PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS: Axios Bungles the ‘Imperial Presidency.’

Axios has published a report this morning titled, “Behind the Curtain: The imperial presidency in waiting,” in which it proposes that, if he is reelected, Donald Trump “promises an unabashedly imperial presidency.” And I’m sorry to record that it’s . . . well, it’s almost entirely garbage.

I truly write that more in sorrow than in anger. We really do need to limit the power of the presidency, and, if it takes fear of Donald Trump to do it, I’m all in. Certainly, that fear is not imagined. Like Barack Obama before him, and Joe Biden after him, Trump was guilty of attempting to usurp Congress’s lawmaking powers, and, as I have written and said 359,701 times by now, he should have been impeached in January 2021 for interfering with Congress. But, as quickly becomes clear, Axios does not actually understand the problem that it believes itself to be warning about, and, as a result, those warnings fall flat.

The term “imperial presidency” was coined by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., and it signifies two things: (1) the enormous growth of the president’s war powers over time, and (2) the president’s intrusion into areas that are supposed to be managed by Congress. Schlesinger was horribly biased as an analyst, and prior to his anti-imperial phase, he was one of the country’s most vocal champions of the presidency, but the phenomenon he described was real — and, if anything, it has got worse since he published his book in 1973. Unfortunately, though, what Axios includes as supposed examples of Schlesinger’s theory are not, in fact, examples of Schlesinger’s theory.

But the left, as Charles Cooke implies above, loves the “imperial presidency” — as long as they’re the party presiding over the empire.

QED: