The Most Dangerous Job in the World

Partisan feelings are running strong right now, with the election coming on Tuesday. But I’d like to invite readers to set aside those sensitivities for just a few minutes and think about the presidency itself. 

Many Americans—somewhere between most and practically all, depending on whom you ask—believe that the coming election will be the most consequential of their lifetimes. According to Rasmussen, only 16 percent of Americans think otherwise. I’m in that 16 percent—a percentage that may very well make that the most popular political position I hold. There are many Americans who sincerely believe (and many more who pretend to believe) that this election is in fact an existential crisis, that, should it go the wrong way, that’s the end of the republic, of American democracy, of the Constitution, etc. 

If you believe that this election could mean the end of the country, then you should conclude, as I have: The United States does indeed have a Donald Trump problem or a Kamala Harris problem, but those are near-term and relatively minor. The long-term, major problem is the presidency itself. 

If the presidency has, in fact, grown so powerful that one election going the wrong way could mean the end of the country, then the presidency is a political weapon of mass destruction, an office too dangerous for anyone to hold. The presidency is J. R. R. Tolkien’s Ring of Power in a country that is more like the corruptible Boromir than the abstemious Galadriel. 

It is important that such a man as Trump is unfit for the presidency. It is much more consequential that the presidency is unfit for such a man as Trump. And if you think that Kamala Harris is a dangerous Marxist radical or whatever it is you heard from the little man on the radio, the same principle applies. It is really the presidency that is the problem. 

The American constitutional order is a really lovely piece of political architecture, a feat of balance, harmony, and proportion. It is the greatest instrument of its kind yet devised by mortal men, in no small part because it assumes human limitations and incorporates them into the larger order. Our form of government was not made for godlike philosopher-kings operating dispassionately in the service of the highest things, but was instead crafted for a nation of farmers, merchants, soldiers, pirates, slaveholders, religious fanatics, and ungovernable hillbillies—it is an order designed not for the people we aspire to be but for the people we are. It is a work of genius, but it is not perfect. 

The framers believed—wrongly, as it turned out—that the great vice that needed containing in a republic was ambition. And so they set the organs of government in opposition to one another, trusting that envy, jealousy, and rivalry would do the work that no republican senate or signoria had been able to manage: preventing the excessive accumulation of power in a single office or in a single group of cronies, making it impossible to carry out a successful conspiracy or usurpation. At the time, that looked like the proper priority, and it worked for a time—until another vice, one even deadlier than ambition, took root: sloth. 

Our constitutional order really invests most of the power—and responsibility—for managing federal affairs in Congress, the branch established in Article 1. But running the affairs of the federal government of this continental republic is a great deal of work, and, over time, members of Congress began to voluntarily cede their powers to the executive branch. That was a development at odds with the framers’ expectation that each organ of government would jealously guard its own powers. The transformation of the U.S. government from a government of laws made by lawmakers in the legislature into a government that principally does its business via regulation and executive orders originating in the executive branch under the command of the president is probably best understood as an attempt by a lazy Congress to maintain power (via enabling statute) over affairs for which it did not wish to maintain responsibility. And so, to take one example from a million, the difficult technical question of how many gun parts you can sell somebody before you have sold them a gun is punted by the lawmakers over to the regulators at the ATF. That way, nobody in Congress has to go on the record voting for or against any particular legal standard or procedure. In other instances, such as the regulation of greenhouse gas emissions, political entrepreneurs who would like to have won a victory in Congress but found themselves unable to do so have used the executive power to make an end-run around the lawmakers and the lawmaking bodies. 

The result of this has been the accumulation of vast powers in the presidency, an office that never was intended to be the general-purpose receptacle of such powers. Congress has slowly transferred even its most important powers to the president: This country has been in a more or less constant state of war for the whole of my lifetime, but the last time Congress actually declared a war was in June 1942. If you want a sense of how long ago in history that was, consider that it was several … months … before Joe Biden was born. That date may jump out at you a little bit: In 1942, the U.S. already was involved in World War II, having made a declaration of war in 1941 after Pearl Harbor. The 1942 declaration added Hungary, Bulgaria, and Romania to the list—and the fact that Congress felt obliged to act in a formal way to do so rather than in the willy-nilly mode of current practice should be instructive. 

Today, presidents are empowered to carry out acts of war with very little input from Congress, as Donald Trump did vis-à-vis Iran and Qassem Soleimani, or to assassinate U.S. citizens, as Barack Obama did in the matter of Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan, and 16-year-old Abdulrahman Al-Awlaki. This isn’t limited to war powers: Presidents enter international agreements without bothering to ask the Senate to ratify a treaty, as Obama did with the Paris Agreement, or effectively nullify the law, as Obama did with certain illegal immigrants, or spend money without congressional authorization, as Joe Biden attempted to do in his loan-forgiveness scheme and other projects. Congressional Republicans at one point estimated (with CBO confirmation) that Biden had spent more than a half-trillion dollars without proper authorization—and then did approximately squat about it. Presidents act unilaterally to prohibit politically unpopular private-sector developments, as with Biden and the Keystone XL pipeline. Americans can be law-abiding citizens on Monday and be felons on Tuesday without doing anything different and without any lawmaker voting on a change to a single statute, as Biden’s ATF has demonstrated from time to time. 

The American presidency is the most dangerous job in the world—not to the president, but to us. 

And if you believe, as J.D. Vance once insisted, that Donald Trump is a potential American Hitler—or if you believe that Kamala Harris is the Antichrist, as Trump’s excitable friends claim—then you should want to put the presidency back into a relatively small box and nail the lid shut. You wouldn’t give a toddler a loaded gun—why give nuclear weapons to a psychopath, a mental incompetent, or an aspiring tyrant? 

Or, you know, to someone who is all three?