By Ian Tuttle
Friday, April 28, 2017
It turns out that being president is hard.
“I loved my previous life. I had so many things going,”
Donald Trump told Reuters in a newly published interview. “This is more work
than in my previous life. I thought it would be easier.”
The president’s plaintive remark should come as no
surprise. This is the same man who, in February, announced: “Nobody knew that
health care could be so complicated.” Donald Trump, the wealthy heir to a
real-estate empire and complete political neophyte, was, compared to any of his
predecessors, uniquely unprepared for what is quite possibly the most difficult
job on Planet Earth. And after 100 days in office, he’s beginning — at least,
in his more introspective moments — to appreciate just how difficult that job
is.
Then again, Barack Obama’s tenure was marked by a similar
lament. “I think it is important to remind everybody that . . . I’m president,
I’m not a king,” he told Univision in January 2013, discussing the possibility
of suspending deportations of non-criminal illegal aliens. “I’m required to
follow the law.” The executive was, he acknowledged, only one of three branches
of government, and that presented structural challenges to advancing his
agenda.
Elected, like his successor, largely on his charisma and
promise to transform “the system,” President Obama found himself flummoxed by
it. He, too, thought the presidency would be easier.
But where Trump’s comments seem tinged with wistfulness —
O, to enjoy unburdened the breeze at Mar-a-Lago! — Obama’s were more often
tinged with frustration. In February 2013, again discussing immigration during
a Google Hangout interview, he was more transparent: “This is something that
I’ve struggled with throughout my presidency. The problem is that, you know,
I’m the president of the United States. I’m not the emperor of the United
States.”
In private, Obama was more forthright about the
challenges of the office. Plotting an approach to the Arab Spring that would
appear supportive of democratic protesters and also protect American interests
proved so difficult, he “told people that it would be so much easier to be the
president of China,” the New York Times
reported in March 2011. “As one official put it, ‘No one is scrutinizing Hu
Jintao’s words in Tahrir Square.’”
The modern presidency, as Barack Obama ultimately
discovered, is an impossible job. The president must be the leader of his
party, but also the leader of the nation — “the only national voice in
affairs,” in the words of Woodrow Wilson, who reshaped the office in the 20th
century. And he must be not only the leader of his nation, but “the leader of
the free world,” on whom the oppressed can look with hope. He must be all
things to all people everywhere — and yet he must remain a citizen among
citizens, abiding by the law.
Obama’s response to this conundrum was to abandon the law
in favor of, as he liked to say, “the right side of history,” an
ends-justify-the-means solution of which Wilson would have approved. Those same
things that he acknowledged, as late as 2013, were beyond his powers, he would
go on to do: granting lawless de facto amnesties to nearly half the illegal
population in the United States under his DACA and DAPA orders; declaring that
neither the nuclear arrangement hammered out with Iran nor the Paris climate
accords were “treaties” so that he could withhold them from Senate
consideration; and unilaterally manipulating the Affordable Care Act when its
measures proved politically costly.
Donald Trump is being mocked as a buffoon for discovering
that the presidency presents unique challenges, especially to those who seek
sweeping and dramatic overhauls of American policy. In fact, he is only
learning the same lesson as his predecessor — and he could do the country a
service merely by rejecting his predecessor’s reckless response to that lesson.
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