The President is Upset By How Congress Works

I have noted repeatedly in this forum that the president has an extremely personal conception of power. Some have said that he is unprincipled, I would say instead that he is aprincipled - getting his way is the only principle he acknowledges. He has always believed that strong people get their way, and he has always been out to prove that he is a strong person. The best. Tremendous.

In this context, it is not difficult to see why he has very little commitment to the institutions of American government. The guiding principle of the Constitution is to make power diffuse. Many individuals and entities in the government have the ability to intitate or block policy changes. Because the people who wrote it were so very afraid of personal despotism, they created a government that would not permit an individual to dominate it.

The government they created stands rather precariously. In the interest of clarity, I do not expect a violent takeover of power in the immediate future by anyone. What I do expect is that the erosion of norms and institutional roles in the government will soon mean that, regardless of whether the institutions themselves survive as entities, they will operate so differently from the design that the resulting government will not function in accordance with its principles.

An interview Trump gave to Fox News recently was illustrative and unsettling. He repeatedly referred to the difficulty in passing legislation as the product of "archaic" rules in the Congress. He said explicitly that he felt it was absurd that he couldn't pass laws with a simple majority in the Senate because of the filibuster. He went on to say that such institutional roadblocks are "bad for the country." He had said a few days earlier that he thought the presidency would be "easier" than his old life.

Trump's response to finding that heading the world's most powerful state is more difficult than a life as a real estate magnate is characteristic. He did not reevaluate his tactics, or consider that his work habits are inimical to success at the level on which he now operates. He blamed the system for being too hard. In evaluating the trade off between maintaining a delicate balance of institutional power nearly 250 years in the making and getting what he wants, he struggles to find merit in the former.

In the current political circumstances such intemperance may seem comically impotent, but it should give us pause that this is the person who legally holds the most powerful office in the land for the next three and a half years, at minimum. Allowing this sort of behavior to be normalized is exactly how we become complicit in the slow undermining of institutional barriers to personalized power. A country need not be a formal dictatorship for an individual to consistently abuse their authority. Understanding how important those barriers really are is the first step to successfully opposing individuls who seek to unduly concentrate power.