Teaching Trump's Presidency

Compared to the Constitution's version.

Political scientist Brendan Nyhan asked:

I am teaching my presidency course again - last year's syllabus is here sites.dartmouth.edu/nyhan/files/... How should I change it to reflect the current moment? I have a class session on presidential power and norms at the beginning and two at the end on democratic erosion and possible reforms.

My immediate reaction was that I’d start the course with the Supreme Court decision from this past summer granting extraordinary personal immunity to president and supplement it with an argument claiming that there’s a “unitary executive” — that is, that the entire executive branch is properly just an extension of the president’s will. Following that, I’d spend the bulk of the semester on a tour of how the presidency was nothing like that from the adoption of the Constitution until now, and end up with the question of whether the presidency has now become something entirely different or not — and if so, how that new presidency fits into the constitutional system.

It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the classroom, but the presidency was one of the courses in my regular rotation. I’ve always thought of the class I put together as asking why presidents do the things they do; I asked students to consider partial answers (such as party, skill, representation, national interest, race/ethnicity, and others) using historical examples.

Another way to look at it, however, was that the big theme was about constraints on the president — and perhaps the hardest thing for undergrads to accept was that presidents rarely act on their own impulses or preferences. Joe Biden didn’t support Ukraine because he likes the nation; it was his policy because he and relevant experts in and out of the administration believed it was in the US interest to do so. Biden didn’t select women for half of the positions he filled because he’s a feminist; he did it because he was a Democrat in the 2020s. And so on.

What I didn’t think of right away was that I actually started the class by talking about tensions between the presidency and ideas of kingship. I showed the Crispin’s Day speech from Henry V (1989) and talked about kings as semi-divine, and then the opening of Richard III (1995) and the idea of kings as villianous usuprers, and talked about how presidents — who are not kings, but remind us of kings — can be constrained by such myths but also find ways to exploit them. The idea wasn’t so much about kings as that the Constitution mainly leaves the presidency as a blank page, and that ideas about what the presidency is supposed to do fill in much of that blank space. In the course, we go from there to George Washington’s influence through ideas such as the Cincinnatus myth, and when we get to Franklin Roosevelt I talk about how the FDR idea of the presidency became the dominant one going forward. FDR-style presidents are far more the focal point of the federal government than those who preceded him, but they are bargaining deal-makers who build influence through political skills, not authoritarians.

I’m not sure what I’d actually do if I was teaching presidency these days. I’d certainly explain that it’s ahistorical nonsense to claim that executive branch departments and agencies are solely responsible to the president, and not to the president and Congress.¹ Of course, nonsense or not, if Trump (for example) impounds funds and a Republican Congress is fine with that and a Republican Supreme Court says it’s kosher, then we have a very different presidency.

Overall, my guess is that I’d do what I suggested to Brendan: Spend the bulk of the semester on the constraints on the president, and how they are deeply embedded in the US political system. Which then raises the question of what happens when the rules of the game change in ways that allow presidents to come closer than ever to doing whatever they want. When Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon tried to govern as if constraints did not exist, the rest of the government pushed back against them and their presidencies were destroyed.²

What happens, however, if Congress and the courts are fine if the president openly breaks the law; if he seizes the power of the purse; if he cuts Congress out of its legitimate role in funding and overseeing what the executive branch does? The institutions that normally constrain the presidency remain (including federalism and more), but if the rules of the game change, will the constraints still exist? What would that situation look like?

We may not find out. It’s possible that Trump’s second term will look a lot like his first one, with attempts to govern by command mostly proving to be ineffective, and damaging him even when he did occasionally bully his way into things. But we certainly can’t discount the possibility that the rules are changing rapidly in the White House’s favor, even if he’s as clumsy in exploiting them as ever.

In other words, it may be that we’ll replace the idea of the FDR presidency with a new, more authoritarian version and that enough people will buy in that it will really work in the sense that such a president could thrive and the new system could be reasonably stable.

Whether the nation would thrive, and to what extent it would be democratic, are different (and probably more important) questions.

I expect those who are beginning a semester on the presidency in the new year will start knowing the answers to a lot of this by the last few weeks of spring semester.

1. Or perhaps to the president, Congress, and the courts.

2. One can argue that happened to Trump in his first term too. It’s complicated. Johnson and Nixon tried to govern out of the White House, which turned out to be folly; avoiding the constraints of using executive branch departments and agencies turned out to also cost them governing capacity and expertise, and also made lots of enemies. (That’s the story of the Iran-Contra scandal during Ronald Reagan’s presidency as well). Trump’s case is different because he’s so uninterested in and oblivious to much of what the government does, except for a few fetishes and for the things that affect him as a private citizen personally.