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THE MAN MADISON WARNED US AGAINST  
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Harold Meyerson
February 17, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ He authored the Constitution to forestall the rise of a despotic
president. We’ll soon see if those safeguards suffice. _

President Donald Trump gestures as he boards Air Force One at Joint
Base Andrews, Maryland, February 14, 2025., Ben Curtis/AP Photo

 

One of the themes recurring in conservative media these days is the
normalization of Donald Trump by historical analogy. This kind of
sweeping arrogation of power, we’re told by _Wall Street
Journal _editorialists, columnist George Will, and other conservative
commentators, has ample precedents in the records of progressive
presidents particularly: Woodrow Wilson, both Roosevelts, Lyndon
Johnson, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden. So why this harping on poor
Donald Trump?

Trump’s overreaching claims to power, Will tells us
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“is an institutional consequence of
progressivism.” _Journal _editorialists note
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“Mr. Trump is stretching laws to see what he can get away with, but
so have other recent Presidents,” including both Obama and Biden.

As historical analysis, this is malicious piffle. No previous
president has told the nation’s many thousands of autonomous school
boards what their schools should teach; required his cabinet
secretaries to affirm his Big Lie that he actually won a presidential
election he actually lost; dictated which shows are suitable, and
which not, for the Kennedy Center; told the NCAA which athletes to
disqualify; or excluded media organizations from the White House that
didn’t conform to his renaming international bodies of water. If we
seek precedents for this kind of conduct, we must look not to American
presidents but to, say, the Bourbons of France.

The power of our presidents has grown chiefly during wartime or other
crises, and as the development of mass media, beginning with radio,
enabled them to speak directly to their fellow Americans. There was
nothing pernicious or threatening about Franklin Roosevelt’s
aptitude for radio or John F. Kennedy’s for television. Trump’s
tweets, on the other hand, are pernicious and dangerous, not because
he’s mastered that medium but because he deliberately peddles lies
and slanders. Nor has he taken power at a time of crisis; rather,
he’s claimed this to be a time of national emergency that presumably
justifies his power grabs, though that emergency is not visible to the
naked eye.

So Trump’s opening salvos are in no way like Franklin Roosevelt’s
first hundred days, as some right-wingers have argued. Roosevelt took
office in a time of genuine crisis, when unemployment stood at 25
percent and when an epidemic of runs on banks had shuttered every
depository institution in the nation on the eve of his inauguration.
To address this, Roosevelt did order federal examiners to spend the
next several days assessing the solvency of the country’s banks, but
then he turned to Congress to enact the emergency measures that
defined his first months as president. At his behest, Congress enacted
a bailout for American farmers and a semi-cartelization of American
industry, created deposit insurance for the nation’s bank
depositors, and established a Civilian Conservation Corps that
provided work to jobless young men and improvements to national parks
and forests. He did not claim for himself powers he knew presidents
did not have; he asked Congress, successfully, to enact these
far-reaching changes.

Progressive presidents have indeed enlarged government’s regulatory
capacity, but invariably because public interest and public safety
demanded it. Congress established the departments and agencies that
these presidents sought and the public desired. The growth of the
administrative state did not come from presidential decrees, unlike
the destruction of the administrative state flowing from unlawful
executive orders today.

Teddy Roosevelt persuaded Congress to create the Food and Drug
Administration so that Americans wouldn’t be poisoned so frequently
by what they consumed. Wilson’s allies pushed a bill through
Congress that established the Federal Trade Commission to aid
consumers and small businesses struggling to deal with corporate
domination of markets. FDR signed congressional legislation
establishing the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National
Labor Relations Board. Congress, responding to the financial chicanery
that led to the crash of 2008 and the ensuing Great Recession, passed
a bill, which Obama signed, creating the Consumer Financial Protection
Bureau. This was all government by consent of the governed, with
Congress passing, the president signing, and the courts upholding the
constitutionality of these newly created agencies. None of these
fundamental changes were due to presidential executive orders,
decrees, tweets, or pronunciamentos.

If there _is_ a model in the annals of our history for the agency
closures and funding impoundments that Trump has unilaterally ordered,
it’s the despotic one that James Madison cautioned against in
his _Federalist Papers_ arguments. There, he explained why the
Constitution he’d just co-authored created separate branches of
government precisely to forestall the prospect of a despot’s rise.

The possibility that the new American nation could degenerate into the
monarchical form of government that then prevailed across Europe was
very much on Madison’s mind. “The accumulation of all
powers—legislative, executive and judiciary—in the same hands,
whether of one, a few or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed
or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of
tyranny,” Madison wrote in _Federalist 47_. To keep that from
happening, he wrote in _Federalist 51_, “Ambition must be made to
counteract ambition.” To this end, he installed the French
philosophe Montesquieu’s ideas of separation of powers and checks
and balances as the centerpiece of the Constitution.

Despite that, a cowed and supine Republican Congress has raised nary a
peep at Trump’s seizure of its power; because Republicans want these
agency closures and funding impoundments but know they could not get
them through their chambers of the legislature, they’d rather the
president seize their power while they go mute. And while federal
courts, so far, have sought to curtail those seizures of power, the
Supremes have yet to be heard from.

Ours is the only constitution enacted in the 18th century that’s
still operative; the constitutions of every other nation were drafted
and enacted in more modern times, when the specter of a monarchial
despot had by then generally receded. Ours was by no means a fully
democratic document, limiting popular sovereignty to the lower levels
of government and endeavoring to ensure rule by elites. While
amendments have mitigated some of these biases, vestiges (the Senate,
the Electoral College) are still with us today.

Yet the Founders’ emphasis on a separation of powers rooted in fear
of a despotic president has long been a kind of background noise in
discussions of our constitutional order. It’s there, and we’re
generally glad it’s there. But as a result of the nearly 250 years
that we’ve gone without a wannabe despot president, it’s not the
sort of thing that has merited much attention.

Mr. Will’s and the _Journal_’s stabs at Trump normalization
notwithstanding, it does now.

_Harold Meyerson is editor at large of The American Prospect._

_Used with the permission © The American Prospect, Prospect.org
[[link removed]], 2025. All rights reserved. _

_Read the original article at Prospect.org.:
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* Presidential powers
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* the Constitution
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* Donald Trump
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* James Madison
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