How Historic Is Trump’s Presidency?

Commentary

The circumstances that led to the remarkable week of President Donald Trump’s second time in office are highly unusual. It’s only the second time that the same man has served a non-consecutive term in this office. The first was Grover Cleveland, who took office in 1885 and 1893.

The government in those days was barely visible in the lives of Americans. The annual federal budget was $9.4 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars. Today’s federal government spends $6.82 trillion, or 72,000 percent more than it did back in those days.

Let’s just say the job has changed substantially.

When you get any job, the main questions you face are what are you supposed to do and what powers will you have to do that?

If the answer to the first part is to manage millions of employees, shepherd the operation of 420 agencies, and oversee the spending of nearly $7 trillion in taxpayer dollars, that’s clearly too much for one man.

If the answer to the second part is that you cannot control the employees of the institution you head, you have a major problem.

And this has been the situation in American history for a century or more. The job has outstripped the office. Every new president notices this immediately. If they try to have an impact, they immediately run into rules concerning independent agencies, the permanence of the civil service, and the problem of ongoing conspiracies between the established ways and the news media and industrial backers.

Then the new chief executive faces a choice. He can take huge risks and threaten his personal popularity and status in the history books. Or he can just go along with the system as it is and fix things on the margin whenever the possibility arises while working with all the powers that be.

It was never supposed to be this way.

The Constitution created a presidency to oversee the executive branch of government, an elected position that stood in contrast to most systems of government at the time. The argument for monarchy at the time was that only a person carefully reared in the arts of statecraft could possibly manage the job of chief executive.

The Founders had an answer to this claim. Kings and royals had an entirely different job to do in managing the whole realm, controlling large armies, constructing cultures, and controlling enterprises.

The president, in contrast, has a narrow list of functions because the central government would be so small and limited. Most power belongs to the states. For this reason, the president can be an elected position within a society in which freedom is the first principle.

That system worked for a very long time—until it stopped working. The government grew and grew, and the federal civil service, created only in 1883, accumulated ever more institutional knowledge, power, and essential functions. After a while, and gradually over the decades through war, depression, and civic upheavals, the presidency became less decisive in terms of the day-to-day and ever more ceremonial and symbolic.

The administrators ran everything, in combination with media and industrial interests.

This reality dawned on many people only in the past four years, during which the person of the president seemed to have almost no real volition or influence. We were reminded of the last decades of the Soviet Union, in which the head of state was clearly just a stand-in for an enormous bureaucracy and machinery that could operate on its own.

Indeed, the last Soviet premier who tried to change things, Nikita Khrushchev, was driven from office and spent years feeding pigeons from park benches, just grateful to be alive.

None of this was well known by Trump when he became president in 2016. He was a real estate builder and businessman, not a politician. He knew the government had plenty of problems but assumed that once he was president, he would in effect become the CEO of the government or, at least, the executive branch. He would have a staff of millions that would follow his policy priorities.

The D.C. establishment was already furious that he won without their permission. It immediately set out to throttle the functioning of the presidency. He was confounded from the first days with wild and false claims that he had only won thanks to Russian influence. That claim was later debunked, but then the plots and conspiracies grew ever more and became wildly threatening to him. It was, of course, the COVID-19 response that finally took down the first Trump administration with the help of mail-in ballots and a collapsed economy.

Trump, however, was and is not the sort of person who so easily accepts defeat. Knowing this and fearing his return, the lawfare began as soon as he was declared defeated in the election. People who protested on Capitol Hill for him and against government corruption were labeled as “insurrectionists” and goaded into entering the Capitol building, which was later grounds for imprisonment.

That was only the start of it. For four years, Trump had been subjected to a level of lawfare never seen before in American life, even to the point of having him threatened with prison and his property robbed over small technicalities pushed by partisan enemies.

Still, he won the Republican nomination for a second term in any case. The desperation to stop him even resulted in assassination attempts, one of which came within a quarter inch of killing him.

The point is this: Trump learned from his first term, worked with a brilliant team to fight his way back to power, and now inhabits the presidency with an indefatigable desire to make a change in the system on behalf of the American people.