National security is today threatened less by slow-moving armies than by stateless terror groups who might weaponize a rented truck and by rogue states who might weaponize an email. The growth of presidential power is not new. When Arthur Schlesinger Jr. Each time a president has added to the job description, a new expectation has conveyed, like the Oval Office furniture, to the next man in line. A president must now be able to jolt the economy like Franklin Roosevelt, tame Congress like Lyndon Johnson, comfort the nation like Ronald Reagan.
T he emotional burden of these responsibilities is almost unfathomable. The president must endure the relentless scrutiny of the digital age. He must console the widow of a soldier he sent into combat one moment, and welcome a championship-winning NCAA volleyball team to the White House the next. He must set a legislative agenda for an often feckless Congress, navigating a partisan divide as wide as any in modern American history.
He must live with the paradox that he is the most powerful man in the world, yet is powerless to achieve many of his goals—thwarted by Congress, the courts, or the enormous bureaucracy he sometimes only nominally controls. Even Trump, not one to readily admit a mistake, has acknowledged that he underestimated the difficulty of the job.
A blunt admission—and one much mocked by his critics—but one every president eventually makes. President Trump is tackling some of the challenges of the office. He has tallied up partisan victories: cutting taxes, appointing conservative jurists, and slashing regulations. He has also shed responsibilities in a job that traditionally only accumulates them, neglecting allies, his own employees, and even the oldest presidential aspiration, telling the truth. Whatever you think of him, Trump is rewiring the presidency—or perhaps more accurately, dismantling the machine and flinging the parts onto the White House lawn.
But you might be grateful to him for demonstrating, in his inimitable way, the extent to which the machine has become a wheezing and jerry-rigged contraption badly in need of repair. Either way, until we fix the office, presidents will continue to be frustrated by its demands, and Americans will continue to be disappointed in their leader.
We will enter another presidential-campaign season desperate for a good outcome, but unprepared to choose someone who can reset the terms of success. What they described is an office in dire condition: overburdened, unrelenting in its demands, and unlike anything the Founders intended when they designed the role years ago.
Before his inauguration, Barack Obama discussed the office he was about to assume with his predecessor, George W. Americans still need their president to succeed. But the presidency has set him up for failure. On April 8, , more than demonstrators dressed as Paul Revere marched along Pennsylvania Avenue.
They were protesting the Reorganization Act, the first major modification of the executive branch since the presidency was created, in The legislation was an outgrowth of the Brownlow Committee, which Franklin Roosevelt had commissioned to study the presidency and update it for modern times. Roosevelt responded by requesting a handful of personal aides and a reorganization of his Cabinet departments. Congress and the public, however, objected.
In an April Gallup poll, only 18 percent of the country thought the president should have more power. In a fireside chat, Roosevelt promised to work to defeat in the election any Democrat who had blocked him.
He failed badly; all but one candidate he backed lost. After a year of fighting, Congress finally granted the president some additional manpower.
To dispatch the duties of his office, he would now be allowed six assistants and given the power to reorganize the executive branch within certain limits. The emergencies of the Great Depression and, later, World War II gave Roosevelt more leverage with Congress, and the gains he made for the executive branch not only increased its power but provided a blueprint for his successors to do so further.
In the 80 years since Roosevelt got his six additional men, the executive branch has steadily increased in size and power; Congress and the public have grumbled plenty about power grabs by presidents from the other party, but offered little resistance of the type witnessed on Pennsylvania Avenue in Today, about people work inside the White House, in jobs from national-security adviser to public liaison to special assistant for financial policy.
Two thousand more work in the Executive Office of the President. In , the civilian agencies of the federal government employed , people. They now employ three times that number. The 24 members of the Trump administration with Cabinet rank have to be photographed from across the room to fit in the camera frame. A White House once quaintly understaffed is now overstaffed, which leads to laborious decision making and palace intrigue.
The insatiable, never-resting media take those leaks and turn them into new headaches for the West Wing team. Even so, you might think that extra manpower would be a boon to an overextended president.
Some, such as Carter, have tried. In July , he held a Cabinet meeting that was more like the Red Wedding. But the press has a way of describing debate as discord. Dwight Eisenhower was a life-hacker. During his military career, he devised systems that made him more efficient. After he became president, he applied his methods to the already vast management challenge. When Ike first entered the executive mansion, the story goes, an usher handed the new president a letter.
Nothing, he explained, should come to him without first being screened to see whether it really merited his attention. Eisenhower sorted priorities through a four-quadrant decision matrix that is still a staple of time-management books. Sage advice, but antique for any president trying to manage the office after the attacks of September 11, The Cold War presidents monitored slow-moving events that had flashes of urgency. Now the stakes are just as high, but the threats are more numerous and fast-moving.
From North Korea alone, the president faces both Cold War—style nuclear devastation and cyberwar mayhem. How the PDB is delivered changes with each president. Early in his term, Trump reportedly requested a verbal digest of the brief. During the Obama years, the PDB was wrapped in a stiff leather binder and looked like the guest book at a country club.
Inside was a grim iPad containing all the possible ways the president could fail at his most essential role. John F. Kennedy requested that his intelligence briefing be small enough to fit in his pocket. Monitoring even small threats can take up an entire day. An acute example: In June , Johnson planned to travel to China to discuss the long-term threat from cyberattacks. Hours before takeoff, he was forced to cancel the trip so he could monitor developments after the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.
Your day is spent just trying to prioritize the urgent. Which urgent first? One of George W. Bush wanted to go through every one. Each administration worries that it might somehow slip and let an attack through. This leads to a lot of make-work and ass-covering, impediments to managing any organization. Prior to the U.
After weighing matters of life and death at the appointed hour, the president can expect to be interrupted later in the day by unanticipated chaos. When Lisa Monaco was new on the job, she got a taste of the pace of things: One Monday in April , the Boston Marathon was interrupted by horrific bombings, setting off a manhunt that paralyzed the entire metropolitan area.
The next day, an envelope addressed to a member of Congress containing the toxin ricin was discovered. On Wednesday, an explosion destroyed a fertilizer plant in West, Texas. One national-security official, describing the pace of events during the Obama years, said it was a relief when healthcare. It meant that a different kind of crisis had interrupted the permanent cycle of security management in the age of terror. The threat of attack still loomed, but with attention elsewhere the requirement to participate in homeland-security theater for a nervous public was, momentarily, diminished.
When disaster does strike —whether the work of an enemy or an act of God—the theatrical role presidents play is amplified. He has to dash to the scene. We now expect the president to be a first responder, too. So ingrained is this expectation that we forget how recently it took hold.
In , a number of strong storms battered the United States, but Eisenhower was barely mentioned in the newspaper stories about Hurricanes Connie, Diane, or Ione. That hurricane season was then the costliest on record, but there are no pictures of the former Allied Commander pointing at maps or receiving furrowed-brow briefings from meteorologists. When some of the storms hit, Ike was on vacation. His absence was not the subject of endless concerned punditry, as it would be today.
Local governments, civil-defense forces, and the Red Cross were supposed to stack the sandbags and distribute relief when a storm hit.
Upsetting that division of duties, the president believed, would jeopardize core American values. Lyndon Johnson believed in a stronger connection between the people and their president—a belief that would expand the role for all the presidents that have come since. After visiting victims of the storm, Johnson leaped into action, coordinating local forces and pushing Congress to fund relief.
It was also a bit of self-promotion well suited to the times. Families across the country were watching the drama of the storm unfold on the news during the dinner hour. Networks binged on images of Americans waist-deep in water, fishing their heirlooms from ruined living rooms. Television, according to Gareth Davies, an American-history professor at Oxford University who has studied the evolution of the president as first responder, greatly accelerated the demand for the president to appear front and center.
When Johnson visited Indiana to tour tornado damage, a skeptical columnist writing for the South Bend Tribune wondered why a president should interrupt people trying to put their lives back together. Popular expectations of the presidency were changing, and not just when a storm hit. The bigger the federal government became, the more a president had to act as a warming face of that distant behemoth—and its avatar on TV.
Bush, in August , and served as George W. George W. Eisenhower-esque detachment was no longer viable. Amid crashing favorability ratings, Obama interrupted his own vacation to tour abandoned, oil-slicked beaches.
That phrase—a succinct expression of presidential obligations—is like the presidency itself: It has spilled out of its original container. When Harry Truman placed a sign on his desk reading the buck stops here , it meant that some decisions, only the president can make. It did not mean that the president is responsible—and therefore to blame—for everything that happens in the executive branch, much less the nation.
Lyndon Johnson made the most of the new, televised presidency, but the co-dependency with the cameras started with his predecessor, John F. In , Kennedy, a young senator and candidate for president, filmed television ads that showed him shaking hands with miners in West Virginia before they dropped down feet to start their eight-hour shift.
Votes for Kennedy were shown dropping from the ballot box through the roof of the White House. In designing the office, the Founders worried that the executive would be whipsawed by the passions of the people rather than driven by reason and good character. Because of this fear, the Founders did not want candidates to campaign for the office, believing that stumping for votes would warp their priorities.
The electoral process might elevate men who had simply played to the crowd; once in office, such a president might pander to the people rather than instituting sound policy.
Without a constant need to court voters, the Founders reasoned, presidents could calmly pursue the best interests of the country. For a century, the system worked as intended. Men such as Andrew Jackson argued for a closer connection between the people and the president, but the taboo against campaigning was durable.
The parties still picked their presidential candidate in the smoke-filled rooms of legend. In the early 20th century, reformers such as Woodrow Wilson asserted that the modern age required presidents to be more responsive to the voters. And just as the Founders had surmised, prolonged exposure to the people had a powerful effect.
The votes had gone right to the White House. Looking out for the interests of the poor may sound like an unalloyed good. But party reforms in the last quarter of the 20th century pushed the nominating process further toward the direct election of delegates. This encouraged candidates to make ever more lavish promises and to tout their singular power to deliver on them. The present system elevates the crowd-pleasing qualifications above all others, and sets expectations for what a president can do well beyond what is actually possible in office.
Media coverage, meanwhile, keeps the show going—and keeps the focus on the show. Debate coverage is mostly like a theater review, and it starts before the curtain has come down. Candidates play to the snap judgments, practicing set-piece outbursts. In , when Obama was perceived to have lost the first debate, his team emphasized that he needed to be a better performer. As campaigning has become more about performance, the skills required to be president have become more defined by talent on the stump, an almost perfect reversal of what the Founders intended.
The current system is so focused on persuasion over policy, argues Jeffrey K. Tulis, the author of The Rhetorical Presidency , that he sees the country as governed by a second Constitution, one that is in tension with the original. The second Constitution puts a premium on active and continuous presidential courtship of popular opinion, on hot action over cool deliberation. Or, failing that, a reality-TV star? In , after Bill Clinton beat George H. In defeat, Quayle was articulating the common modern view—ratified by voters—that being a gifted campaigner was the more important quality.
With the line between campaigning and governing blurred, newly elected presidents are overconfident in their ability to tackle the job. Richard Neustadt, the historian of the presidency, described the mind-set of the winning campaign team:. Modern presidents who have just come to office on the strength of their rhetoric and showmanship are encouraged to continue relying on those skills. Edwards III says. Governing is about more than talking, though. Selling the voters on the idea that you are better than your opponent requires a different set of skills than achieving your preferred outcome on health-care legislation, where there is not one alternative but a series of alternatives on a series of aspects of the policy.
Campaigning requires attack and comparison. Governing requires deliberation, cooperation, negotiation. A candidate for president has one constituency: the voters. A president has to navigate the interests of many parties: the voters, Congress, foreign leaders. In an ideal system, incoming presidents would have months of orientation to learn the ropes and break their rhetorical addiction. No such school exists for presidents. Presidential transitions are a bigger undertaking than any private-sector transfer of power.
In business, large mergers and acquisitions typically take a year or more and involve hundreds of staffers. The United States federal government is the most complicated conglomerate on the planet.
Unlike in a business acquisition, in which a new leader might retain staff from the target company as well as bring in his own trusted people, a president must start almost from scratch. He has as many as 4, fresh political appointments to make, including for more than 1, top leaders who will require Senate confirmation.
Putting a team in place quickly is crucial to making good decisions. Some temporary holdovers can manage in the interim, but they can get you only so far.
The rush to staff up encourages new presidents to fill the administration with the people who helped them win the office in the first place, further entrenching a campaign mentality within the White House. The presidential scholar Shirley Anne Warshaw, who teaches at Gettysburg College, found that 58 percent of the senior posts in the Obama administration were filled by campaign staff. Some may have been suited to the unique challenges of the executive branch, but the system does not allow enough time to make certain of it.
New presidents just have to hope for the best. Presidents thus enter office burdened with campaign instincts, not governing ones; with a team that may lack experience in the tasks at hand; and with a long list of promises to keep to voters. In such a situation, patience would seem to be called for. Except, as Lyndon Johnson warned, new presidents only have a year before Congress starts thinking about midterms, which makes bold or bipartisan action difficult.
The push to meet expectations set during the campaign encourages frantic behavior. The cameras were called in and the theme music was cued, but several of his executive actions merely instructed agencies to look at problems and issue reports. I alone can PowerPoint it! Others, such as the travel ban, the exclusion of transgender people from the military, and tariffs on steel and aluminum, were poorly vetted and incited massive backlashes.
We all know what this desire to execute looks like in our own lives. The president is the jumpy man who presses the elevator button a second time, then a third time—with his umbrella. It feels good. It looks like action. But the elevator does not move faster. President Obama stands by the bedside of wounded soldiers he sent into battle and in the ruins left by natural disasters.
He counsels his daughter from a seat on the backyard swing while on television oil oozes from the Deepwater Horizon spill. He sits, leans, and paces through endless meetings. The presidential brain must handle a wider variety of acute experiences than perhaps any other brain on the planet.
Meanwhile, the president lives in a most peculiar unreality. His picture is on almost every wall of his workplace.
The other walls contain paintings of the men who achieved greatness in his job, as well as those who muddled through. When a president travels, he has his own doctor, security, exercise equipment, and water. It all gets moved around on his airplanes. If the Secret Service thinks the bathroom in a foreign country might cause the president to slip, agents will lay down protective strips to give him traction when he gets out of the tub.
Grover Cleveland used to answer his own front door. Now presidents touch door handles only in their private quarters. Their lives are babyproofed. At the same time, the American president is constantly subjected to the harshest scrutiny from outside his bubble. This is a long-standing tradition. It was the cantaloupe. The president is the biggest celebrity in the world. Eyes are always watching, ready to imbue a grimace with meaning. Everyone waves—and everyone expects a wave in return.
If the president is close enough, people expect a selfie. Photographers can capture a note about needing a bathroom break that he jots in a meeting, and someone is always at a keyboard ready to make a cultural moment out of a thought that escapes his subconscious.
Obama told an aide that he had a recurring dream. In it, he was enjoying a peaceful walk. He was alone and undisturbed. Suddenly, he was noticed. The dream became a nightmare, and he awoke. While emoting at all the appropriate times in all the appropriate ways, a president must also wear masks to hide his intentions—from world leaders, political adversaries, and allies alike. This allows him room to negotiate. But a man who wears masks must do a lot of work to keep them from slipping.
Can one person handle all this? In , former President Herbert Hoover completed a review—his second—of executive-branch efficiency and suggested the addition of an administrative vice president to help the overloaded president. The existing vice president was apparently already too busy. It was the fifth heart attack or stroke to hit a current or former president since the Wilson administration ended, in This caused the columnist Walter Lippmann to wonder whether the job was too much for one man to bear.
Since then, the weight of the job has grown even heavier. The Souza photograph that marks the day Obama describes as the hardest of his presidency shows him standing with one of the 26 families he comforted after the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary. That day, when a mother broke down, the president handed her a tissue. They must comfort the nation in the shadow of tragedy. Woe unto the president who selects the wrong sermon for the occasion.
He may soon be called on to console their families, too. An aide to George W. Bush says that when the president was deciding whether to send more troops into Iraq in , at a time when the public and members of his own administration wanted the U. The president also may be vulnerable to foreign influence. The White House did not respond to requests for comment. The Biden transition declined to comment.
Trump has said his finances are sound, and that the debts are a small percentage of his assets. Generally, though, large debts to foreign banks — Trump's biggest creditor is reported to be Deutsche Bank, a German institution with links to Russia — would exclude a person from a top secret clearance. Presidents, however, are not investigated and polygraphed for security clearances as all other government officials are.
By virtue of being elected, they assume control over all the nation's secret intelligence, and are allowed by law to disclose any of it, at any time, to anyone.
Former presidents aren't subject to security clearance investigations, either. They are provided access to secrets as a courtesy, with the permission of the current president. Typically, former presidents are given briefings before they travel overseas, or in connection with an issue about which the current president wishes to consult them, Priess and other experts say.
When President Bill Clinton sent former President Jimmy Carter to diffuse a tense stand off in Haiti, for example, Carter likely received classified briefings on the situation ahead of his trip. And when George H. Bush visited his son in the White House, he sat in on on the President's Daily Brief, the highly classified compendium of secrets that is presented each morning to the occupant of the Oval Office, according to Priess, who interviewed both men for his book.
It's unclear whether former President Barack Obama has received intelligence briefings after he left office, but Trump said in March that he hasn't consulted his predecessors about the coronavirus or anything else. Former presidents have long made money after leaving office by writing books and giving speeches, but no former president has ever had the kind of international business entanglements Trump does. Trump has business interests or connections in China, Russia and other U. That said, Trump probably is not conversant with many highly classified details, experts say, He was famous for paying only intermittent attention during his intelligence briefings and declining to read his written materials.
Moreover, intelligence officials tend not to share specifics about sources and methods with any president, unless he asks. But presumably he knows a bit about the capabilities of American surveillance drones, for example, or how adept the National Security Agency has been at intercepting the communications of various foreign governments. Like so much with Trump, his track record of sharing secrets has been unprecedented in American presidential history.
In interviews with the journalist Bob Woodward for a book released this fall, Trump boasted about a secret nuclear weapons system that neither Russia nor China knew about. In , Trump gave the location of two American nuclear submarines near North Korea to the president of the Philippines.
That same year, a member of his golf club at Mar-a-Lago took a photo of a briefing Trump and the Japanese prime minister were receiving in a public area about North Korea, and posted it on Facebook.
In , The New York Times reported that Trump commonly used insecure cellphones to call friends, and that Chinese and other spies listened in, gaining valuable insights. Doug Wise, a former CIA officer and Trump critic, argued this week in a piece on the Just Security web site that Trump has long posed a national security danger, and that affording him access to secrets after he leaves the White House would compound that danger.
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