The American presidency – the most powerful office in the world – is in some ways a vast group enterprise. Scores of aides oversee various departments, with hundreds of thousands of employees and billion-dollar budgets. The leader of the free world can seem like a kind of “chairman of the board,” sitting atop a massive government bureaucracy that can, and sometimes does, run itself.
But the past two occupants of the Oval Office have revealed pointedly how much the person behind the Resolute Desk really matters – perhaps now more then ever. As the balance of power in the federal government continues to shift toward the executive branch, the actions, or inactions, of the president himself can have a sharp impact on the country.
President Donald Trump’s tariff policy is Exhibit A. His sharp shifts in strategy, which at times apparently even caught top aides off guard, have single-handedly roiled international markets, upended relationships with allies, and created economic uncertainty for businesses. While aides are working to negotiate trade deals and project a sense of stability, it’s clearly Mr. Trump and his lifelong enthusiasm for tariffs driving the policy – sometimes via late-night social media posts.
Why We Wrote This
The U.S. president can seem like a “chairman of the board,” atop a massive bureaucracy that often runs itself. But the Trump and Biden administrations, in different ways, have shown how much the person with the highest executive power matters.
In the case of former President Joe Biden, an overly hands-off approach also proved impactful. Recent reporting about the president’s decline in office suggests that while Mr. Biden was engaged on foreign policy, certain domestic issues seemed to fall through the cracks – like the porous southern border, which the Biden administration did not get a handle on until late in his term.
Mr. Trump lit a fuse on the “Biden competency” discussion Wednesday, when he ordered an investigation into his predecessor’s actions as well as those of Mr. Biden’s staff. This includes determining whether certain actions were taken on his behalf without his knowledge, such as the use of an “autopen” to sign official documents, which the Trump administration says could throw their legality into doubt. In a statement, Mr. Biden called the claims “ridiculous and false.”
But the larger issues around the growing power of the presidency remain. Technically, Congress remains the Article 1 branch of government in the Constitution, with its powers enumerated before those of the president in Article 2. In reality, however, the legislative branch has ceded much power to the executive branch in recent years, as polarization has led to more party-line votes and greater gridlock. The courts, meanwhile, are slow and deliberative, and their rulings have no enforcement mechanism.
In this era of expanded executive power, the president’s team also carries outsize weight – as seen in the thousands of layoffs and departmental closings instigated by billionaire Elon Musk during his five-month stint at the Department of Government Efficiency. But it’s ultimately still the president who selects and directs those team members, for better or worse.
“The presidency can’t really be run by a cabal of faceless bureaucrats,” says Chris Whipple, author of “Uncharted,” a book on the 2024 campaign. “The president matters.”
Less influence on domestic than foreign affairs?
Polling suggests that Americans have always seen their presidents as having a great deal of impact on the military and foreign policy, but less so on domestic issues, where Congress and local governments tend to play a role as well. Still, a new YouGov survey found that 60% of respondents now say the president has “total” or “a lot of” control over tariffs – an indication of how Mr. Trump’s actions are being perceived, and the degree to which he may be held responsible for the results by voters. Tariffs weren’t even a question in a preelection iteration of the YouGov poll, taken in July 2024.
In fact, under the Constitution, tariffs are within Congress’ purview, but under a 1977 statute, that power has accrued increasingly to the president. The issue is likely to land at the Supreme Court.
In President Trump’s second term, analysts say he’s pushing the boundaries of what’s legal and constitutional in carrying out his agenda. And the centrality of the man himself, a compelling and charismatic figure – love him or loathe him – has been made abundantly clear.
The president’s rapid-fire crackdown on immigration also highlights the importance that one person can play in American governance, as he has used emergency powers to secure the southern border, rounded up and deported thousands of unauthorized immigrants, and rescinded the protected status of certain migrants that was bestowed by his predecessor.
Both Mr. Trump’s tariffs and immigration policies are stress-testing the system of checks and balances established by the Founding Fathers, flooding the judiciary with cases that could shape American jurisprudence long into the future.
In his maximalist approach to executive power, Mr. Trump has filled key administration posts with a close eye for loyalty to his agenda. His inner circle is a more cohesive group than in the first term, says an aide who also served in the first Trump administration. This person expresses relief that people like John Kelly, the second of Mr. Trump’s four chiefs of staff in his first term, and other voices of internal dissent aren’t part of Trump 2.0.
Mr. Whipple points to the current Trump chief of staff, Susie Wiles, as particularly effective so far in helping him carry out his agenda.
“The White House is no longer just a battlefield of internecine warfare and backstabbing,” says Mr. Whipple, also author of the 2017 book “The Gatekeepers: How the White House Chiefs of Staff Define Every Presidency.”
The importance of internal debate
Other observers, however, note that there are downsides to having a staff that often operates as cheerleaders and actively refrains from telling the president hard truths.
“Most presidents in the past have recognized the importance of dissenting views and talking to people who disagree with him on various grounds … because they don’t want to make a mistake,” says Terry Moe, a professor emeritus of political science at Stanford University. But Mr. Trump “thinks that he knows all kinds of things that actually he doesn’t know. And that people need to get in line.”
That suggests things like ego can also play a greater role. Last Friday, a reporter asked the president a question about “TACO,” an internet meme about the on-again-off-again tariff threats that stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
The president hadn’t heard the term before and took offense. “Nasty question,” he snapped. Then he recovered: “It’s called negotiation.”
Former President Biden also surrounded himself with aides who not only avoided telling the president what he didn’t want to hear but also, according to reporting in a new book, “Original Sin,” actively worked to hide the president’s mental and physical decline from the public.
Mr. Whipple’s book about the 2024 campaign comes to a somewhat different conclusion. “Biden’s closest advisers were lost in a fog of denial and delusion” themselves, he says. “They believed, many of them, that Biden could win [a second term]. They still believe it.”
To be sure, Mr. Biden boasts a record of accomplishment, from getting the country through the COVID-19 pandemic to making massive infrastructure investments to addressing climate change. But he was rarely exposed to the press for more than quick unscripted encounters for much of his term, and seemed increasingly trapped in a bubble.
Despite their differences, both presidents share a common attribute: a fervent belief in himself. “I alone can fix it,” Mr. Trump famously said in his 2016 GOP convention speech, referring to a government that he said was letting down everyday Americans.
Mr. Biden, in his failed 2024 campaign, held to the view that he alone could defeat Mr. Trump, having beaten him in the 2020 election, according to multiple books examining last year’s race. Mr. Biden interpreted the Democrats’ better-than-expected 2022 midterm results as a vote of confidence in his leadership, blowing past his 2020 statement that he’d be a “bridge” to the next generation of Democratic leadership – strongly suggesting he’d be a one-term president.
In the end, the former president was forced from the race last July after a disastrous debate with Mr. Trump, effectively handing the nomination to Vice President Kamala Harris.
