The Rise of the Strongman Presidency

Two experts on presidential power put Trump in a broader context

William Howell and Terry Moe are two of the most eminent scholars of the Presidency. Their new book, Trajectory of Power: The Rise of the Strongman Presidency puts Trump’s rise in the context of both the increasing historical dominance of the executive branch and the conservative backlash against the administrative state.

Donald Trump has exposed the fragility of American democracy, pushing presidential power to unprecedented extremes. During his first term, he did it most egregiously by inciting a violent insurrection to overturn the 2020 election and keep himself in office. He also obstructed justice during the Russia probe and in many other ways orchestrated a presidency dismissive of the rule of law and antithetical to democracy.

His second term has been even more egregious—with Trump unilaterally eviscerating agencies and programs established by Congress, impounding congressionally authorized funds, defying the courts, weaponizing governmental power against his political opponents, ignoring due process rights, and brazenly violating the law.

We’re writing this book because American democracy is in crisis, and because the presidency—the lead actor in that crisis—has become so powerful that it now threatens to substitute autocracy for our centuries-old system of self-government.

Donald Trump’s abuse of the presidential office provides vivid evidence of that. But Trump is just part of a much larger historical trajectory of presidential power—a trajectory that has become very dangerous, has little to do with any one person, and is driven by fundamental forces that lie at the heart of American society and its politics and have developed over many decades.

Our aim is to identify those fundamentals and to explain how an office that was intended to be so limited has seen its powers grow to the point that they enable, if the occupant seeks it, what can rightly be called a strongman presidency. The answers we provide are anchored in a simple theoretical argument about the historical trajectory of presidential power. Here, very briefly, are the basics of that argument.

The Motivational Commonality

We ultimately have our eyes on the president’s powers of unilateral action, because these are the powers that have grown so expansively over time and are potentially so dangerous to democracy. Their autocratic exercise, unconstrained by democratic norms and procedures, is the essence of a strongman presidency. That said, the longstanding weakness of presidents in the normal policy process plays an important part in our larger story. We need to appreciate presidential weakness and its structural causes in order to understand why the strongman presidency emerged as it did.

Underlying this interplay between weakness and strength is a crucial motivational commonality that unites all presidents and is the appropriate starting point of any attempt to understand presidential power. The commonality is that all presidents care first and foremost about establishing a legacy as great leaders; and in order to establish such a legacy, they need to wield sufficient power to achieve notable and enduring accomplishments.

Their time is short, their aspirations large, and their legacies demand that they move aggressively to overcome weakness, expand their power—and, when situations call for it, embrace unilateral options that circumvent the normal policy process and enable them to act on their own.

This motivational commonality is the beginning of an explanation, but only the beginning. Although presidents want to be powerful, and although their will to power lends a predictable dynamic to their behavior, there is no guarantee that they can have anything close to what they want. For the rest of the explanation, we need to recognize certain key aspects of American society and politics that, in conjunction with the motivational commonality, have propelled the rise of presidential power over time to altogether dangerous heights.

Two aspects stand out. The first is the rise and expansion of the administrative state. The second is the partisanship of the president, along with the ideology and agenda of the party he leads. These core components combine with the motivational commonality to produce what we call the two logics of presidential power. One is symmetric, applying to all presidents in roughly the same way regardless of party. The other is asymmetric, applying very differently to Republicans and Democrats. Both are centered on the administrative state. And both, in political practice, operate at the same time to shape the trajectory of presidential power.

The Symmetric Logic

All modern nations have administrative states. And for a very good reason: they couldn’t do without them. The administrative state is essentially just the executive component of government, consisting of all the various government agencies whose job it is—on the basis of formal authority, expertise, professionalism, merit, and specialized organization—to translate the written words of public policy into concrete reality for the rest of society.

This they do through the execution of policy—as the Food and Drug Administration does, for example, when evaluating new drugs—but also through rulemaking, adjudication, investigations, enforcement, guidance, information-gathering, data analysis, reports, and assorted other means. Such bureaucracy is arcane and sometimes slow and frustrating. But no government could hope to address its nation’s problems and meet the needs of its citizens without an administrative state to make it happen.

For all presidents, whether Republican or Democrat, the growth of the American administrative state—beginning in the very late 1800s and increasing rapidly in the decades thereafter—opened up vast opportunities for the exercise and expansion of presidential power. As government became bigger and more complex, there was a strong demand for what presidents had to offer. The American public wanted presidents to take the lead. And Congress and the courts, recognizing that presidents were the only practical means of managing the administrative state and promoting its effectiveness, were willing to grant them discretion, deference, and resources.

The door was thus opened, and presidents were happy to walk through it. They had always been motivated to seek power, but an expanding administrative state gave them a lot more to work with than in the past. George Washington, James K. Polk, and Ulysses S. Grant were chief executives who sat atop the executive branch—yet there was very little in the executive branch to empower them.

Not so for modern presidents. For them, the administrative state offers a cornucopia of specialized agencies, discretion-filled policies, trained personnel, positions for loyalists, monetary and material resources, and countless other means of exercising power and promoting their own agendas. It also affords them countless opportunities to engage in unilateral action—to launch military actions by relying on the defense and intelligence components of the administrative state, but also to advance their domestic policies by taking action through the many domestic agencies that control the vast range of policies and personnel.

For the most part, presidents can’t expect the diverse parts of the administrative state to automatically align and do their bidding. Communication, coordination, and monitoring are inherently difficult in a large bureaucracy. Bureaucrats, moreover, have their own interests, and resistance is not unusual. So as part of their pursuit of power, presidents have had to build mechanisms of control that allow them to overcome these problems.

To that end, they have constructed an “institutional presidency,” housed in the Executive Office of the President, that gives them an organizational capacity for centralizing executive policy and imposing presidential control from above. In addition, they have increasingly politicized the bureaucracy, appointing loyalists to top positions of bureaucratic authority who can be counted upon to promote the president’s agenda.

In short, big government generates presidential power. It does so because presidents want power, and because big government affords many opportunities for them to get it. There is nothing partisan about this. It is symmetric across the parties: Republicans and Democrats alike are caught up in the same overarching logic and thus the same characteristic types of behavior. They all seek to establish legacies as great leaders, and they all use their positions of executive leadership to try to control the administrative state and take advantage of everything it has to offer them.

The Asymmetric Logic

In one key respect, Republicans and Democrats are very different in their connection to the administrative state, and this difference, which has become increasingly pronounced over time, has a profound effect on how they approach and use presidential power. There is an asymmetric logic at work, one that operates at the same time as the symmetric logic but with radically different—and ultimately very dangerous—consequences. It is the combination of the two that propels the trajectory of presidential power.

The asymmetry comes about because, except for the defense, national security, and foreign policy agencies, along with a few others, the administrative state is almost wholly an embodiment of progressive values—constructed to help people in need, regulate business, protect the environment, secure the rights of minorities and women, and so on.

Democrats, accordingly, have embraced this administrative state as theirs, filled with agencies and programs they value and support. Since the Reagan years, by contrast, Republicans have increasingly seen it as a freedom-threatening incursion on individuals and businesses, a costly behemoth of taxing and spending, and a coercive promulgater of progressive values; and they have wanted to stifle and severely retrench it.

In the early decades following the Progressive Era, as the administrative state grew and put down roots, conservative Republicans and their business and intellectual allies railed against Democratic presidents—Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson—for advancing big government and progressive programs. But the Republican Party was fairly diverse and moderate at that time, and its staunch conservatives were shouting from the margins.

The party as a whole, moreover, was in no position to take on the administrative state even if it wanted to. Congress was controlled by Democrats, who stood ready to defend it against any opposition. The courts were filled with judges who accepted it as a modern reality and adapted their jurisprudence to accommodate it. And the bureaucracy was in the expert hands of experienced civil servants who were adept at defending their turf.

Yet conservatives wouldn’t forever be at the margins. They rose to political power during the late 1970s, elected Ronald Reagan president, took control of the Republican Party (eventually), and dedicated it to undermining the administrative state. The obstacles to change were the same as before. But conservatives hit upon a novel solution that, for professed believers in limited government and individual liberty, has to be regarded as the ultimate irony: they would endorse and pursue a presidency of extraordinary power, capable of dominating, retrenching, and sabotaging the administrative state unilaterally through top-down presidential control of the executive.

Hence the new asymmetry. Democrats didn’t need a president to pursue such domination, because the administrative state was largely performing functions that they supported. If the agencies and programs just did their jobs and carried out their legal missions, the progressive agenda would be advanced. This state of affairs, moreover, was the prevailing status quo; and as political scientists have long known, it takes much less power to protect the status quo than to change it. Conservative Republicans were on the other end of this power equation. They were the ones seeking to upend the established system. And to do so, they recognized, they needed a vastly more powerful presidency than the Democrats did.

Their pursuit of extraordinary power took decades, and it continues today. Its first stirrings can be seen in the “administrative presidency” of Richard Nixon’s final two years in office. But it was Reagan who embraced it as a full-blown, systematic strategy of conservative governance. This involved greatly magnifying the presidency’s traditional reliance on centralization and politicization to enhance top-down control.

But it also involved a radical move of great historical consequence: Reagan’s Department of Justice, led by Ed Meese, began developing the Unitary Executive Theory (UET), a new line of legal theory that rejected the traditionally understood constraints of statutory law and separation of powers and claimed that the Constitution grants presidents vast inherent powers of unilateral action and supreme authority over all agencies within the executive—what they do, how they do it, how they are staffed, what decisions get made.

Over time, the theory was more fully developed and diversified by conservative legal scholars. It also was sharply criticized, not simply for its questionable jurisprudence, but for its potential to unleash and legitimize strongman powers threatening to democracy. Those fears appeared to be borne out during the presidency of George W. Bush, whose administration relied on the UET to justify controversial actions—notably, the torture of prisoners—that violated existing law. Prominent legal scholars soon began pointing to Bush as the poster boy of an anti-democratic president.

Bush, however, was but a pale imitation of the real thing. The real thing was coming soon. Conservatism itself was slowly being transformed and rendered much more extreme by the rise of right-wing populism—which began to threaten democracies throughout the developed West during the 1990s as a backlash to the disruptions of globalization, technological change, and immigration; was super-charged in the United States by the emergence of the Tea Party in 2010 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016; and became the controlling force of the Republican Party.

The party’s pursuit of extraordinary presidential power was no longer just a strategic choice. It was now magnified and driven to extremes by an anti-system, grievance-driven populist base that yearned for strongman leadership: a president who would exercise unchained unilateral power untethered to traditional democratic norms and procedures.

In Donald Trump, they found their man—and put American democracy in great danger. That danger was very real during Trump’s first term, is sure to magnify during his second, and there is good reason to think it will persist well after he leaves center stage. For with the Republican Party in the thrall of populist forces—an entrenched feature of American politics that will not end soon—future Republican presidents will have much the same incentives to embrace the role of the strongman.

In the decades since Reagan, then, the asymmetric logic has grown increasingly influential, so much so that it has generated what amounts to an asymmetric presidency, bifurcated by party. Republican presidents do not approach presidential power in the same way Democrats do. They have gone beyond the “normal” incentives that have traditionally shaped presidential behavior—and that still shape the behavior of Democratic presidents—to pursue a presidency of such expansive unilateral power, with such disregard for the traditional requirements of democracy, that it threatens to replace American democracy with a de facto system of strongman rule.

The Future

Presidency scholars don’t normally think in terms of a “logic” that explains the evolution of presidential power over time, and certainly not in terms of two logics. And while a robust literature focuses on the president’s ability to navigate and control the administrative state, few political scientists consider how the state’s growth over time affected the evolution of presidential power.

The framing we’ve set out here—highlighting the two logics and their anchoring in the administrative state—is a construction that, in our view, provides useful insights and analytic guidance that help promote a better understanding of the historical trajectory of presidential power and why it has become so dangerous in recent decades.

As this brief summary begins to suggest, America’s crisis of democracy is not simply due to Donald Trump, who is more an agent than a cause. And it is not a crisis that can be defused by simply electing a Democrat to the presidency, which offers only temporary relief, as the presidency of Joe Biden well illustrates. It is a crisis, rather, that is deeply rooted in our nation’s social and political fundamentals—fundamentals that, as they have fueled the asymmetric logic, have driven the trajectory of presidential power and will remain dangerously anti-democratic for the foreseeable future.

They have already produced one strongman presidency, or two if we count Trump’s nonconsecutive terms separately. The potential clearly exists for them to produce more in future years. And if and when they do, as we show in detail in the book, there is good reason to think that our democratic system will lack the protective capacity to defend itself. Whether Trump remains at center stage is beside the point. What matters is that, because the strongman presidency will continue to be a persistent threat for many years to come, the nation faces a perilous and uncertain future.

William G. Howell is inaugural Dean of the School of Government and Policy at Johns Hopkins University. Terry M. Moe is the William Bennett Munro Professor of Political Science at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.