The Council on Foreign Relations hosted a discussion today featuring two prominent scholars and a New Yorker journalist, all of whom I admire. The topic was an appraisal of the first 100 days in office by the individual currently holding the presidency. Their assessment comes after 142 Executive Orders, 42 Proclamations, and 42 Memoranda issued by the White House.
Among the central questions on the table was whether this president’s actions are unprecedented in the annals of presidential history. The scholars, both historians, generally felt they were not unprecedented. After all, the Office of the President has been growing in power for many decades, just as Congress continues to diminish before our eyes. We were reminded that Nixon’s years in power were dubbed the “imperial presidency.” Starting with Washington, presidents have certainly grabbed power and filled vacuums with their bully pulpits. The Supreme Court has consistently fortified the power of the Executive Branch, as well, ironically reducing its own power as the third co-equal branch of government.
The scholars were generally too antiseptic in reinforcing that much of what is happening today has ample precedent. Sure, clinical arguments can be made about the existence of considerable past precedents in terms of presidential power, structure, aggressiveness, and overreach, but that’s missing a point the size of Greenland. Quite simply, there has never been a display of presidential overreach more unprecedented than right now in its witch’s brew of cruelty, pain, abuse, revenge, corruption, amateurism, and incompetence. One needs not only to examine the nature, quantity, and politics of presidential overreach, but its content, too. This nation will never fully recover from what is being done to it right now, and that is most certainly without precedent. The economic, national security, and human costs will be staggering.
One of the scholars did make an interesting point in saying that the current president “is Nixon’s revenge on all the ‘enemies’ who brought him down. They share all the same enemies … the media, courts, Harvard.” He added, as well, that the breathtaking corruption in this administration “would have been Nixon’s fever dream.” If only this was all a fever dream and we woke up in a sane, civilized country.
