President Trump’s supporters relish his norm-shattering behavior precisely because elites bemoan it. But there are constitutional costs to Trump’s shattering of norms. His demagoguery—Alexander Hamilton referred to “the snares of the ambitious, the avaricious, and the desperate”—personalizes the presidency in the very manner the Founders warned against.
However well intended, progressive reforms beginning in the early years of the twentieth century have invited the personalization of the presidency. It is ironic that many conservatives defend Trump because they see him as exploding “the modern norms of liberal governance.” But his presidency is the culmination of these progressive reforms. And many progressives have rediscovered the virtues of the Founders’ constitutional design in the face of Trump’s populist presidency.
To see the similarity between Trump’s presidency and the progressive presidency, we must contrast both with the Founders’ conception. Aware of the fragility of popular government, the founding generation worried about demagoguery and the “popular arts,” where the people might be “stimulated by some irregular passion” or “misled by the artful misrepresentations of interested men.” As Hamilton put it, constitutional design should foster an independent executive able to distinguish between the people’s interests and their inclinations protecting them against the “arts of men who flatter their prejudices to betray their interests.”
Beyond institutions, this depended on constitutional norms that discouraged emotional appeals to the people. To consolidate the executive as an agent of democratic stability, George Washington fostered a norm of the president as representative of the whole nation. More than a mere partisan, the duties of the presidency required a norm of dignity that subordinates personal interests to the constitutional office. This norm has persisted despite profound changes in the nature of the presidency.
Beyond Washington’s model, political parties arose as a way to complement and complete the Constitution by educating and channeling public opinion, as well as limiting the rhetorical appeals of presidential candidates for office. This innovation, beginning with James Madison and completed by the victory of the Jacksonian Democrats, nurtured popular governance. Parties become a source of popular education by articulating, tempering, and refining popular understandings. But they also served constitutional ends by disciplining and limiting the presidency largely based on norms and practices.
At the beginning of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson situated the president as acting on and articulating the popular will in a way that transcends the Constitution. Not only would the president “lead the nation” by speaking for the people, but presidential authority rested on popular approval. Complementing this change, Wilson emphasized popular primaries as the means of selecting presidential candidates, which would encourage rhetorical appeals to the people and allow them, rather than party elites, to elect candidates based on such popular appeals. While such reforms aimed to solve genuine problems, they also created problems of their own—most notably, a populist understanding of democracy that personalized the presidency and downplayed the educative function of representative institutions.
We see the personalized presidency—indeed, cult of personality—in Trump. His presidency is not understood in terms of constitutional duties or responsibilities to the public good, but as serving the personal interests and ambitions of Trump.
The Constitution and the party are subordinate to Trump’s personal ambitions, which are not harnessed to anything higher than himself. Dispensing with the difficult business of governing, he indulges himself before adoring partisan audiences as if the campaign were still on. Nearly two years after his election, he still refers to his defeated opponent. He cannot seem to consider seriously questions of a foreign power interfering in an American presidential election, putting aside any questions of collusion, precisely because he views it in personalized rather than constitutional terms. He criticizes his own Attorney General because he is not acting as Trump’s personal lawyer.
Trump’s brand of personalized populism is the fulfillment of progressive changes wrought over the course of the twentieth century. And his norm breaking behavior, despite the efforts of some conservatives to justify it, is striking in that it has nothing to do with the Constitution or constitutional ends, of which Trump remains stunningly unconcerned. If anything, it is anti-constitutional. This is not the Washington model of a constitutional presidency; it’s the presidency as a permanent rhetorical and partisan campaign fixated on the person of the president.
Prior presidents have been more than partisans and more than demagogues. This is true even after the populist changes to the presidency initiated by Wilson. Certain norms of behavior kept the personalized presidency (mostly) in check. And presidents aspired to the dignity of the office in recognizing it was larger than they were. This dignity makes a constitutional difference.
Knowing that he has broken these “Washingtonian” norms, Trump once called himself a “new kind of president.” He is the personalized presidency incarnate.
