The Power Is The Threat

Upstream from the menace of Donald Trump is a greater hazard: the expansion and aggrandizement of the presidency.

As the presidential race tightens, Democrats are making one last case against Donald Trump. Recently, he’s been likened to a fascist, which, in the American mind, usually implies to one specific figure. One could easily argue that Trump’s political style is authoritarian, but what no lawmaker or journalist seems willing to discuss is what lies upstream of Trump as he seeks a second term. That is the expansion of executive power and the cultural aggrandizement of the presidency over the last century.

That expansion—driven by foreign and domestic crises, including unilateral control over tariffs, immigration, foreign intervention, and public health—should be the focus of power skeptics. This centuries-long centralization has acted like a growing debt that, with Trump, now demands confrontation.

Yet, the media fixates disproportionately on Trump himself, his policies, and speculation about his worst impulses—at the expense of investigating how Trump’s power as president itself undermines democratic principles.

Coverage oscillates between aggrandizing the office and sounding alarms about its capacity. Reporting that attributes near-despotic influence over minute economic metrics misleads the public and perpetuates a savior complex in the guise of accountability.

The examples are ubiqitous in news coverage, but an especially striking one involved former President Barack Obama during a rally for Vice President Harris crediting himself with economic conditions that continued through much of his successor’s presidency, calling it “my economy”. He then attributed the initial stimulus checks sent during the COVID-19 emergency under Trump’s administration entirely to Congress — which was strange because he thereafter criticized Trump for claiming credit for the checks that bore his name. He’s in campaign rhetoric mode, but for Obama to so arrogantly claim ownership of the economy was in closer alignment with a core rebuttal of his 2012 campaign against Mitt Romney involving him telling voters “you didn’t build that”, with “that” being one’s personal or career success earned with the help of the government, in some form or another. In this campaign as ever, economic activity is without qualification attributed to the president routinely in both straight news reporting and political analysis. Workers don’t “run” the economy, you see, presidents “run” the economy and “create” jobs. It’s theirs and we live just live “under” them. Any fact-checker worth their salt would rate similar misattributions as highly misleading, at best. As it stands it’s the biggest perfectly acceptable political lie to regularly publish.

But presidents are further exalted by the media when asked to address local matters outside their jurisdiction, such as crime, education, or the spread of a virus. False expectations that encourage presidents to stake ethically or legally dubious positions only embolden those who believe “I alone can fix it” or pledge to “be a dictator on day one.”

When systemic critiques do arise, they are often counterproductively directed at checks on executive power. Harvard professors like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt echo progressives in attacking the Senate’s filibuster, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College.

Because of the filibuster, however, Democrats blocked attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, and cut entitlements. Over the last twelve years, during which each party was in the Senate minority for six years, the Republican majority was blocked more than 30 times compared to the Democratic majority, according to Senate data.

---

---

As for the conservative-leaning Supreme Court, they struck down Trump’s efforts to add a citizenship question to the Census, deny grants to “sanctuary cities” and retain his original travel ban. The high court curbed racial gerrymandering, has so far preserved access to over-the-counter birth control, upheld Obamacare a third time, protected LGBTQ Americans from employment discrimination, and rejected Trump’s 2020 election challenges. The Electoral College’s decentralized structure further impeded Trump’s attempt to stay in office. In an alternative reality with a “popular vote” regime, certification might have instead resided with an executive branch bureaucrat uncomfortably close to a sitting president.

A central conceit is that America’s brittle institutions barely survived Trump’s first term and that a second would be existential. For critics’ who seem to think so little of these storied institutions, it begs the question which ones do they exactly want to preserve? What reforms would blunt future threats from the Oval Office?

To their credit, congressional Democrats have proposed limits on emergency declarations and strengthening judicial independence. Left-of-center groups like the Brennan Center for Justice have suggested war powers reforms, and academics like Harvard’s Jack Goldsmith and Yale’s Bruce Ackerman support broader presidential limits. Revising mid-century laws on unilateral actions over immigration and trade would also be wise. Importantly, devising ways to find legislative means limit presidents legal immunity after the Supreme Court’s decision earlier this year should, too, be a priority.

But among a certain of centrist technocrat, democracy hinges less on robust checks than on the outcomes it produces. The premise being that obstacles to central power are evasions of liberal democracy. But a system whose legitimacy is outcome-based risks losing that legitimacy altogether, and rightly so. This underscores the utility of a representative federation of states that can reach multiple outcomes democratically.

Impediments to central power explain frustration over the rejection of Biden’s vaccine mandates, eviction moratoriums, and student loan relief by the Supreme Court, as well as the scaling back of provisions in the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act. It also explains attacks on the Senate, which conspicuously began only after Democrats lost long-held rural and suburban seats. It explains Vice President Harris’s threats to effectively end the filibuster, a self-defeating move for a party expecting to be marginalized by an increasingly radical Republican Party. A recent New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters think the U.S. Supreme Court and U.S. Senate are “good” for democracy by a more than 30 points, with a plurality saying the same of the Electoral College.

All of this prompts the question of how much of the pearl-clutching over American democracy is a bluff. If there is such urgency to dismantle institutional checkpoints, then exactly how much of a threat could a fascist be?

---

Do Economics Matter Anymore?

---

I suspect among some progressives, the adverse consequences of Trump’s destruction of norms and executive overreach will over the long-term establish an excusable precedent for a Democratic administration to do the same. For those committed to the democratic process, it will be important to recognize this as a long-term indicator of democratic backsliding for the United States.

If either party and its media surrogates push for the demolition of checks on the presidency, they will have no grounds to criticize their opponents for the policies that result. For lawmakers, now is the time to center the presidency’s excesses as the primary challenge facing American democracy. For journalists, it’s time to reevaluate the profession’s misattribution of power and elevate consensus expertise committed to curbing executive authority.

Nearly two years ago, spurred by the January 6 events, Congress reformed the Electoral Count Act with a bipartisan Senate supermajority. It shouldn’t take a riot to secure democracy in the land of no kings. With enough resolve from those committed to protecting the American experiment, it won’t need to.

In a political media dominated by national narratives, That Patchwork is the only newsletter about democracy from a decentralist angle. To preserve democratic pluralism means challenging the primacy of national narratives that presume central power knows best.

---