https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/radical-presidency-obama-biden-trump (paywalled and archive can't get around it)
The president has gone rogue. Usurping the powers and prerogatives of Congress, the president invokes radical and dubious theories of executive authority to try to restructure American government and society by decree. Not only Congress but also cabinet secretaries find themselves marginalized and diminished. The president imposes policy on the executive branch through personal loyalists who have not been confirmed by the Senate and enjoy ill-defined authority simply by their proximity to the White House.
Having run toward the center in the previous election, the president surprises everyone by ramming through the niche policies of small ideological factions and interest groups. Surprised and appalled by this behavior, the president’s party cannot control him, thanks to a cult of personality backed by a nationwide movement that places loyalty to their leader over loyalty to the political party to which he nominally belongs. In response to criticisms of its radical policies and power grabs, the White House uses federal agencies and federal lawyers to punish critics in the media and weaponizes formerly neutral government agencies to persecute political opponents.
The paragraph above is a description of Donald Trump. It is also a description of Barack Obama and, for the most part, Joe Biden.
Throughout history, some presidents have been criticized for asserting powers beyond their constitutional authority. For the most part, though, these controversies have involved presidential war and foreign policy powers, from Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France to Truman’s attempt to seize steel mills during the Korean War and George W. Bush’s creation of a global system of extralegal interrogation camps following 9/11. However, presidents rarely contested the limits of their domestic authority. As commander in chief, Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces, but he knew that only Congress could strike down desegregation in civilian life by law. Bill Clinton did not try to pass his health-care plan by executive order after it failed in Congress, just as George W. Bush did not try to impose his plan for partial privatization of Social Security by executive fiat.
Under Obama and his successors, there has been a radical break, with presidents of both parties usurping congressional powers and ignoring powerful members of their own parties. Obama created his one-man party, Organizing for America/Organizing for Action, which sidelined and weakened the Democratic Party. Similarly, Trump’s MAGA movement, a similar one-person party based on loyalty to a single charismatic leader, has largely taken over the moribund Republican Party. Today’s members of Congress fear that opposing a leader like Obama or Trump will open them up to attack in primary elections and on social media from members of the personality cult.
Consider the following parallels between our three most recent presidents.
Rule by decree. In 2012, Donald Trump, then a private citizen, asked in a tweet: “Why is @barackobama constantly issuing executive orders that are major power grabs of authority?” Since his second inauguration, however, President Trump has sought to remake the government and American society with a flurry of executive orders. Many of these seek to achieve results that could normally be achieved only by congressional legislation, like restructuring federal agencies created by law or by the federal judiciary, or like redefining the status of children born in the United States to noncitizen parents (birthright citizenship).
In usurping the power of Congress to make law, Trump in his second term is following the examples of Obama and Biden. In his first term, Obama claimed he lacked the power to grant relief from deportation of children of illegal immigrants. In March 2011, he rejected “the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case.” In May he said he could not “just bypass Congress and change the law myself. … That’s not how a democracy works.” Nevertheless, in 2012, following multiple refusals by Congress to pass the DREAM Act, Obama issued an executive order to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. In 2014, he issued an even more radical executive order, creating the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program, granting access to government benefits and work permits for illegal aliens with foreign-born children whom they had brought with them. A split 4-4 decision by the Supreme Court in 2016 left a stay of the DAPA program by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in place until Trump rescinded the order in his first term. In 2020, the Supreme Court overruled Trump’s rescission of DACA for administrative irregularities, and upon becoming president, Joe Biden reaffirmed it. Trump has announced his intention to phase it out.
In 2016, Obama sought to impose radical gender-fluidity ideology from above through an Education Department decree requiring K-12 schools to allow so-called transgender children suffering from gender dysphoria to join sports teams and use bathrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex.
Joe Biden—or whatever group of aides or family members was governing in his name—engaged in more sporadic but equally sweeping power grabs during his administration. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration in 2021 mandated that all companies with more than 100 employees fire workers who refused to be vaccinated or undergo weekly COVID-19 testing. A 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court blocked Biden’s power grab: “This is no ‘everyday exercise of federal power.’ It is instead a significant encroachment on the lives—and health—of a vast number of employees.”
In 2022, Biden issued an executive order mandating a “whole-of-government” approach that required all federal agencies to adopt race and gender tokenism—regardless of their particular missions or the statutes authorizing them.
Czars. To evade Senate confirmation of appointees and congressional and judicial oversight, presidents for decades have appointed “czars” with dubious legal authority to pressure cabinet secretaries and career government officials to carry out a preferred policy. Here, too, Obama marked a break with tradition, going beyond FDR’s dozen czars in four terms and appointing more than three dozen czars in areas from the auto bailout to climate policy. Sen. John McCain joked, “Obama has more czars than the Romanovs.”
Biden and Trump have appointed fewer czars than Obama, the all-time champion, but some of theirs have exercised unprecedented, if arguably illegal, authority. While Vice President Kamala Harris did little as Biden’s border czar, Nina Jankowicz, whom Biden appointed as “disinformation czar”—technically executive director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board—in 2022, had a sweeping mandate to pressure government agencies and private companies to censor points of view of which the administration disapproved. The resulting outcry by Republicans and conservatives led to her resignation after three weeks and to the abolition of the new board.
For his part, Trump, following his second inauguration, appointed the czar to end all czars: Elon Musk, who was rewarded for his campaign contributions with the title of “special government employee,” a title as Orwellian as Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was neither a department nor a presidential commission created by statute. Even though the Trump administration claimed that the real head of DOGE was an obscure individual named Amy Gleason, on Feb. 22, Musk, via the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), sent all federal employees an email demanding that they respond with five things they did last week. On X, he claimed that those who did not respond would be fired. On his Truth Social account, Trump endorsed the bizarre request: “A GREAT JOB BUT I WOULD LIKE HIM TO BE MORE AGGRESSIVE.” Trump’s department heads pushed back, and efforts by Musk and his DOGE minions to arbitrarily cut spending and randomly fire civil servants, in violation of statutes, bogged down in court, even before Musk withdrew to private life, his reputation and that of his companies severely damaged. “Unfortunately—and in direct contravention of the Framers’ intentions—virtually no one can say with certainty what these individuals do or what limits are placed on their authority,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) complained about Obama’s czars in The Washington Post in 2009. The same question can be raised about both Jankowicz and Musk.
Not content to usurp the power of Congress with executive orders, and to sideline Senate-confirmed department heads with czars whose legal authority is as vague as their policy mandates are immense, today’s radical presidents, beginning with Obama, have waged “lawfare” against their opponents, seeking to use the Justice Department or the court system to bankrupt or crush their political and ideological opponents. Under Obama, an initiative dubbed Operation Choke Point weaponized federal financial regulation by pressuring banks and other financial institutions not to lend money to firms like firearms dealers and tobacco companies, of which progressive Democrats disapproved.
Under Biden, lawfare took the form of the first federal indictment of a former president. Special Counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland, in addition to investigating Trump’s role, if any, in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, got a federal grand jury to issue 31 counts against Trump under the Espionage Act of 1917, on the absurd charge that the former president had mishandled official papers. A Justice Department investigation found that Biden had engaged in similar actions, but he was not charged, on the grounds of debilitating age.
President Woodrow Wilson had used the Espionage Act to jail a rival presidential candidate, the socialist Eugene Debs. The purpose of the Biden administration’s prosecution of Trump, like similar cases in New York and Georgia brought by Democratic prosecutors, was clearly to bankrupt or jail Trump to prevent him from running for president again in 2024 or, failing that, to brand him as a “convicted felon”—something they succeeded in doing, as a result of Trump’s kangaroo court trial in New York over hush-money payments to a porn star. Unable to both impeach and remove Trump from office in two attempts, Democrats sought to use the allegedly neutral court system to destroy him financially and politically.
A different man than Trump might have stressed that his administration, unlike Biden’s, would not weaponize federal law enforcement. Instead, Trump has penalized specific law firms, including Paul Weiss and WilmerHale, that have partners who participated in legislation or political activities against him or pro-Trump Jan. 6 rioters in the past. To avoid similar persecution by the executive branch, nine law firms have surrendered to Trump’s mafia-like extortion and pledged to volunteer $940 million in pro bono legal services to causes and organizations of which Trump personally approves. Proving that there are still some limits on the radical presidency, on Tuesday, a federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order targeting WilmerHale.
Abuse of the presidential pardon power. Speaking of Jan. 6, Trump shocked many allies as well as enemies when he issued a blanket pardon for all participants in the Jan. 6 riot by zealous Trump worshippers that sought to stop the certification of Joe Biden as the president lawfully elected in 2024, including some who assaulted police officers. Trump’s abuse of the pardon power, however, was less shocking than the decision of the out-going President Biden, who pardoned not only his son Hunter but also other family members and their spouses, including his brothers Francis W. Biden and James B. Biden; James’ wife, Sara Jones Biden; and Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, all rumored to have been involved in schemes to convert Joe Biden’s political status into family profits. In total, Biden granted far more pardons than any other president, Trump included.
The radical presidency of Obama, Biden, and Trump can be distinguished from the “reconstructive” presidency of leaders like George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. These leaders transformed American society chiefly through inspiring legislation in Congress that was supported by at least some members of both major parties in their day. The new structures that they created by working with Congress were ratified and adopted in many details by successor presidents who belong to rival parties. In the 20th century, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon ratified most of the institutions and policies of FDR’s New Deal. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and his Democratic allies followed the turn toward the free market economics of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, promoting Bush’s North American Free Trade Agreement and abolishing a federal social insurance program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
In the age of the radical presidency, such new foundings seem impossible, for now. Instead, what we appear to be heading toward, or living through, is a series of temporary, elective dictators, who not only reverse the decrees of their predecessors by their own decrees but also, in some cases, mobilize the machinery of justice to try to bankrupt or jail their rivals, including former presidents and presidential candidates. With each “presidente” surpassing the last one in usurpations of legislative power, the decline of the United States into an unstable and lawless Latin American-style banana republic is accelerating.
The president has gone rogue. Usurping the powers and prerogatives of Congress, the president invokes radical and dubious theories of executive authority to try to restructure American government and society by decree. Not only Congress but also cabinet secretaries find themselves marginalized and diminished. The president imposes policy on the executive branch through personal loyalists who have not been confirmed by the Senate and enjoy ill-defined authority simply by their proximity to the White House.
Having run toward the center in the previous election, the president surprises everyone by ramming through the niche policies of small ideological factions and interest groups. Surprised and appalled by this behavior, the president’s party cannot control him, thanks to a cult of personality backed by a nationwide movement that places loyalty to their leader over loyalty to the political party to which he nominally belongs. In response to criticisms of its radical policies and power grabs, the White House uses federal agencies and federal lawyers to punish critics in the media and weaponizes formerly neutral government agencies to persecute political opponents.
The paragraph above is a description of Donald Trump. It is also a description of Barack Obama and, for the most part, Joe Biden.
Throughout history, some presidents have been criticized for asserting powers beyond their constitutional authority. For the most part, though, these controversies have involved presidential war and foreign policy powers, from Jefferson’s purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France to Truman’s attempt to seize steel mills during the Korean War and George W. Bush’s creation of a global system of extralegal interrogation camps following 9/11. However, presidents rarely contested the limits of their domestic authority. As commander in chief, Truman ordered the desegregation of the armed forces, but he knew that only Congress could strike down desegregation in civilian life by law. Bill Clinton did not try to pass his health-care plan by executive order after it failed in Congress, just as George W. Bush did not try to impose his plan for partial privatization of Social Security by executive fiat.
Under Obama and his successors, there has been a radical break, with presidents of both parties usurping congressional powers and ignoring powerful members of their own parties. Obama created his one-man party, Organizing for America/Organizing for Action, which sidelined and weakened the Democratic Party. Similarly, Trump’s MAGA movement, a similar one-person party based on loyalty to a single charismatic leader, has largely taken over the moribund Republican Party. Today’s members of Congress fear that opposing a leader like Obama or Trump will open them up to attack in primary elections and on social media from members of the personality cult.
Consider the following parallels between our three most recent presidents.
Rule by decree. In 2012, Donald Trump, then a private citizen, asked in a tweet: “Why is @barackobama constantly issuing executive orders that are major power grabs of authority?” Since his second inauguration, however, President Trump has sought to remake the government and American society with a flurry of executive orders. Many of these seek to achieve results that could normally be achieved only by congressional legislation, like restructuring federal agencies created by law or by the federal judiciary, or like redefining the status of children born in the United States to noncitizen parents (birthright citizenship).
In usurping the power of Congress to make law, Trump in his second term is following the examples of Obama and Biden. In his first term, Obama claimed he lacked the power to grant relief from deportation of children of illegal immigrants. In March 2011, he rejected “the notion that I can just suspend deportations through executive order, that’s just not the case.” In May he said he could not “just bypass Congress and change the law myself. … That’s not how a democracy works.” Nevertheless, in 2012, following multiple refusals by Congress to pass the DREAM Act, Obama issued an executive order to create the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. In 2014, he issued an even more radical executive order, creating the Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents (DAPA) program, granting access to government benefits and work permits for illegal aliens with foreign-born children whom they had brought with them. A split 4-4 decision by the Supreme Court in 2016 left a stay of the DAPA program by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in place until Trump rescinded the order in his first term. In 2020, the Supreme Court overruled Trump’s rescission of DACA for administrative irregularities, and upon becoming president, Joe Biden reaffirmed it. Trump has announced his intention to phase it out.
In 2016, Obama sought to impose radical gender-fluidity ideology from above through an Education Department decree requiring K-12 schools to allow so-called transgender children suffering from gender dysphoria to join sports teams and use bathrooms and locker rooms of the opposite sex.
Joe Biden—or whatever group of aides or family members was governing in his name—engaged in more sporadic but equally sweeping power grabs during his administration. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Biden administration in 2021 mandated that all companies with more than 100 employees fire workers who refused to be vaccinated or undergo weekly COVID-19 testing. A 6-3 majority of the Supreme Court blocked Biden’s power grab: “This is no ‘everyday exercise of federal power.’ It is instead a significant encroachment on the lives—and health—of a vast number of employees.”
In 2022, Biden issued an executive order mandating a “whole-of-government” approach that required all federal agencies to adopt race and gender tokenism—regardless of their particular missions or the statutes authorizing them.
Czars. To evade Senate confirmation of appointees and congressional and judicial oversight, presidents for decades have appointed “czars” with dubious legal authority to pressure cabinet secretaries and career government officials to carry out a preferred policy. Here, too, Obama marked a break with tradition, going beyond FDR’s dozen czars in four terms and appointing more than three dozen czars in areas from the auto bailout to climate policy. Sen. John McCain joked, “Obama has more czars than the Romanovs.”
Biden and Trump have appointed fewer czars than Obama, the all-time champion, but some of theirs have exercised unprecedented, if arguably illegal, authority. While Vice President Kamala Harris did little as Biden’s border czar, Nina Jankowicz, whom Biden appointed as “disinformation czar”—technically executive director of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Disinformation Governance Board—in 2022, had a sweeping mandate to pressure government agencies and private companies to censor points of view of which the administration disapproved. The resulting outcry by Republicans and conservatives led to her resignation after three weeks and to the abolition of the new board.
For his part, Trump, following his second inauguration, appointed the czar to end all czars: Elon Musk, who was rewarded for his campaign contributions with the title of “special government employee,” a title as Orwellian as Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which was neither a department nor a presidential commission created by statute. Even though the Trump administration claimed that the real head of DOGE was an obscure individual named Amy Gleason, on Feb. 22, Musk, via the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), sent all federal employees an email demanding that they respond with five things they did last week. On X, he claimed that those who did not respond would be fired. On his Truth Social account, Trump endorsed the bizarre request: “A GREAT JOB BUT I WOULD LIKE HIM TO BE MORE AGGRESSIVE.” Trump’s department heads pushed back, and efforts by Musk and his DOGE minions to arbitrarily cut spending and randomly fire civil servants, in violation of statutes, bogged down in court, even before Musk withdrew to private life, his reputation and that of his companies severely damaged. “Unfortunately—and in direct contravention of the Framers’ intentions—virtually no one can say with certainty what these individuals do or what limits are placed on their authority,” Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX) complained about Obama’s czars in The Washington Post in 2009. The same question can be raised about both Jankowicz and Musk.
Not content to usurp the power of Congress with executive orders, and to sideline Senate-confirmed department heads with czars whose legal authority is as vague as their policy mandates are immense, today’s radical presidents, beginning with Obama, have waged “lawfare” against their opponents, seeking to use the Justice Department or the court system to bankrupt or crush their political and ideological opponents. Under Obama, an initiative dubbed Operation Choke Point weaponized federal financial regulation by pressuring banks and other financial institutions not to lend money to firms like firearms dealers and tobacco companies, of which progressive Democrats disapproved.
Under Biden, lawfare took the form of the first federal indictment of a former president. Special Counsel Jack Smith, appointed by Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland, in addition to investigating Trump’s role, if any, in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, got a federal grand jury to issue 31 counts against Trump under the Espionage Act of 1917, on the absurd charge that the former president had mishandled official papers. A Justice Department investigation found that Biden had engaged in similar actions, but he was not charged, on the grounds of debilitating age.
President Woodrow Wilson had used the Espionage Act to jail a rival presidential candidate, the socialist Eugene Debs. The purpose of the Biden administration’s prosecution of Trump, like similar cases in New York and Georgia brought by Democratic prosecutors, was clearly to bankrupt or jail Trump to prevent him from running for president again in 2024 or, failing that, to brand him as a “convicted felon”—something they succeeded in doing, as a result of Trump’s kangaroo court trial in New York over hush-money payments to a porn star. Unable to both impeach and remove Trump from office in two attempts, Democrats sought to use the allegedly neutral court system to destroy him financially and politically.
A different man than Trump might have stressed that his administration, unlike Biden’s, would not weaponize federal law enforcement. Instead, Trump has penalized specific law firms, including Paul Weiss and WilmerHale, that have partners who participated in legislation or political activities against him or pro-Trump Jan. 6 rioters in the past. To avoid similar persecution by the executive branch, nine law firms have surrendered to Trump’s mafia-like extortion and pledged to volunteer $940 million in pro bono legal services to causes and organizations of which Trump personally approves. Proving that there are still some limits on the radical presidency, on Tuesday, a federal judge blocked Trump’s executive order targeting WilmerHale.
Abuse of the presidential pardon power. Speaking of Jan. 6, Trump shocked many allies as well as enemies when he issued a blanket pardon for all participants in the Jan. 6 riot by zealous Trump worshippers that sought to stop the certification of Joe Biden as the president lawfully elected in 2024, including some who assaulted police officers. Trump’s abuse of the pardon power, however, was less shocking than the decision of the out-going President Biden, who pardoned not only his son Hunter but also other family members and their spouses, including his brothers Francis W. Biden and James B. Biden; James’ wife, Sara Jones Biden; and Joe Biden’s sister, Valerie Biden Owens, all rumored to have been involved in schemes to convert Joe Biden’s political status into family profits. In total, Biden granted far more pardons than any other president, Trump included.
The radical presidency of Obama, Biden, and Trump can be distinguished from the “reconstructive” presidency of leaders like George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, William McKinley, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. These leaders transformed American society chiefly through inspiring legislation in Congress that was supported by at least some members of both major parties in their day. The new structures that they created by working with Congress were ratified and adopted in many details by successor presidents who belong to rival parties. In the 20th century, Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon ratified most of the institutions and policies of FDR’s New Deal. In the 1990s, Bill Clinton and his Democratic allies followed the turn toward the free market economics of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, promoting Bush’s North American Free Trade Agreement and abolishing a federal social insurance program, Aid to Families with Dependent Children.
In the age of the radical presidency, such new foundings seem impossible, for now. Instead, what we appear to be heading toward, or living through, is a series of temporary, elective dictators, who not only reverse the decrees of their predecessors by their own decrees but also, in some cases, mobilize the machinery of justice to try to bankrupt or jail their rivals, including former presidents and presidential candidates. With each “presidente” surpassing the last one in usurpations of legislative power, the decline of the United States into an unstable and lawless Latin American-style banana republic is accelerating.
