The news media have found a seemingly insatiable appetite with stories about Donald Trump, whether he’s on the campaign trail or in a courtroom.
His expected presidential rematch with Democrat Joe Biden has consumed the press and will continue to do so now through at least November, if not beyond, should there be a repeat of the 2020 post-election challenges and protests that culminated with the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
As much as people say they are unhappy with the choice, they still will give the contest a huge amount of their attention, as both sides try to convince voters that this is the most important election in their lifetimes, just as every presidential election before this one has claimed in modern history.
Richard Lim, who does a popular history podcast on American presidents, argues, however, that our Founding Fathers never intended for the presidency to be the center of national life. He makes a good argument.
“To be sure, when the Framers drafted the Constitution,” Lim writes in a column recently reprinted on the Magnolia Tribune website, “they created an ‘energetic’ president with considerable powers — to sign laws, appoint government officials, and command the military. They did not, however, envision the president as the primary mover in American politics, especially in domestic policymaking. That job belonged to the people and their representatives. As George Washington noted in 1789, ‘The election of the different branches of Congress ... is the pivot on which turns the first wheel of government ... which communicates motion to all the rest.”
“In other words, after the people express their views through elections, the legislative and executive branches then carry out the voters’ will. Once the first wheel (the people) moves, the second wheel (Congress) moves in synchronized fashion. The president is the third wheel — as the chief executive, he is tasked with executing the people’s will, namedly by enforcing laws Congress passed.”
The early presidents, according to Lim, generally respected this order. Even though the Constitution gave presidents the power to veto legislation, they were expected to use it sparingly, like when they felt that a law was unconstitutional. He quotes Washington, who acknowledged that he often signed legislation with which he personally disagreed, but he did so out of respect for Congress and in keeping with its intended role and his.
This concept of a limited chief executive, according to Lim, lasted into the early 20th century, when Woodrow Wilson declared — in the chauvinistic tenor of the time — that the president was free to be “as big a man as he can.” What followed were a succession of increasingly imperial presidents, according to Lim, specifically naming another wartime president, Franklin Roosevelt, and Barack Obama.
Lim’s choice of examples, all Democrats, obviously reflects his conservative bias. There are plenty of Republican presidents, including Donald Trump, who have tried to act like makers of the law as well as enforcers of it. One of Trump’s main line of defenses in the criminal trials he is facing is that a president can do almost anything he wants and that the laws don’t apply to the office. If that’s not an “imperial” interpretation of the presidency, then what is?
Still, Lim’s point is valid. Presidents, despite all their lofty campaign promises, rarely achieve most of them. The expectations they create in the public’s mind are almost always unobtainable, leaving the country with a sense of disappointment when their terms end. This cycle of hope followed by disillusionment is repeated over and over again, leaving the nation divided and cynical.
It might be time, Lim says, to return to the model of a more modest presidency on which the nation was founded.
