By Nick Catoggio
Wednesday, March
19, 2025
The further the right drifts from classical liberalism,
the deeper it sinks into leftist modes of thought.
Identity
politics. Centrally
planned economies. Simping
for Russia. When I was a kid—and by “kid,” I mean until I was in my early
40s—that was pinko stuff.
Another left-wing idea of more recent vintage that the
right has warmed up to is the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency.
In 2014, Barack Obama was mired in Year 4 of being
stymied by a Republican House majority dedicated to obstructing him at every
turn. Frustrated liberals who’d been promised a golden age of Hope and Change
demanded to know why the president wasn’t doing more to break the stalemate. He
should use his powers!
To which smart Democratic wonks like Brendan
Nyhan and Ezra Klein replied: Which powers?
“The belief that the president can achieve any political
or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics” is
how Nyhan defined what he derisively called “the Green Lantern Theory of the
Presidency.” For those who don’t know, the Green Lantern is a comic-book
superhero who’s capable of generating immense amounts of force but only by
mustering a similarly immense amount of courage and will.
That’s not how politics works in a system where federal
power is divided among three branches and enumerated in a written Constitution,
Nyhan and Klein reminded dejected Democrats.
Granted, some presidents’ abilities are more superheroic
than others’. Nyhan cited Ronald Reagan as an example of a leader whose
communication skills rallied the public behind his agenda and Lyndon Johnson as
a master of twisting congressional arms to move landmark legislation. The White
House isn’t powerless to influence American politics. But in the end, if
Congress says no and the courts say no, there’s no Green Lantern scenario in
which the president can simply will his way into getting what he wants.
Donald Trump’s second term will be an extended attempt to
rebut that claim. Do presidents really lack super powers, or did prior
presidents simply fail to summon the requisite courage to smash
through institutional
obstacles to their wishes? There’s no Green Lantern figure in a liberal
system of government—but there sure is in a fascist one. That’s sort of the
point.
Trump’s popular image as a political superhero is
important to understanding why he behaves as he does, I think, and why so many
of his policies end up as goofy garbage. Superheroes are expected to act
boldly, impose their will, and achieve things that mere mortals can’t, and the
president is very eager to meet those expectations. As he once
famously said, “I alone can fix it!” That’s been his de facto motto for
going on 10 years.
The problem with having a president who’s obsessed with
proving that he can achieve things others can’t is that the things he ends up
achieving are often quite stupid.
The hero’s journey.
Barack Obama was brimming with superhero potential when
he took office in 2009.
He’d been elected in a national landslide with the most
popular votes of any candidate in U.S. history. His party had won huge
majorities in Congress. He’d broken a momentous racial barrier by becoming the
country’s first black president. And he was an “outsider,” or as much of one as
a sitting senator could be. He’d risen from obscurity in 2004 to win the White
House just four years later at the tender age of 47. He wasn’t of the system;
he was here to save America from it.
He had youth, charisma, a “coalition of the ascendant”
behind him, and the numbers in the House and Senate to move any legislation he
wanted. That’s as close to becoming the Green Lantern as a traditional
president gets. No wonder liberals couldn’t cope when the GOP clobbered
Democrats in the 2010 midterms and their superhero president’s powers
disappeared overnight, a mere two years into what would end up being an
eight-year tenure.
Two presidential election cycles later, Trump gave
Republicans their own superhero as leader.
He was a true outsider, having never held office before
and given to speaking in ways that no politician would. The TV game show he
hosted solidified him as a national celebrity and bestowed upon him, laughably,
a reputation as a business genius. He inflated
his wealth and whispered to the tabloids about
his sexual exploits to cultivate an image as the ultimate alpha male. And
his pitch to voters leaned heavily on protecting them from threats like the
many rapists
supposedly pouring into the country from Mexico.
He would clean up the streets of Gotham, beginning with
“the swamp” inside the Beltway.
To a far greater degree than Obama, a Trump presidency
portended something radically more transgressive than what had come before.
Obama was a mainline neoliberal Democrat, a lawyer by training, and a creature
of party politics, like nearly every other Democrat in government. Trump was a
nationalist in a party of conservatives, evinced not the faintest respect for
the constitutional scheme, and has only ever seemed to regard the Republican
Party as a vehicle for his own ambitions. In fact, he’s spent the last 10 years
demonstrating superhuman political strength by vanquishing “villains” in his
own party who dared to cross him.
Both men’s supporters had messianic ambitions for them
early on but most of the gas for Obamamania had gone out of the left by the
time he was reelected in 2012. Trump is the opposite: Between his ruthless
dominance of his party, his improbable victory over the “deep state” that
sought to imprison him, and his stature as the first Republican in 20 years to
win the popular vote, he’s more of a national savior to populist fanatics now
than he was in 2016. They’re expecting a superhero in his second term, even
more so than in his first.
So that’s what he’s striving to give them. Befitting his
identity as the Green Lantern, the president is constantly trying to prove that
he’s willing and able to accomplish things no other president could.
Take Russia. (Please!)
Performative dynamism.
On Tuesday, Trump excitedly
announced that his latest phone call with Vladimir Putin had gone well and
that both sides of the war had agreed to immediately halt attacks against the
other’s infrastructure and energy supplies.
A few hours later, Russian bombs began falling on
Ukraine. One knocked out the
power in the city of Slovyansk.
That wasn’t all. Although Ukraine had already agreed
to the White House’s demand for a full 30-day ceasefire, the Kremlin declared
after Putin’s call with Trump that no progress will be made toward settling the
conflict until Ukraine’s western allies completely cut off weapons and
intelligence to Kyiv. That’s an unserious demand, tantamount to rejecting peace
talks entirely. Even if Trump is willing to comply, European nations won’t be.
In other words, the Russians made Trump look like a
chump, and an ego as fragile as the president’s normally wouldn’t tolerate
that. But Putin has an ace in the hole: He knows that the Green Lantern
promised many times during last year’s campaign that he’d end the war in
Ukraine “in
24 hours.” Trump has now begun to inch
away from that pledge—he says he was “being a little bit sarcastic”—but he
can’t give up on peace due to Russian recalcitrance without conceding that his
peacemaking abilities aren’t so superheroic after all.
To prove that he can broker a truce that no one else
could broker—he alone can fix!—he’s stuck humoring Moscow, potentially forcing
concessions on Ukraine in the name of securing a deal that are so
repellent even nations as illiberal as Turkey will struggle
to condone them. The demands of being a superhero have left Trump in a weak
negotiating position destined to produce an embarrassing settlement that favors
Russia. No wonder Putin is driving a hard bargain.
Forget foreign policy, though. How about deportations? If
there’s one aspect of domestic policy in which MAGA voters are expecting feats
of political strength beyond what any mere mortal president could achieve,
that’s it.
Last weekend, the White House delivered. Trump invoked
the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a statute previously used only in wartime, to
authorize deporting
certain criminal “invaders” without the usual due process for immigrants.
That’s precisely the sort of Green Lantern-ism that liberals like Brendan Nyhan
and Ezra Klein struggled to imagine in 2014. The president has lots of
“emergency” powers under the law that he can exploit if only he has the
ruthless will and imagination to try.
The one little catch is that some of the “gang members”
shipped off to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act … might not be gang
members.
If you believe their relatives (a big “if”), some were
misidentified based on tattoos that resembled
gang insignias and sent to rot in a banana-republic dungeon without any
chance to plead their innocence to a judge. Trump’s need to prove that not even
due process can resist his border-enforcing super powers may have left
law-abiding asylum-seekers stranded in a nightmare with no easy legal remedy.
If true, that’s morally atrocious—and I suspect it’ll also be politically
atrocious if the public starts paying attention to the plight of the deportees.
Everywhere you look in Trump’s first 60 days back in
office, you’ll find him asserting outlandish abilities to shape events that his
predecessors seldom or never claimed, all with lousy consequences for the
country.
Other presidents have imposed “emergency” tariffs, for
instance, but none in my lifetime has done so as prolifically, arbitrarily, or destructively
as Trump has, effectively seizing control of U.S. trade policy. Other
presidents have pressured American allies to comply with our wishes, but I’ve
never seen one muse
about annexing a neighbor, wrecking relations between our two countries to
no obvious policy end. Other presidents have cut spending, but no one has
dispatched a team of shadowy tech bros to dismantle federal agencies
surreptitiously and possibly
illegally.
DOGE is the purest expression of Trump’s Green Lantern
identity, I think, because the ratio of performative dynamism to actual results
is so large. Not only has
it not saved much money, there’s a chance it’ll cost taxpayers
dollars as lawsuits pile up, agency inefficiencies mount, and the IRS’ ability
to collect
revenue erodes. It’s terrible policy—but it’s fantastic theater.
What is Elon Musk if not a superhero in his
own right, possessed of an historic fortune, consumed with visiting Mars,
and now kicking down the doors of villainous federal bureaucracies to tear out
supposedly wasteful spending by the roots?
He and Trump are doing things no one thought possible and
they’re doing them fast, heightening the mystique they’ve cultivated as
men of extraordinary ability and indomitable will who intend to change the
world whether existing institutions are ready or not. Bold action, daring
reforms, garbage results: We have a Green Lantern presidency at last.
Chicken and egg.
Which leaves us with an interesting question. Does Donald
Trump want to be a superhero because he’s an authoritarian or is Donald Trump
an authoritarian because he wants to be a superhero?
I typically approach his gambits as fascist strategic
ploys aimed at consolidating power under the executive branch. Everything I
mentioned above can be analyzed that way. He’s going easy on Putin in Ukraine
negotiations because he hopes to re-create Putinism here at home; he’s siccing
DOGE on federal agencies because he’s keen to purge the government of rival
“liberal” power blocs; he’s flouting due process in deporting gang members
because he wants to get the public on his side in
delegitimizing the courts; he’s tariff-ing his brains out because he wants
the whole world to have to beg him for
their livelihoods; he’s menacing Canada because seizing neighboring
countries is just kind of what fascists obsessed with “national greatness” do.
His Green Lantern aspirations flow from his illiberalism,
one might conclude, which is why Barack Obama was a poor match for the theory.
The most distinctive “super power” Trump wields, in fact, is the certainty that
if you resist him you’ll be threatened by the White House politically and
economically and threatened by the scummiest elements of his base in
more visceral ways.
But not every Trump political gambit lends itself so
easily to strategic logic.
What’s the strategic logic, for example, of vowing to
convert Gaza into a resort? What was the supposed strategic logic of holding a
photo op with Kim Jong Un in 2019? Is there really a strategic rationale
behind slapping tariffs on Canada and Mexico, then lifting them, then slapping
them on and lifting them again?
When the president strong-arms nations like
Ukraine and Canada while playing nice with international cancers like
Russia and China, is it because of his ideological affinity for the latter? Or
is it a simpler matter that smaller powers can be successfully bullied and
major ones can’t? A superhero always wins in the end, after all, and it’s a lot
easier to “win” over weak allies than hostile enemies.
And yes, Taiwanese readers should find that ominous.
His interest in Gaza and in meeting Kim are more easily
explained as efforts to distinguish himself as a singular figure willing to
venture where his predecessors didn’t dare. No other president would be so bold
(or dumb) as to propose resolving the Israeli-Palestinian with a bit of ethnic
cleansing and seaside development. No other president would take the
political risk of meeting with a global pariah like Kim. No other president
would toy with the American economy by imposing and then un-imposing tariffs on
two of the country’s biggest trade partners as a matter of whim.
Only a leader endowed with superhuman courage and
willpower is willing to confront and shatter the constitutional and
international norms that have governed the world for the last 80 or so years.
Trump is accomplishing things no other president could—or would want to. He’s a
superhero.
Liberals wanted a Green Lantern behind the Resolute Desk
10 years ago. Now we have one. How do you like it?
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