Jack Landman Goldsmith asks an interesting question at the outset of the second Trump administration.
Donald Trump enters his second presidency, as he did his first, pledging to wield executive power in novel and aggressive ways. This is neither new nor necessarily bad. “Presidents who go down in the history books as ‘great’ are those who reach for power, who assert their authority to the limit,” the presidential scholar Richard Pious noted.
But pushing power to the limit does not guarantee presidential success, much less greatness, as Mr. Trump is about to discover. …
… The most successful presidents anticipated problems others did not see, understood the inadequacies of inherited institutions and prodded the nation to a new place in ways that defied prevailing practices and provoked enormous resistance. Think of Jackson and democracy, Lincoln and freedom, Franklin Roosevelt and equality.
But the heroic presidency runs the persistent danger of becoming craven or abusive, as Vietnam and Watergate taught. This is what so many critics worry about with Mr. Trump — that his transformations will be more resonant of Richard Nixon than of our most esteemed presidents.
Yet there is a complementary question that should concern supporters of Mr. Trump: Can he succeed? He has amassed enormous power in his party and is building an intensely devoted administration. Those factors will bring him wins in the short run.
But it takes extraordinary skill to wield executive power successfully throughout an administration. If past is prologue, Mr. Trump lacks the acumen to carry out his ambitious agenda.
The first problem is management style. In his first term, Mr. Trump was a poor administrator because of his mercurial, polarizing style and a general indifference to facts and the hard work of governance. There is no reason to think this will change in his second term. …
… Second is the question of whether Mr. Trump knows where he wants to go. “Great presidents possess, or are possessed by, a vision of an ideal America,” Mr. Schlesinger noted. Mr. Trump has a powerful slogan, “America first,” a robust agenda, and many discrete and often insightful political instincts. But he lacks a coherent sense of the public ends for which he exercises power.
