Abolish the Presidency

No human is fit to be President.

Today is Presidents’ Day, our worst holiday, commemorating our worst institution, which is currently at its lowest ebb. Watching the rule of law in America crumble before one’s eyes, it’s hard to keep the focus on a better future, or to navigate between the Scylla of unrealistic radicalism and the Charybdis of useless incrementalism. But I think we can get there, and one way is to focus on a single demand: no more damn presidents.

Pundits and political scientists have been warning us for at least a decade that presidential democracy is inherently unstable and prone to crisis and unraveling. Well, here we are. And it’s worth reflecting on why we don’t yet have a supermajority anti-Trump coalition despite the awfulness of the past month’s continuous crisis and unraveling: in my view, it’s largely because so many people don’t see Trump’s dictatorial deeds as all that out of the ordinary.

I heard this phonebanking for the Harris campaign, I hear it more recently talking to Trump supporters online and through Braver Angels events: where were you, they ask, when Biden or Obama or GW Bush did X or Y or Z? And they have a point, just not the one they think.

Because even though the many abuses of power by recent presidents weren’t a tenth as bad as what Trump is trying to do, they were still unacceptably bad! We never should have tolerated them for a second! Every president of my adult lifetime should have been impeached and removed from office many times over! And the vast majority of us supported at least some of the outrages instead, for the stupid reasons that we liked the guy who did them and/or supported the policy goals he was trying to achieve by doing them.

I like to think I was better than most on this score. I was glad when SCOTUS struck down Biden’s student loan power grab. I warned people when Obama did DACA: yes, we all sympathize with the Dreamers and it sucks that Congress can’t get it together to fix immigration law to legalize them; but do you really want the president to be able to just unilaterally decide not to enforce laws he doesn’t like?

But I was too cautious and incremental. I thought a bit of reform here, a new statute there, could fix the problems I saw and stop the slide toward competitive authoritarianism. When Obama was first elected I said, mindful of the cruelty and illegality of so many GWB presidential actions: “treat him as a Boromir who has just grasped the Ring”. But I didn’t really think through what that metaphor meant.

Because the Boromir strategy has failed, just as Tolkien told us it would. It’s time for Frodo. If we have a contested presidential election in 2028, the candidate of the anti-Trump popular front should be someone who promises not to use the hideously overgrown powers of the Presidency, but to call a constitutional convention to get rid of them. Our next POTUS should be our last.

There are plenty of reasonable options for a replacement. The most tried and true would be a Prime Minister like so many other countries have, elected by the legislature and serving at their pleasure. I still think it’d be worth considering an executive council held in check by a citizens' assembly. But the differences between those options are far less important than the central idea: no single elected official should ever again be allowed to hold anywhere near that much power, for any reason. It attracts the worst people and it brings out the worst in us. No one, not any human being alive today or any who has ever lived or any who is ever likely to live, can redeem the basic evil of holding so much hostage to the whim of a single individual.

It’ll take a serious culture shift—sadly, only likely to be sparked by something much worse than anything the past month has brought— to get us there. Even Reason magazine, in its otherwise well-argued roundup of calls to abolish things, neglected this one. But maybe the silver lining of Trump’s cartoonish, over-the-top depravity is that it will finally force that shift.

In the meantime, for a better human future, we can start banging our little drums now. Presidentia delenda est.