George Bush Presidential Library and Museum
Ever since his Inauguration a year ago, Donald J. Trump’s competency for office has been questioned by colleagues, opponents, and psychiatrists. While Trump’s underperformance may well deserve such scrutiny, perhaps some of his failure is predictable.
Jeremi Suri, who teaches history at University of Texas at Austin, says in his latest book, The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America's Highest Office (Basic Books), that modern Presidents are set up to fail. His book argues that the successes of Presidents, including George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and the two Roosevelts, have raised expectations of the office to where later Presidents, from Kennedy to Obama, have struggled with the chasm “between promise and possibility.”
In an interview at the offices of The Progressive, Suri spoke of the challenges of the U.S. presidency and the shortcomings of the Oval Office’s current occupant.
Q: Your book divides the historical “great” Presidents from modern ones more thwarted in their efforts. Is it just easier to see the flaws and foibles of the more recent office holders?
Jeremi Suri: It’s always easier to see the limitations of what’s closest to you. But, I try to make the case that it was a different office, it was a different country. I hope that when I’m describing the successful Presidents, I’m not making them out to be men of marble. (I’m actually fairly critical of Andrew Jackson, for example.) But I do think that what they were doing was real leadership.
They were in a position for those first 150 years to really help Americans re-conceive what their country was about, and to think about how their values could be married to power. I think as we became so powerful after World War II—and this has been a theme in The Progressive—the power starts dictating the values more than the values the power. What I’m trying to show in the book is that that’s really not about the personalities, though that matters, too. It’s about the nature of power and the way power gets deployed.
Q: You say in the book that it’s so much more complicated to be President now. We didn’t have nuclear weapons or a twenty-four-hour media cycle in the time of George Washington. Talk a little bit about that.
Suri: It’s not only that the issues themselves are more complicated—there’s so many of them and there are so many interdependencies between them. So when George Washington is thinking about foreign policy, his concern is territorial security and maybe the area around the United States. But as you get into a world, even in the early 20th century where we are operating in the Philippines, what we’re doing in the Philippines is having effects all around that region and at home. The proliferation of issues creates interconnections that are hard to see and understand.
Jeremi Suri
Q: And there’s money in politics, which our founder, Fighting Bob La Follette, railed against over 100 years ago. Now we have the Tea Party funded and created by the Koch brothers, and the billions of dollars that go into political campaigning.
Suri: Yeah, I think this is an old problem, as The Progressive knows very well. It’s a flaw in our Constitutional structure going back to the beginning but it has become far far worse because, as any historian would say, scale matters. So it’s not even that the Koch brothers are worse than the Rockefellers as individuals, but it’s that they have so much more money and they can do so much more with that money. It’s almost two self-reinforcing factors. The money in politics has created more inequality in our society and that inequality reinforces the money in politics. Which is why we need actual legal, legislative action. It’s not going to happen naturally.
Q: You talk about Roosevelt coming from a dynasty—he was ordained to be President basically because of his family. A modern President I think about in that way is George H.W. Bush. But we don’t have dynasties in modern presidencies like we did with the early patrician descendants.
Suri: We do have dynasties in politics, which is actually part of the problem.
One of the many things that led to the horrible outcome in 2016 was that a lot of the political energy was sucked out of the room by two dynasties, the Clintons and the Bushes. I think you can make the case that Jeb would have been a better President than W., and you can make the case in some ways that Hillary would have been a better President than Bill (I have enormous regard for Hillary’s capabilities). But both of them [Jeb and Hillary] were such poor campaigners they sucked so much of the wind out of the room.
Q: Trump’s not a featured character in your book but you reference him as bringing a kind of disrespect and boorishness to the presidency.
Suri: He is the first President who is not doing the job. We’ve had good and bad Presidents, we’ve had varying approaches to the office, but all forty-four people who preceded him, when they got into office, saw themselves as representing everyone in the United States, even those who didn’t vote for them. Trump has never tried to do that, and his supporters don’t want him to do that.
They are, for all kinds of reasons, angry, upset, and [unpersuaded of] the mission of the presidency, and I think Trump was elected to destroy it. Their anger is legitimate, but they’ve pursued an avenue that is actually undermining the very values that they claim they’re about. And Trump doesn’t have values so it doesn’t matter to him. I think he’s the first valueless President.
Q: What can we do about this?
Suri: I’m better on problems than solutions!
Q: In your book you ask if we can redesign the office for a new world. You say the President’s responsibilities have grown too large and ask if we can we shrink it. Another option you offer is a team—having the President and a prime minister. When the Woodward book about the Clinton Administration came out, a criticism everybody raised was, “they're so busy trying to achieve consensus, Clinton’s not taking leadership.” But maybe there’s nothing wrong with a bunch of smart people trying to achieve consensus!
Suri: I agree with you 100 percent, and that’s what I’m arguing for. I think we’d be a lot better off if we had—even if they’re from different parties—multiple people in an executive role who are integral to the American people.
Take Paul Ryan. He’s as close to a prime minister as we get, right? He controls anything that goes to the floor in the House and all appropriations have to start there. He is answerable to the ten most extreme Republicans in his party from the most gerrymandered districts, because otherwise he loses his speakership. To his enormous discredit, he has placed the speakership above legislating. And that’s not the way it should be.
We’re now the only major democracy in the world that doesn’t divide executive power. We claim we’re all about checks and balances, but we’ve created the most unitary, overpowered, overburdened executive in the world.
But imagine if the Speaker of the House were accountable to the American people, or even accountable to both parties. It’s a rare thing to say that Texas might be a model, but in the Texas assembly, the speaker of the assembly is actually chosen by both parties. In the last legislative session, the speaker of the assembly blocked all the crazy legislation because the speaker was representative of the mainstream between the two parties. We would be better off if we had someone in that role [nationally] and that person had to negotiate with the President—both of them accountable to the American people not to certain corners of the American public.
We’re now the only major democracy in the world that doesn’t divide executive power. We claim we’re all about checks and balances, but we’ve created the most unitary, overpowered, overburdened executive in the world.
Q: You have a line right at the end where you ask us to imagine this new presidency as necessary for a country that remains “the last best hope of Earth.” Doesn’t that put more burden on the presidency to say the United States is the city on the hill that’s going to bring peace, justice, and order to the otherwise disheveled world?
Suri: I think America is the last best hope of Earth because our enormous strength has always been one thing and one thing alone: We have talented people from so many different parts of the world here.
We are a “mongrel nation,” as Hitler said, and that’s what makes us great.
My father is an immigrant from India; my mother is the child of immigrants from Russia. Both sides of my family came here fleeing death. We have a long history of racism, a long history of immigrant restriction, too, but somehow we’ve managed to bring talented hardworking people here. That’s what makes us the last best hope of Earth.
Norman Stockwell is publisher of The Progressive.