Can Trump Be a Great President?

 

Opinion

Guest Essay

Can Trump Be a Great President?

Jan. 20, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/opinion/trump-great-president.html

By Jack Goldsmith

Mr. Goldsmith, a former assistant attorney general under George W. Bush, is a co-author, with Bob Bauer, of a newsletter about presidential and executive power.

 

Donald Trump enters his second presidency, as he did his first, pledging to wield executive power in novel and aggressive ways. This is neither new nor necessarily bad. “Presidents who go down in the history books as ‘great’ are those who reach for power, who assert their authority to the limit,” the presidential scholar Richard Pious noted.

 

But pushing power to the limit does not guarantee presidential success, much less greatness, as Mr. Trump is about to discover.

 

Mr. Trump ran thrice and won twice on increasingly fervent claims that establishment institutions and practices were damaged, and on pledges to upend the way Washington does business. When he is inaugurated as president on Monday, he will have a second shot at fixing the institutions, policies and ideas that he has criticized: immigration, the “deep state,” wokeness, suppression of speech, government inefficiency, free trade, crime and education.

 

Some critics claim that Mr. Trump will be acting illegitimately in seeking to reimagine the nature and operations of the federal government, as if the way things have run traditionally, or during the post-Watergate period, are invariably good or set in stone. They are not.

 

Eminent presidents acting in new circumstances have since the founding taken a sledgehammer to the norms and constitutional principles thought to govern the executive branch and its relationship to other American institutions.

 

George Washington acted before there were executive branch precedents. But he unleashed controversy when he asserted an independent power to interpret the Constitution, unilaterally proclaimed America’s neutrality in the early wars of the French Revolution and denied the House of Representatives documents related to the Jay Treaty. Washington was widely accused of monarchical tendencies in his day.

 

As were his most distinguished successors. Thomas Jefferson changed the presidency to be openly (and effectively) partisan and agreed to the Louisiana Purchase even though he believed it was unconstitutional. Andrew Jackson deepened the spoils system and transformed the veto power. Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, among his many constitutional violations.

 

Theodore Roosevelt converted the presidency to a “bully pulpit” and acted on the theory that the president can do anything not specifically restricted by the Constitution or Congress. Franklin Roosevelt intensified the president’s direct connection to Americans, broke the two-term norm and expanded the federal government and presidential prerogative in unprecedented ways.

 

In short, the rules governing the presidency have never been static. The Constitution created an independent office with vaguely specified powers and few overt constraints. The office evolved into an immensely powerful institution over the centuries because domestic and international society grew more complex, energetic presidents asserted new authorities to meet new challenges, and Congress and the American people — with occasional exceptions — acquiesced in the new arrangements.

 

There is nothing illegitimate in this pattern. Bold presidential leadership has always been needed to make American democracy overcome the “perennial gap between inherited institutions and beliefs and an environment forever in motion,” as the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. put it.

 

The most successful presidents anticipated problems others did not see, understood the inadequacies of inherited institutions and prodded the nation to a new place in ways that defied prevailing practices and provoked enormous resistance. Think of Jackson and democracy, Lincoln and freedom, Franklin Roosevelt and equality.

 

But the heroic presidency runs the persistent danger of becoming craven or abusive, as Vietnam and Watergate taught. This is what so many critics worry about with Mr. Trump — that his transformations will be more resonate of Richard Nixon than of our most esteemed presidents.

 

Yet there is a complementary question that should concern supporters of Mr. Trump: Can he succeed? He has amassed enormous power in his party and is building an intensely devoted administration. Those factors will bring him wins in the short run.

 

But it takes extraordinary skill to wield executive power successfully throughout an administration. If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda.

 

The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. There is no reason to think this will change in his second term. Mr. Trump also lacks the emotional intelligence that the great presidents had in various degrees — the self-awareness, self-control, empathy and ability to manage relationships that are so vital to steering the ship of state on the desired course.

 

Second is the question of whether Mr. Trump knows where he wants to go. “Great presidents possess, or are possessed by, a vision of an ideal America,” Mr. Schlesinger noted. Mr. Trump has a powerful slogan, “America first,” a robust agenda, and many discrete and often insightful political instincts. But he lacks a coherent sense of the public ends for which he exercises power. This will make it hard over time for his administration to prioritize challenges, a vital prerequisite for presidential success. It will also make his administration susceptible to drift and reactiveness, especially once unexpected events start to crowd the presidential agenda.

 

Third, personal gain was neither a priority of the great presidents nor a guide to their exercise of power. There is every reason to believe that Mr. Trump’s personally motivated first-term actions — his insistence on loyalty over other values, his preoccupation with proclaiming and securing his personal power, and his indifference to conflict-of-interest norms — will persist. These inclinations will invariably infect the credibility, and thus the success, of everything his administration does.

 

Fourth, Mr. Trump is unlike any previous president, even Jackson, in broadly delegitimating American institutions — the courts, the military and intelligence communities, the Justice Department, the press, the electoral system and both political parties. This will do him no favors when he needs their support, as he will.

 

Mr. Trump is especially focused on eroding the capacity of federal agencies. At the same time, he has plans to regulate in areas including health, crime, energy and education, and to deport millions of people, all of which require a robust and supportive federal work force. Mr. Trump’s twin aims of incapacitating the bureaucracy and wielding it to serve his ends will very often conflict.

 

Fifth, Mr. Trump’s obsession with hard executive power and an extreme version of the unitary executive theory will be self-defeating. If his stalwart subordinates carry out his every whim, as he hopes, bad policies will result. If the loyalists Mr. Trump is putting at the top of the Justice Department do not give him candid independent advice that he follows, he will violate the law and often lose in court, as happened in his first term.

 

The great presidents used coercive unilateral power when they needed to, but only when they needed to — none more so than Lincoln and Roosevelt, who faced the most serious crises in American history. But these presidents also understood that hard power could go only so far and that persuasion and consent were surer tools to achieving lasting presidential goals in our democracy. This idea is lost on Mr. Trump.

 

Finally, as Mr. Schlesinger noted, the great presidents all “took risks in pursuit of their ideals” and “provoked intense controversy.” And, except for Washington, they all “divided the nation before reuniting it on a new level of national understanding.”

 

Mr. Trump is a risk taker and a divider. But it is hard to see how his approach to the presidency ends in national reunion.

 

Jack Goldsmith (@jacklgoldsmith) is a law professor at Harvard, a nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a former assistant attorney general. He is a co-author, with Bob Bauer, of “After Trump: Reconstructing the Presidency” and the newsletter Executive Functions.