Friends,
From time to time, I come across essays that are particularly apt and helpful in terms of understanding the time we are in. Here’s the latest from my friend Harold Meyerson, writing in The American Prospect:
One of the themes recurring in conservative media these days is the normalization of Donald Trump by historical analogy. This kind of sweeping arrogation of power, we’re told by Wall Street Journal editorialists, columnist George Will, and other conservative commentators, has ample precedents in the records of progressive presidents particularly: Woodrow Wilson, both Roosevelts, Lyndon Johnson, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. So why this harping on poor Donald Trump?
Trump’s overreaching claims to power, Will tells us, “is an institutional consequence of progressivism.” Journal editorialists note that “Mr. Trump is stretching laws to see what he can get away with, but so have other recent Presidents,” including both Obama and Biden.
As historical analysis, this is malicious piffle.
No previous president has told the nation’s many thousands of autonomous school boards what their schools should teach; required his cabinet secretaries to affirm his Big Lie that he actually won a presidential election he actually lost; dictated which shows are suitable, and which not, for the Kennedy Center; told the NCAA which athletes to disqualify; or excluded media organizations from the White House that didn’t conform to his renaming international bodies of water. If we seek precedents for this kind of conduct, we must look not to American presidents but to, say, the Bourbons of France.
The power of our presidents has grown chiefly during wartime or other crises, and as the development of mass media, beginning with radio, enabled them to speak directly to their fellow Americans.
There was nothing pernicious or threatening about Franklin Roosevelt’s aptitude for radio or John F. Kennedy’s for television. Trump’s tweets, on the other hand, are pernicious and dangerous, not because he’s mastered that medium but because he deliberately peddles lies and slanders. Nor has he taken power at a time of crisis; rather, he’s claimed this to be a time of national emergency that presumably justifies his power grabs, though that emergency is not visible to the naked eye.
So Trump’s opening salvos are in no way like Franklin Roosevelt’s first hundred days, as some right-wingers have argued.
Roosevelt took office in a time of genuine crisis, when unemployment stood at 25 percent and when an epidemic of runs on banks had shuttered every depository institution in the nation on the eve of his inauguration. To address this, Roosevelt did order federal examiners to spend the next several days assessing the solvency of the country’s banks, but then he turned to Congress to enact the emergency measures that defined his first months as president.
At his behest, Congress enacted a bailout for American farmers and a semi-cartelization of American industry, created deposit insurance for the nation’s bank depositors, and established a Civilian Conservation Corps that provided work to jobless young men and improvements to national parks and forests.
He did not claim for himself powers he knew presidents did not have; he asked Congress, successfully, to enact these far-reaching changes.
Progressive presidents have indeed enlarged government’s regulatory capacity, but invariably because public interest and public safety demanded it. Congress established the departments and agencies that these presidents sought and the public desired. The growth of the administrative state did not come from presidential decrees, unlike the destruction of the administrative state flowing from unlawful executive orders today.
Teddy Roosevelt persuaded Congress to create the Food and Drug Administration so that Americans wouldn’t be poisoned so frequently by what they consumed. Wilson’s allies pushed a bill through Congress that established the Federal Trade Commission to aid consumers and small businesses struggling to deal with corporate domination of markets.
FDR signed congressional legislation establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Labor Relations Board. Congress, responding to the financial chicanery that led to the crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession, passed a bill, which Obama signed, creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
This was all government by consent of the governed, with Congress passing, the president signing, and the courts upholding the constitutionality of these newly created agencies. None of these fundamental changes were due to presidential executive orders, decrees, tweets, or pronunciamentos.
If there is a model in the annals of our history for the agency closures and funding impoundments that Trump has unilaterally ordered, it’s the despotic one that James Madison cautioned against in his Federalist Papers arguments. There, he explained why the Constitution he’d just co-authored created separate branches of government precisely to forestall the prospect of a despot’s rise.
The possibility that the new American nation could degenerate into the monarchical form of government that then prevailed across Europe was very much on Madison’s mind. “The accumulation of all powers—legislative, executive and judiciary—in the same hands, whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny,” Madison wrote in Federalist 47. To keep that from happening, he wrote in Federalist 51, “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.” To this end, he installed the French philosophe Montesquieu’s ideas of separation of powers and checks and balances as the centerpiece of the Constitution.
Despite that, a cowed and supine Republican Congress has raised nary a peep at Trump’s seizure of its power; because Republicans want these agency closures and funding impoundments but know they could not get them through their chambers of the legislature, they’d rather the president seize their power while they go mute. And while federal courts, so far, have sought to curtail those seizures of power, the Supremes have yet to be heard from.
Ours is the only constitution enacted in the 18th century that’s still operative; the constitutions of every other nation were drafted and enacted in more modern times, when the specter of a monarchial despot had by then generally receded.
Ours was by no means a fully democratic document, limiting popular sovereignty to the lower levels of government and endeavoring to ensure rule by elites. While amendments have mitigated some of these biases, vestiges (the Senate, the Electoral College) are still with us today.
Yet the Founders’ emphasis on a separation of powers rooted in fear of a despotic president has long been a kind of background noise in discussions of our constitutional order. It’s there, and we’re generally glad it’s there. But as a result of the nearly 250 years that we’ve gone without a wannabe despot president, it’s not the sort of thing that has merited much attention.
Mr. Will’s and the Journal’s stabs at Trump normalization notwithstanding, it does now.
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