The Left’s Hypocrisy About the ‘Imperial Presidency’

An energetic executive is a positive when it is a liberal, not so much in a conservative.

In Federalist 70, Alexander Hamilton wrote that “Energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks. It is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws, to the protection of property ... [and] to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction and of anarchy.” Liberal scholars and observers quote Hamilton approvingly when liberal Democrats occupy the White House. When, however, conservative Republicans exercise executive power with the zeal of a Hamiltonian, the left screams “imperial presidency.” They are doing that now with Donald Trump in the White House. “Trump,” Doyle McManus writes, “is creating an imperial presidency.” The Economist tells us that with Trump’s election in 2024, America has “an imperialist president for the first time in over a century.” The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward told MSNBC shortly after the 2024 election that Trump appeared to “be trying to recreate the ‘imperial presidency.’” The Washington Monthly headlined an anti-Trump column by James Zirin, “Trump’s Imperial Presidency.” Edward Luce in the Financial Times writes that one of Trump’s goals is to “recreate the imperial presidency that was buried in the mid-1970s after Richard Nixon’s resignation.” The reference to Nixon is no accident. In 1973, Kennedy court historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote a book titled The Imperial Presidency, which decried President Nixon’s quest for presidential supremacy and labeled it a danger to the republic. Schlesinger, of course, praised energy in the executive branch when it flowed from the likes of Democrats such as Andrew Jackson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy. It didn’t matter that Schlesinger’s hero presidents forcibly removed native Americans from their lands (Jackson), ordered the internment of more than 100,000 innocent American residents of Japanese ancestry (FDR), used the...