Does the American presidency exist anymore?

Last week Donald Trump flipped off a worker at a Ford plant for yelling “pedophile protector” at him. This is a minor incident in the scheme of things – especially by the violent and disruptive standards of 2026. The federal government is violently occupying an American city. The Trump regime is threatening to destroy decades of diplomatic relations with a threat to take over Greenland.

But for the American presidency, it’s significant, and of a piece with other symbolic failures. The most notable and recent of these is perhaps Trump’s response to the murder of actor and director Rob Reiner, whose death Trump commemorated by posting about their political disagreements and even blaming Reiner’s death, somehow, on “Trump derangement syndrome.”

With these statements of hostility and divisiveness, Trump rejects a core a presidential duty. Notice that I’m not referring to Trump in the previous paragraphs as the president – obviously he is – but I want to draw attention to the fact that I’m not sure the office exists in any meaningful way anymore. And that matters.

The presidency gathers a lot of power in one individual – in a way that’s complicated, and has made a lot of observers nervous over the years. But the presidency works because while it’s an individual, the office itself is one steeped in institutional features like stasis and procedure, and understood to stand for a collective whole: the Constitution and the nation.

A lot has been written about some of the major areas where Trump has destroyed the main features of the presidency as we know it. One of these areas is the politicization of the executive branch, turning everything into a contest for presidential dominance rather than allowing independent bureaucrats and experts to carry out their roles.

Trump’s communication – especially in these symbolic moments that don’t typically have much policy or political relevance – also matters a lot. It destroys the symbolic idea of a unified people, with shared history and values, invoked rhetorically in those moments. The fact that the people have never been unified, the history and values always contested, is not beside the point. It is the point. These things need to be said – to be publicly imagined – in tense and traumatic moments because they are impossible to fully realize. Instead, we have a president who articulates the ugly reality we can all see, rather than the aspirations that, paradoxically, anchor us.

There’s another aspect that probably needs even more exploration by presidential observers and scholars: the apparent lack of constraints on the administration. Previous scholarship has acknowledged that public opinion is a major constraint on what presidents do – more the direct checks that the other branches can apply. This administration has not been entirely unaffected by public pressure, but they’re not as concerned about unpopular agenda items as we’ve come to expect modern presidents to be. The absence of these informal constraints will probably grow in importance, and need more attention and study.

All of this adds up to an office that has not formally changed much, and yet has transformed in key ways. In one sense, this is pretty much the story of the presidency. Progressive-era presidents made the president a public rhetorical leader, a legislative agenda-setter, and a chief administrator. The mid-century office eventually gave way to the excesses and comedic lows of the 1970s presidency.

In most cases, I’d argue that presidential politics are a symptom rather than a cause of political developments. But a changed presidency also changes the country. The development of the more active modern presidency resulted in country with more nationally-focused politics. Nixon, Watergate, and Vietnam ushered in an era of distrust.

Trump’s changes are more significant, adding up to a destruction of the office as we knew it and a replacement with something else. The rejection of Constitutional and political limits, the failure to articulate the national interest, and the preference for grievance over unity leave us with very little that resembles what we’ve come to expect from the presidency, even under very strained conditions.

Trump’s neglect of the presidency’s unifying duties makes it easier for Americans to think even more in terms of our divisions and conflicts than we already do. It’s likely that future presidents – and hopefuls – will be expected to address these conflicts directly and articulate grievances that Americans have toward each other. The use of state forces to punish blue states and cities will foster distrust Nixon could only have dreamed of. I can only speculate about how Trump’s treatment of our alliances and carelessness with our national interest will shape how Americans think about presidential foreign policy going forward. And we have – quickly – become a people adjusted to thinking about what we can and cannot say, teach, or be publicly associated with.

Needless to say, this is not a good situation. At the same time, it could also create some opportunities for others – other politicians, civil society leaders – to push back. There are plenty of people poised to challenge the idea that the country can be neatly divided into two warring sides. An optimistic interpretation is that we could be looking at a moment of reassertion of national values and identity. But other possibility is that this creates a new cleavage: between those who want to fight for the spirit and ideals of an American nation, and those who are ready to discard them for narrower interests.