[Editor's Note: With The Presidency Reimagined , Mr. Dunneagin Speaks begins a new inquiry into the modern American presidency and the constitutional architecture surrounding it. Over the course of Season 4, we will examine not simply how presidential power has evolved, but whether the safeguards intended to constrain that power remain capable of performing their functions under the demands placed upon them today.
The object is neither to restore some imagined presidential past nor to redesign government around any single president. It is to ask a harder question: How do we preserve a presidency powerful enough to govern while ensuring that the constitutional system surrounding it remains strong enough to constrain that power—even when some of its safeguards fail?
The Presidency Reimagined begins that inquiry.]
Long before Theodore Roosevelt became president, he had considerable experience learning that public power did not belong to the person exercising it.
He had served in the New York State Assembly, on the United States Civil Service Commission, as president of the New York City Police Board, as assistant secretary of the Navy, and as governor of New York. Each office gave him authority. None of that authority personally belonged to him.
That distinction would eventually shape Roosevelt's understanding of the presidency.
Roosevelt rejected the idea that the president should act only when the Constitution explicitly authorized him to do so. His stewardship theory held that the president could act vigorously on behalf of the people unless the Constitution or the law prohibited the action.
It was an expansive conception of executive power, and Roosevelt was hardly shy about exercising it.
But beneath that muscular conception of executive power rested an important premise: the power inherent in any political office was public before it was presidential.
Roosevelt was its temporary steward.
More than a century later, Donald Trump arrived at the presidency by a very different route.
Before entering politics, Trump spent decades running a privately owned business organization. The Trump Organization wasn't something citizens temporarily entrusted to him. It existed to advance the interests of its owner—him.
That is not an indictment of private enterprise. It is simply a different relationship with authority.
A business owner can decide what the organization's interests are and direct the organization accordingly. Government is different. Its institutions existed before the president arrived.
Where Roosevelt entered the presidency after years of learning how to exercise power he did not own, Trump entered after decades of exercising power he did own.
That difference does not explain everything about either presidency. But it offers a useful way to think about something larger: what happens when enormous public power is placed in the hands of someone whose understanding of authority has been formed in a private-sector setting.
Every president believes, to some degree, that his judgment reflects the national interest. Roosevelt certainly did. His stewardship theory rested upon the conviction that a president should act vigorously on behalf of the people, provided the Constitution or the law did not forbid him from doing so. That formulation gave Roosevelt considerable room to decide what the public interest was—and considerable power to pursue it.
But there is a difference between deciding what one believes to be in the public interest and possessing the authority to make that judgment final.
Elections expose that distinction with unusual clarity.
A president may believe passionately that his reelection would be better for the country. Jimmy Carter presumably preferred four more years of Carter to Ronald Reagan. George H.W. Bush undoubtedly preferred a second Bush term to a Clinton presidency.
The Constitution did not require either man to change his mind.
It required him to leave.
Trump confronted the same problem after the 2020 election.
He was entitled to believe that the country had made a terrible mistake. He was entitled to challenge the election’s results through lawful processes. His campaign and allies did so repeatedly.
Eventually their challenges produced answers.
Of the 62 post-election lawsuits commonly counted as brought by Trump and his allies, 61 failed; the single procedural victory in Pennsylvania did not alter the election result. Multiple state recounts confirmed results. State officials certified votes. Some of the people delivering those answers were members of Trump’s own party—Republicans.
None produced the answer Trump wanted.
That disagreement presented Trump with something more consequential than disappointment. For a brief period following the election, he remained the most powerful elected official in the country while knowing that the country had decided to give that power to someone else.
In the immediate post-election period and up to inauguration day on January 20, 2021, Trump was still president. He still possessed the authority, influence, and enormous public platform of the office.
But none of those things gave him authority to determine who had won the election.
That authority existed elsewhere.
And therein lies the problem that reaches far beyond 2020.
There is a temptation to regard each subsequent episode involving Trump’s exercise of presidential power separately: another fight over voting rules, another demand directed at states' election officials, another presidential threat, another controversy to be added to an already crowded ledger.
Taken together, however, they raise a more fundamental question about presidential power: What happens when the steward believes he is the owner?
Roosevelt's stewardship theory was expansive. He believed deeply in presidential action and deeply in his own ability to determine what action the public interest required. The modern presidency owes something of its enormous reach to presidents like him.
But Roosevelt's theory also contained a vulnerability.
It depended, in part, upon the president understanding what stewardship meant.
And Roosevelt himself provides the first warning. His confidence in his judgment did not make that judgment infallible. Roosevelt could be wrong.
The problem becomes more serious when presidential confidence is combined with the enormous powers of the modern office.
Lyndon Johnson had something Trump conspicuously lacked when he first entered the White House: extraordinary experience in government. He knew Congress intimately. He understood political power and had spent decades exercising public authority—so much so that Robert Caro titled the third volume of his Johnson biography Master of the Senate.
None of that made Johnson’s judgment infallible.
Vietnam demonstrated that a president could possess experience, knowledge, patriotism and enormous lawful authority—and still lead the country into a disastrous quagmire.
Roosevelt could be wrong.
Johnson was spectacularly wrong.
But presidential error, even catastrophic error, does not require hostility toward the constitutional mechanisms capable of saying no.
Trump gives us the ultimate design-failure condition precisely because constitutional restraint itself became the adversary.
That is where reimagining the presidency must begin.
For much of American history, constitutional government has relied upon more than written restrictions. It has relied upon Congress defending congressional power, courts policing legal boundaries, states protecting their authority, professional administrators performing public rather than personal functions, election officials administering elections, and presidents accepting that some things remained beyond their authority even when they desperately wanted a different outcome.
Those assumptions can fail.
Worse, they can fail together.
Congress can acquiesce rather than resist. Courts can constrain too late—or work to facilitate an expansion of presidential power. State officials can assist rather than oppose. Professional administration can be subordinated to personal loyalty. Norms can cease to constrain once violating them carries little meaningful consequence.
The institutions remain. The Capitol still stands. Judges still sit. Governors still govern.
But the behavioral independence upon which the constitutional architecture depends can weaken without a single word of the Constitution being erased.
Trump did not create the modern presidency. He inherited an office that had accumulated enormous authority over more than two centuries—through wars and emergencies, powers granted by Congress, administrative growth, judicial decisions, technological change and precedents established by earlier presidents.
The presidency evolved.
So did the political parties surrounding it, the Congress confronting it, the courts reviewing it and the administrative machinery serving it.
The constitutional architecture remained recognizable, even as the forces affecting it changed.
That does not mean the Founders designed a defective presidency. It means the system developed vulnerabilities its original architects could not have anticipated.
And that leaves us with an architectural question: What architecture gives the president enough power to govern while denying the president the power to circumvent the constitutional constraints of the office?
Answering that question requires more than pointing toward Congress, the courts and the states and declaring that the safeguards already exist.
That means the safeguards themselves must be stress-tested.
What happens when Congress refuses to constrain?
What happens when courts cannot constrain—or constrain too late—or work to facilitate an expansion of presidential power?
What happens when states cooperate?
What happens when professional administration is stripped of its independence?
And what happens when several of those failures occur simultaneously?
The object is not to Trump-proof the presidency.
The next threat may bear no resemblance to Trump. Nor does constitutional failure require a malevolent president. Johnson reminds us that a president can be experienced, patriotic and spectacularly wrong.
Trump presents the more difficult problem: the president who intentionally challenges constitutional restraints because they obstruct what he wants to accomplish.
In one case, the safeguards are called upon to correct presidential error.
In the other, the safeguards themselves become targets.
The constitutional architecture cannot know who will be sitting behind the Resolute Desk. That is why reimagining the presidency cannot merely mean imagining a better president.
We must try to design a better presidency.
Not a powerless presidency.
The country will continue to require an executive capable of acting rapidly and forcefully when circumstances demand it. War, economic catastrophe, pandemic, terrorism, and crises not yet imagined will continue to require presidential leadership.
The challenge, therefore, is not simply limiting presidential power.
It is designing for failure.
The Founders understood that problem in their own time. They did not construct constitutional government on the assumption that political leaders would invariably be wise or virtuous. They divided power because they understood that ambitious, self-interested, and fallible human beings would govern.
But the government operating inside that architecture has changed enormously since 1787.
Presidential capacity evolved tremendously. Consequently, the safeguards surrounding it must be examined with equal seriousness.
Engineers do not build bridges on the assumption that the wind will always be gentle. Constitutional government deserves the same consideration.
We have inherited the bridge Franklin's generation designed. More than two centuries of American government have strengthened parts of it, altered others, and placed more demanding loads on it than its original architects could ever have imagined.
Our responsibility is not merely to admire their workmanship.
It is to examine what two centuries have done to it—and make certain that no future storm brings it down.
— Dunneagin