Most presidents of the United States have used—and abused—their executive powers upon attaining office. In a balanced constitutional framework, the monarchical powers of the chief executive can be used legitimately to address issues that need immediate attention and cannot wait for the slow deliberative process characteristic of the legislative branch. During the 20th century the presidency grew in its power during the back-to-back emergencies of the Great War, the Great Depression, the Second World War, and the ensuing Cold War. Both political parties were complicit in this accumulation of power at the expense of Congress. Indeed, national crises prompt virtually all governments to assume emergency powers, as we saw during the global COVID pandemic. Whether these powers are used properly is up for debate and the subsequent decisions of the courts, which function, sometimes only in retrospect, as the guarantors of the rule of law.
Upon coming to office in January 2025, President Donald Trump has issued a series of controversial executive orders at a dizzying pace, making it difficult to keep up with them all. According to The American Presidency Project at the University of California Santa Barbara, during his first term Trump issued 220 such orders, as compared to 162 by Joseph Biden and 276 by Barack Obama during his two terms. As of 10 February 2025, the newly inaugurated President Trump had already issued 61 executive orders, more than a third of his predecessor's total for his entire four years in office. Fully 26 of these were issued on inauguration day alone. These orders touch on such controversial issues as “Ending the Weaponization of the Federal Government,” “Ending Radical and Wasteful Government DEI Programs and Preferencing,” and “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
On social media, I have seen some of my contacts post lists of executive orders with which they agree and those with which they disagree. They undoubtedly see this approach as a balanced one that avoids unduly lionizing or deprecating Trump. However, I would suggest that the overuse of executive orders, like their Canadian counterpart, orders in council, is indicative of weakness rather than strength and decisiveness.
A good place to begin in understanding the nature of politics is with Sir Bernard Crick's 1962 classic, In Defence of Politics, which I regularly had my students reading during my thirty years in the classroom. The singular virtue of this book is that it places the political process within a realistic framework free in principle from the anti-political influences of ideology, democracy itself, nationalism, and technology. For Crick the need for politics arises out of the reality of human diversity—that human beings differ with each other in a variety of ways, including material interests and basic understandings of the world. Politics is a way of conciliating peacefully the divergent interests and competing truth claims that present themselves within the public realm. As Crick put it,
Politics is politics, to be valued as itself, not because it is 'like' or 'really is' something else more respectable or peculiar. Politics is politics. The person who wishes not to be troubled by politics and to be left alone finds himself the unwitting ally of those to whom politics is a troublesome obstacle to their well-meant intentions to leave nothing alone (16).
Issuing decrees is a way to avoid the hard work of ordinary politics. It is not the stuff of political leadership. In fact, it may indicate weakness, perhaps a fatal weakness. The would-be autocrat already senses that his policy proposals may not have the needed support to make it through the back and forth negotiations of the regular legislative process. He may not trust his own ability to persuade his colleagues in the legislature to come onside. Better, he assumes, to employ shock and awe tactics—to issue rapid-fire executive orders before anyone else can catch their breath. True, they may not all stand up to judicial scrutiny over the long term, but, as Niccolò Machiavelli counselled half a millennium ago, it is better for the prince to get the unpleasant stuff out of the way as soon as possible rather than drag out the pain and risk alienating the ruled. At least that's one way to interpret President Trump's approach.
However, genuine political leadership requires an official to cultivate good relationships with colleagues and the people he or she claims to lead. It requires one to marshal arguments in favour of one's proposed course of action, to hear possible dissenting voices and to be humble enough to adapt one's ideas in response, to weigh carefully the possible consequences of the proposal, and to build, if not outright unanimity, at least something approaching a consensus for your preferred policy option. Bullying is uncalled for and is likely to backfire by alienating friends and potential allies alike. Observing the niceties of ordinary social intercourse is not an optional extra but a sine qua non of a workable policy with broad acceptance in the population as a whole.
Bypassing all this does not signal strength. It bespeaks a sense of one's own inferiority and an unwillingness to subject one's own proposals to the scrutiny of better minds and wiser judgment. True, there may be occasions when quick action is called for. But when emergency rule overwhelms the normal give and take of politics, politics itself is placed in grave danger.
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