The Founding Fathers of the United States were terrified of monarchy. They designed a constitution that separated and fragmented power, hoping that no single individual would ever amass the kind of authority that Britain’s king had enjoyed. Indeed, the Declaration of Independence decried the history of the British monarchy as a “history of repeated injuries and usurpations.”
Yet in 2025, Americans are experiencing an aggressive deployment of presidential power that many observers fear looks exactly like what the Constitution was meant to avoid. U.S. President Donald Trump has used his office to threaten and intimidate opponents. Federal funds have become a bludgeon wielded against law firms and universities. Through the Department of Government Efficiency, Trump has imposed severe cuts on vital agencies and eliminated other programs altogether.
Individuals have been deported to overseas prisons without due process. Trump has attacked several federal judges and even defied their orders. Based on thin constitutional grounds, Trump deployed Marines and federalized the National Guard to send into Los Angeles despite California Gov. Gavin Newsom adamantly opposing his decision to do so.
The president also keeps joking about running for a third term regardless of the 22nd Amendment. When asked by a reporter if he had to “uphold the Constitution,” Trump responded: “I don’t know.”
Trump’s supporters dismiss the criticism by pulling the “everybody does it” card out of their hat. And it’s true that for decades, both parties have relied on expansive executive power to achieve their goals. In that sense, all Americans are imperial presidentialists. Is Trump really so different from the presidents before him?
The expansion of presidential power has undoubtedly been one of the central developments of the United States’ 249 years of nationhood. Though the Constitution attempted to constrain the executive branch, President George Washington nonetheless issued a stern warning in his farewell address, as he set the standard by voluntarily relinquishing power: “It is important … that the habits of thinking in a free country should inspire caution in those entrusted with its administration, to confine themselves within their respective constitutional spheres, avoiding in the exercise of the powers of one department to encroach upon another. The spirit of encroachment tends to consolidate the powers of all the departments in one and thus to create, whatever the form of government, a real despotism.”
Congress remained the primary source of political authority through the 19th century, but several presidents took a more forceful role in the polity. Andrew Jackson used his authority to bring down the Second Bank of the United States when he vetoed its recharter in 1832. In his first year as president, with the Civil War violently breaking apart the union, Abraham Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus—refusing to comply with Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, who, acting on his own as a circuit judge, ruled that the president had no authority to do so.
Whereas 19th-century presidents took on a more prominent role in civic life, occasionally exerting new forms of power, the 20th century witnessed a massive expansion of the executive branch’s institutional infrastructure. After World War I ended, President Woodrow Wilson’s Justice Department broadened its power under Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer by deporting immigrants and accused radicals in 1919 and 1920, during the first Red Scare.
Between 1933 and 1945, the executive branch expanded with Franklin D. Roosevelt in the White House. Beginning with his first 100 days, Roosevelt created many new executive agencies, such as the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Works Progress Administration. Congress appropriated unprecedented budgets for these new government bodies while bolstering the Treasury Department by creating a mass income tax. Roosevelt infamously used the 1798 Alien Enemies Act to intern Japanese Americans, an exercise of executive authority that the Supreme Court upheld in Korematsu v. United States (1944).
Roosevelt’s successor, President Harry Truman, worked with a Republican-majority Congress between 1947 and 1949 to build a formidable national security apparatus that included the National Security Council, the CIA, the Defense Department, and a commitment to a permanent war of containment against the Soviet Union. Despite warnings from some conservatives, such as Sen. Robert Taft, that Truman and Congress were building a “garrison state,” the voices of executive centralization were triumphant. Starting with the Korean War in 1950, presidents would no longer ask Congress to declare war before sending troops into combat.
Amid moments of pushback, such as the Supreme Court’s 1952 decision ruling that Truman was not authorized to take control of steel factories to prevent a wartime strike, Congress steadily allowed presidents to control more policy areas, such as tariffs.
During the 1950s and 1960s, liberal intellectuals produced books and articles justifying why the nation needed a stronger presidency than the founders had envisioned. They argued that the United States could not depend on a fragmented Congress to make decisions in a complex age of industrialization, urbanization, and world war.
The entire issue came to a head with President Richard Nixon, who took power as the Vietnam War had already deeply divided the nation. Nixon’s aggressive use of presidential power shook the faith of those who had extolled the virtues of a strong presidency. The media revealed that Nixon had conducted a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia despite vowing to end military operations in Southeast Asia.
Nixon also used the power of impoundment in ways that his predecessors would never have imagined, refusing to spend vast sums of money that Congress had appropriated because he believed it was in his political interest to oppose the programs. The situation deteriorated further as the Watergate investigation revealed how Nixon had attempted to weaponize the executive branch to go after his enemies, threatened institutions, and sought to obstruct justice.
Nixon triggered a strong reaction from Congress, which throughout the 1970s passed major pieces of legislation that attempted to rebalance power.
In 1973, the War Powers Act imposed new restrictions on presidents who wanted to engage U.S. troops in military conflict. The 1974 Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act centralized budgeting procedures on Capitol Hill to grant legislators more muscle in shaping deliberations and decreed prohibitions on presidents from being able to impound funds in any significant way. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) established strict procedures for the government to conduct surveillance of U.S. citizens and established a FISA special court that needed to authorize warrants. Congress also passed ethics reforms in 1978 that included financial disclosure rules for executive branch officials and the creation of the Office of Independent Counsel to investigate executive corruption.
But the executive branch quickly regained momentum. President Ronald Reagan used institutional resources to circumvent a Democratic-majority House of Representatives that pushed back against his so-called revolution.
Reagan issued executive orders that stripped down environmental and workplace regulation. Under Attorney General Edwin Meese, the Justice Department became an intellectual hothouse where conservative lawyers produced memoranda outlining legal theories that justified a robust understanding of presidential power. In their estimation, there were few external constraints on the executive branch; the president, moreover, should have total control over every agency and the people who work there, known as the unitary executive theory. The Iran-Contra affair that broke in 1986 revolved around top officials on the National Security Council who used money generated by secret weapons sales to Iran to assist the anti-communist Nicaraguan Contras, despite explicit congressional prohibitions.
Intensifying political polarization in the 1990s and 2000s, which resulted in worsening gridlock on Capitol Hill, incentivized all presidents to use executive orders more frequently. Frustrated with Republican control of Congress after 1994, President Bill Clinton turned to executive orders to make progress on environmental issues; President Barack Obama tackled immigration through a memorandum creating the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program in 2012 to protect people who came into the United States illegally as children.
Nothing, however, was as crucial to restoring the power of the Oval Office as President George W. Bush’s response to 9/11. Following the attacks, the administration created a new national security apparatus, shattering many of the 1970s reforms.
Using the wartime authority granted to him by Congress with the Authorization for Use of Military Force, Bush centralized policy under the Department of Homeland Security, authorized extensive surveillance on U.S. citizens, established a detention facility in Guantánamo Bay to avoid interrogators being subject to U.S. or international law, and allowed for the use of “enhanced interrogation”—torture—on suspected terrorists. (Though restoring more respect for due process and the rule of law within the new system, Obama left most of this infrastructure intact.)
The culture also seemed comfortable with the notion that the president was in charge of Washington. Despite high public distrust in the government, there was still a veneration for the individual in the White House. One of the hit shows of the period was The West Wing, in which the fictional president was idealistic, virtuous, and a strident defender of U.S. democracy.
Political scientists have argued that there is an asymmetry in how the parties use presidential power. William Howell and Terry Moe wrote in 2023 that Democratic presidents—as members of a party that believes in the importance of government—dispose of their authority in ways that don’t threaten the administrative state. In contrast, Republicans turn to extreme powers to sabotage the administrative state.
When Trump first sat behind the Resolute Desk in January 2017, he inherited massive authority, precedents for using his power, the vast institutional machinery of the executive branch, and an office widely perceived as being the center of U.S. government rather than an equal branch.
Even given the history of presidential power, there are several notable differences between Trump and his predecessors. The values guiding Trump fundamentally differ from those guiding past presidents. Despite significant variation in skills, values, and tolerance for corruption, almost all U.S. presidents have believed in the legitimacy of the country’s basic constitutional structure.
When Lincoln suspended the writ of habeas corpus, he did so during the Civil War, to avert secessionist rioting and rebellion that would destroy the Constitution. Congress was out of session, and bringing lawmakers back in that era would have taken time. As soon as Congress returned, he explained his actions and requested congressional approval, which it provided with legislation in 1863.
After the Supreme Court ruled that Truman could not seize the steel mills, he immediately relinquished them. Even Nixon complied when the Supreme Court decided in July 1974 that he had to turn over the White House recordings to the courts. Trump is different, as demonstrated by his attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
Trump is also protected by a hyperpartisan Republican-majority Congress that exhibits intense loyalty bordering on cult-like admiration. The president does not have to fear legislators’ power over the purse, power to conduct oversight, or their power to impeach. The convergence of immense presidential power and a divider-in-chief exacerbates the dangers of what can happen with an imperial presidency.
Some of Trump’s presidency is familiar, and he is creating his own precedents in other areas. This mix allows him to do whatever he pleases, drifting further away from the constitutional principles that the founders tried to enshrine. Until another period of reckoning, as occurred in the 1970s, the United States will remain vulnerable to still more renegade leaders who can threaten the standing of the country’s great democracy.
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