Donald Trump has fundamentally altered the constitutional presidency less than a month into his second term, according to an expert on governance.
The newly inaugurated president has largely dismantled the executive branch through orders and memos, frozen congressionally allocated funds — in a move many have said was illegal — and fired thousands of federal workers. In a column for MSNBC legal scholar Allen Sumrall said Trump has already transformed the president's role in the constitutional order.
"The presidency has gone through several important developments throughout its history, and now we may be witnessing the next," Sumrall wrote. "This development could push our constitutional order increasingly far from a collaborative, interbranch democracy and toward a structure that expects a strong and slapdash presidency. Meaning, the next constitutional presidency may be antithetical to the Constitution itself."
Political scientist Jeffrey Tulis published “The Rhetorical Presidency" in 1987 analyzing the transformation of the presidency in the early 20th century, which Sumrall said marked a change in public understanding and expectations for presidents that persisted until the end of Joe Biden's single term in the White House.
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"Against this backdrop, President Joe Biden’s lackluster public approval makes more sense," Sumrall wrote. "Biden was not derelict in his presidential duties that the Constitution requires — he showed up to work and took care that the laws were faithfully executed. Of course, he made choices that not everyone liked. But that’s normal and expected behavior for a president. Biden’s real deficiency, therefore, was not in the duties given to him by the constitutional presidency, but in his rhetorical duties. He was not a successful rhetorical president. His apparent declining cognitive abilities and lifelong stutter meant that Biden was not able to live up to what the public today demands of a president: a forceful and powerful rhetorician with sharp remarks, a clear command of the room, and frequent public-facing comments."
"Because of the rise of the rhetorical presidency, the public now expects presidents to frequently engage directly with the public in person and on camera," Sumrall added. "Because Biden did not do that, he looked to many like a weak president or a bad president."
Trump satisfies the public's demand for a president who engages frequently and directly with them, although his statements are often inaccurate or unclear, but Sumrall said he wrought fundamental changes in the office in a matter of weeks.
"Trump’s style of presidentialism is to govern by executive order, memo, threat and social media," Sunrall wrote. "This practice ignores laws that Congress passed and renders Congress itself largely irrelevant, reduced to a club for both loyal spokespeople and particularly vocal opponents. It sees Supreme Court opinions constraining executive power as challenges to be overcome. It sees rapid movement and quick results as not just preferable but expected. It sees the Constitution as fungible, or even sometimes wrong."
Sumrall fears that Americans will come to expect presidents to behave like Trump or they'll be seen as ineffective.
"If so, any president who enters without promises to fire everyone their predecessor dared hire, without a mission to steamroll government, will risk being seen as a failure who can’t live up to the steep demands of the office," Sunrall wrote. "Any president with more modest goals than enormous territorial expansion, upending decades of established administration, and breaking through previously unthinkable norms and institutional guardrails risks being punished at the ballot box."
