Donald Trump is the culmination of many years of growth in presidential power. As Congress increasingly surrendered its role and the Supreme Court invented new presidential privileges, it was inevitable that someone would take full advantage of their deference and pursue one-man rule. While many of his actions are unprecedented, many build on the powers explicitly or tacitly granted to his predecessors.
According to Wikipedia, 51 national emergencies are currently in effect. Each one says the situation is so desperate that the president must have powers beyond the normal scope of the law. When Trump says that measures outside normal restraints are necessary, he’s just agreeing with what Congress has always said. The Patriot Act, passed as an emergency measure in response to the 2001 terrorist attacks, is still in effect a quarter century later.
Let’s take a walk backward in time to see how previous administrations paved the road to Trump.
Just before leaving office, Biden issued blanket pardons to many people, including members of his family. Most of these people had not been formally charged or convicted of anything; the pardons applied to anything they might have done. One of them had killed two FBI agents. Trump has built on this precedent, pardoning the people who assaulted the Capitol and even creating a slush fund for them.
Biden wrote off billions of dollars in student debt, an expenditure of money without Congressional authorization and a wealth transfer from those who didn’t go to college to those who did. The ACLU took the president’s side.
Barack Obama got a Nobel Peace Prize and then bombed seven countries without Congressional approval in 2016. He and other presidents relied on AUMF’s that in practice have let presidents attack pretty much anyone they feel like.
Before that we had George W. Bush, who presided over the panic-motivated creation of the Patriot Act, authorized torture, and fraudulently brought the US into an undeclared war with Iraq.
Richard Nixon issued a decree forbidding most wage and price increases, allegedly to fight inflation. That’s like fighting global warming by banning thermometers. It caused all kinds of dislocations. People couldn’t get raises, but they could get a better offer with a new job, so job-hopping skyrocketed. Nixon told David Frost, “When the president does it, it is not illegal.”
John F. Kennedy, aided by his brother the Attorney General, wiretapped journalists.
Truman was the first president to send the US into a major undeclared war.
Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all banks in the US closed, using the World War I Trading with the Enemy Act as an excuse. He ordered Americans of Japanese descent into concentration camps. He urged Congress to pack the Supreme Court with new judges who would approve his unconstitutional actions. Congress handed him vast economic powers with the National Industrial Recovery Act and other legislation. He regularly intimidated the news media and called freedom of the press a “greatly overworked phrase.” Radio stations, subject to federal licensing, were highly subservient.
How far back can we go? To Lincoln’s suspension of habeas corpus? Perhaps even to Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase? How long have people been claiming the president is the commander in chief of the nation (not just of the armed forces), as if we were a military dictatorship?
In some ways, FDR remains worse than Trump, but he had twelve years to Trump’s five. No candidate before Trump tried to overturn an election result after losing, and he tops his predecessors in using the office for personal aggrandizement. Either way, it’s not as if we couldn’t have seen it coming.
Gene Healy’s The Cult of the Presidency was helpful in researching this post.