The Deplorable Monarch

Donald Trump is behaving like a king, deplorably. But the problem has long been simmering, and the ambiguities of the Constitution almost invite such behavior.

The problem arose due to the peculiar circumstances of the 1780s, when the Constitution was written. It was a time when the excesses of democracy and runaway majoritarianism in the states led many chastened revolutionaries to think of restoring a monarchy. Since it was clear that George Washington would be the first president, and that he had no heirs, there was much more willingness to concentrate power in the office of President Washington. 

Those circumstances led to the surprise and extra-legal creation of “an extraordinary strong and single executive,” in the words of Gordon Wood, a leading scholar of the Revolutionary Era. Wood continues: “We will never understand the events of the 1790s until we take seriously, as contemporaries did, the possibility of some sort of monarchy developing in America.” After all, Americans had been raised  as subjects of a monarchy, and such Congressionally-restrained monarchical governments prevailed almost everywhere.

Most republics, including Rome’s, had “naturally evolved from a Republican youth to a monarchical maturity.” Indeed, many thought America was evolving into an Augustan Age, as happened with Rome under Augustus, or into an elective, limited monarchy, as happened with Britain.

Out of this rush to cure the excesses of the confederation and given the reassurance of the self-restrained republican King Washington, arose the fatal concentration of power in the Constitution. It lurks especially in the mischievous ambiguity of the phrase in article II,  “The executive power shall be vested in a president of the United States of America,” which Trump and his advisors have taken to its absurd limit of unitary, omnipotent executive authority.

In fact the Constitution posits Congress as the first among equals, and the crucial Article II phrase might be revised, as David French advocated in The New York Times, to read, “A president of the United States of America shall execute laws passed by Congress.”

Gordon Wood contends in The Idea of America, “It may even be possible to argue that the presidency created in 1787 inherited all the prerogative powers of the English king.” Over decades the president, like a royal monarch, has taken the country into war six times, and now has moved aggressively and royally into the economy, tariffs, higher education, and the cities. The anti-federalists like Thomas Jefferson, who first raised these alarms, were left feebly defending an unworkable confederacy of 13 republics.

And so we created a potent presidency with no executive council, ruling over a central power far removed from the people, and a president with perpetual re-electability. Only the civic restraint and virtue of past presidents kept that power in check. Alas, no more.