In the course of a week in early March, one of President Trump’s longest-serving aides, Hope Hicks, resigned. One of the president’s most capable economics advisers, Gary Cohn, threatened to resign—and soon did. Son-in-law/presidential adviser Jared Kushner had his security clearance downgraded, though he was not sent packing. The president stewed over whether to fire H. R. McMaster, his national security adviser. And Michael Flynn, the president’s first national security adviser, who resigned early in 2017, indicated his willingness to work with the special counsel in the Russia matter.
The successive events were reported in the media as a White House “in chaos.” Against which Trump said, in a Twitter post:
The New York Times called this “an odd defense for a man who has thrived on chaos and has used it as a way both to organize people and manage them.” That was a fair point, but the Times, like most media, didn’t take up Trump’s reference to “energy.”
In ordinary usage, energy means the capacity for vigorous activity. When Trump composed his tweet, he probably had something like that in mind, seeing himself (who else does he see?) as a president of great capacity for such activity.
But energy also happens to be one of the great words of American politics. The Framers understood power not in generic terms but in specific ones—legislative, executive, and judicial power. They vested those powers in Congress, the president, and the judiciary, respectively. And they saw “energy in the executive,” in Alexander Hamilton’s famous formulation, as “a leading character in the definition of good government.”
As explained by James Madison in the Federalist Papers, “Energy in government [meaning the executive] is essential to that security against external and internal danger and to that prompt and salutary execution of the laws which enter into the very definition of good government.”
And Hamilton, author of the papers in The Federalist that covered the presidency, described energy as “essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary courts of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction and of anarchy.”
To secure those ends, the Framers established a structure of government in which there would be a president vested with the executive power who could carry out the powers and duties of office. Hamilton referred to “ingredients” of energy in his discussion of the executive, and just about everything that the Framers did in creating the presidency was done with such ingredients in mind. Even the “duration” in office was an ingredient of energy. As Hamilton explained, the four-year term would mark off adequate time in which a president could undertake “extensive and arduous enterprises” for the public benefit and the people could then judge their efficacy.
The Framers wound up providing for the necessary energy in the executive. Indeed, great energy, Trump could say truly if he were minded to, is what the Framers gave the American people, and it has been enough to sustain the country in times of “chaos” in the White House, and much worse.
The structure of the presidency is not all there is to “energy in the executive.” Decision, activity, secrecy, dispatch, vigor, expedition, promptitude of decision, firmness. These are some of the nouns Hamilton used to explain the energetic executive. They are behavioral terms, reminders of how a president might act in pursuit of good government. For while energy in the executive is about the structure of constitutional government, it is also about those who are elected to it and their decisions and actions—and their responsibility to the people in a system that provides for quadrennial presidential elections, judicial review, and impeachment by Congress.
Not surprisingly, the president’s oath of office is the only one spelled out in the Constitution. And in that oath the president, who along with the vice president is the only officer elected by a national vote, is the only officer obligated to execute a particular office. Everyone else in the federal establishment is bound only “to support this Constitution.” The presidency is the unique office, and it is so on account of its energetic character.
Trump has overseen plenty of personnel changes. Indeed, according to a report in the Washington Post he has set a record for “turnovers”—the share of top staffers who have left or changed jobs. For Trump, the number is 43 percent, while for presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush the numbers (over the same period) were much lower.
The truth is, of course, that Trump may have the people working for him that he wants. And last week he fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and replaced him with Michael Pompeo, ending the mystery raised in his chaos tweet of whom the president would discharge next as he continued his quest for “perfection.” In 2020, when voters will judge whether the country is better or worse off thanks to Trump, chaos in the White House isn’t likely to be uppermost in their minds as they decide if he should be kept in office or booted out.
President Trump is reputed not to read books. Sad. He has missed some of the best writing ever on the job he has and the government he is trying to administer—the essays that constitute the Federalist Papers and which set forth the case for energy in the executive. Maybe one of his aides who has read The Federalist could provide him some tutorials without making the list of “people that I want to change.”
