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The privatization of power. In several of my columns, I’ve made passing references to this idea.
Donald Trump’s recent pardon of Changpeng Zhao, a crypto billionaire with business ties to the president’s family, has thrust it back into the headlines, and this concept bears a bit more exploration.
Stay with me for a moment; I’m about to get a little academic.
In many countries, power is vested in institutions. These countries can be democracies, where authority is conferred under a constitution to different branches of government. Or they could be non-democracies like the Soviet Union, where I grew up, in which power lies with a party and is managed via the politburo.
Yet under some regimes—and these are exclusively dictatorships—power is personal and privatized. Resources, ideas, the weight of the law—all of these belong to the leader—to one human being. Benefits (like pardons) are dispensed at that one person’s pleasure.
Modern Russia is such a state.
Back in Russia, we had a joke about Vladimir Putin when he first came to power. Putin’s regime, we said, was an improbable combination of Karl Marx and Adam Smith: expenses nationalized, profits privatized. Almost from the moment he took office, the Russian president meddled with the business arena to tip the scales in favor of friends and punish political enemies.
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In the early days of the second Trump administration, when Elon Musk and DOGE were tearing through the federal bureaucracy, some pushed back against my warnings of an authoritarian lurch in America.
“DOGE is downsizing the government.” Well-meaning (and some not-so-well-meaning) readers would insist. “Why would an authoritarian make the state smaller?”
I have no problem with the idea of government efficiency, and the US federal government could probably have benefited from some streamlining.
But it never occurred to the people who innocently tried to defend the “downsizing” of government that the authority scraped away from other parts of Washington would be reconcentrated under the office of the president. How brazenly partisan Trump would be, enforcing ideological litmus tests [ [link removed] ]. They ignored how Trump’s sons were cashing in on their father’s image and position with lucrative crypto [ [link removed] ] deals (remember that recent presidential pardon?).
All of this is happening with Trump firmly ensconced in an office far more powerful than it was a generation ago.
Here, Trump’s predecessors shoulder a fair bit of responsibility. In recent decades—and especially after 9/11—the president took on ever greater prerogatives. In many cases, Congress enabled this trend, conferring the president with various emergency powers. Donald Trump is now abusing his privileges, but it was men like Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden who accumulated those powers.
The next time Americans have a president who respects the Constitution—if, indeed, there is a next time—that president must be weaker. The Oval Office will have to surrender some of its power.
New limitations must be codified, not based on goodwill and tradition (the whole world is learning how much custom is worth—and the answer is, not much!). Americans entrusted power to their leaders in the misguided (perhaps instinctive) belief that those leaders would embody the character of the nation’s founding fathers. But this optimism (or is it naivete?) never matched reality. America’s founders didn’t expect it to.
As Benjamin Franklin [ [link removed] ] warned in 1787 at the Constitutional Convention:
The first man put at the helm will be a good one. Nobody knows what sort may come afterwards.
If US democracy survives its current trials, the presidency will have to be redesigned to reverse the privatization of power. The rules governing executive power should be rewritten—not to support a George Washington, but to restrain a Donald Trump.
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