruption, virtually all U.S. presidents have believed within the legitimacy of the nation’s primary constitutional construction.
When Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, he did so in the course of the Civil Warfare, to avert secessionist rioting and insurrection that may destroy the Structure. Congress was out of session, and bringing lawmakers again in that period would have taken time. As quickly as Congress returned, he defined his actions and requested congressional approval, which it supplied with laws in 1863.
After the Supreme Court docket dominated that Truman couldn’t seize the metal mills, he instantly relinquished them. Even Nixon complied when the Supreme Court docket determined in July 1974 that he needed to flip over the White Home recordings to the courts. Trump is completely different, as demonstrated by his makes an attempt to overturn the outcomes of the 2020 election.
Trump can also be protected by a hyperpartisan Republican-majority Congress that reveals intense loyalty bordering on cult-like admiration. The president doesn’t need to worry legislators’ energy over the purse, energy to conduct oversight, or their energy to question. The convergence of immense presidential energy and a divider-in-chief exacerbates the risks of what can occur with an imperial presidency.
A few of Trump’s presidency is acquainted, and he’s creating his personal precedents in different areas. This combine permits him to do no matter he pleases, drifting additional away from the constitutional rules that the founders tried to enshrine. Till one other interval of reckoning, as occurred within the Seventies, the US will stay susceptible to nonetheless extra renegade leaders who can threaten the standing of the nation’s nice democracy.
