The energetic executive

The evening of inauguration day, the new president of the United States sat at his desk, signing one executive order after another. At the same time, he took questions from the press in an ask-anything freewheeling dialogue. And all of this was broadcast live on television. After four years where the prior president hid from public, unscripted questions, it was a notable change. It was not just good entertainment for day one of a presidency. It exemplifies a characteristic that is important to the Constitution’s design for the presidency—the energetic executive.

The Trump performance would have been unimaginable for the previous four years. President Joe Biden rarely interacted with the press or, indeed, with any interlocutors outside of tightly controlled environments. While this was evident to many observers for quite some time, major newspapers waited until the final days of Biden’s presidency to offer detailed reporting on the extent of Biden’s sheltering in the final days of his presidency. Biden’s staff worked assiduously to ensure that he knew exactly what was coming, was prepped to answer, and was doing the interaction at the best time of day when he would present the most energetic appearance and engage with his greatest ability for concentration. Over the course of President Biden’s four years in office, those windows of possibility grew ever narrower.

Donald Trump’s interaction with the press, by contrast, was clearly full of spontaneous give and take. More strikingly, it occurred as the president multi-tasked. White House Staff Secretary Will Scharf stood at President Trump’s side handing him one executive order after another—while Trump kept answering questions. And it wasn’t as though this was the day’s main event. The inauguration ceremony, featuring Trump’s 30-minute inaugural address, had just occurred that morning. Then Trump gave extemporaneous remarks to an overflow crowd at the Capital and to the larger crowd at the Capital One Arena, where he also signed several executive orders in front of the crowd. Back at the White House, he was signing more orders while dialoguing with the press; by the end of day, more than 100 new executive actions had been signed and put into effect. And that was before making the rounds that evening at the inaugural balls. A busy day, by anyone’s reckoning.

The pace has not slowed. The president has produced a seemingly endless barrage of executive orders and actions, while talking to the press and public almost nonstop. Many Americans are hopeful; the GOP is energized; the opposition is not just outraged but overwhelmed. Love him or hate him, no one can deny that Trump has brought a lot of energy to the White House.

The energetic start to Trump’s second term points us to a crucial feature of our constitutional system. An energetic executive is precisely what our Constitution was designed to support.

When Alexander Hamilton wrote his classic analysis of the presidency in The Federalist Papers (No. 70), he minced no words: “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government.” The executive branch has to act and act decisively. The legislative process is not designed for speed, nor is adjudication in the courts. The presidency is—and needs to be. As commander in chief, the president has to be ready to address whatever crisis the nation faces.

The alternative to an energetic executive, Hamilton explained, is a “feeble” executive. A feeble executive will act feebly. And “feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution: And a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be in practice a bad government.”

The designers of the Constitution could not, of course, know who would occupy the office in the future. What they could do was design the Constitution so as to give future presidents the ability to act decisively and energetically.

That is why, Hamilton explained, there is one president, not two and not a council. When multiple people have to agree on any particular action, there’s always the possibility for delay or even gridlock. Checks and balances are, indeed, important in the right context. But checks and balances on military strategy when the battle is underway can be fatal. So “[t]he executive power”—not some, but the entirety—is “vested” in the president by Article II of the Constitution.

As Hamilton explained, decisiveness and promptness “will generally characterise the proceedings of one man, in a much more eminent degree, than the proceedings of any greater number.” So having a single, unitary executive who has the final decision-making power is a key feature of the Constitution’s design for the presidency. President Harry Truman captured the point succinctly with the sign he placed on his desk: “The buck stops here.”

The unitary executive is a key part of America’s constitutional design. But it doesn’t work unless the individual occupying the office of president actually has the energy to do things.

The Biden administration of course did some things. But to what extent did the president act? Everyone now acknowledges that Biden was carefully handled by his staff. It is hardly clear that the presidency functioned as the Constitution anticipated.

Having a flesh-and-blood president signing executive orders in front of a stadium, then signing still more on live television while talking with the press, is a hopeful sign of a change of direction. It places the exercise of executive authority before the people’s eyes, embodied in a single executive rather than an amorphous administrative state. And it embodied an executive with energy and enthusiasm for the job.