This editorial originally ran on February 17, 2025.
Today is a federal holiday. Our popular culture and even the law in some states now refer to the holiday as “Presidents Day.” That habit started by effectively combining the mid-February birthdays of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. It has been corrupted over time into something like a generalized celebration of Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the other 43 highly varied men who preceded them in holding the nation’s highest office.
This is wrong as a matter of law and history: The holiday is still Washington’s birthday. It is also a symptom of a veneration of the imperial presidency that is un-republican and would have horrified the Founding Fathers.
Washington well deserves his own holiday, as we argued last year. On the books, he still has it: Americans have celebrated his birthday since 1778, and it has been an official federal holiday since 1879. Congress, in the 1968 Uniform Monday Holiday Act, moved the date from Washington’s actual birthday (February 22) to the third Monday in February as a giveaway to federal employee unions and the travel industry, both of whom value three-day weekends more highly than our historical patrimony.
Lincoln, born February 12, deserves a holiday as much as any American, but standalone celebrations of Lincoln have been in decline. Black History Month was originally situated in February in the 1920s because the month contains the birthdays of both Lincoln and Frederick Douglass, but it is not Lincoln’s holiday. His legacy belongs to Americans of all races, as he would have wished it to.
We celebrate Washington and Lincoln not for the offices they inhabited but for what they did for their country. In Washington’s case, that extends well beyond his actions as president. In Lincoln’s case, some of his finest moments came in the service of a campaign for the Senate that he lost. Both men understood that public office is a means, not an end.
The presidency is not an honor; it is a trust. It is sometimes bestowed upon men such as Trump, Richard Nixon, and Lyndon Johnson with the aid of voters who do not especially love or admire those men, but see them as the right tool for the job at the right moment. The voters can take it away, as they have done to eleven presidents. They reserve the right to change their minds, as they did when they re-hired Trump and Grover Cleveland after cashiering them. The people amended the Constitution to ensure that no man could hold it for life. The people rule; the president merely presides.
The Founders regarded executive power as at best a necessary evil. The Articles of Confederation placed such power in a Committee of the States, which could “appoint one of their number to preside; provided that no person be allowed to serve in the office of president more than one year in any term of three years.” When this proved inadequate, the Constitution made the presidency separate from the Congress and gave the office significant independent powers and vigor. But it was still designed to be subordinate to Congress — a “chief magistrate” executing the laws rather than a lawgiving ruler.
The Constitution bans titles of nobility, and after some debate about what honorific would be sufficient to place the president on an equal footing with foreign crowned heads, the early republic settled on the simple “Mr. President.” Washington dressed in the civilian clothes of a private citizen, and allowed James Madison to talk him out of giving an inaugural address that would have proposed a legislative program. Thomas Jefferson converted the State of the Union speech into a written message, regarding the pomp of the speech as too monarchical (sadly, the speech was revived by Woodrow Wilson for exactly that reason). Presidents once held open receptions to shake hands with the general public. John Adams answered the White House door. Ulysses S. Grant drove his own carriage and paid a speeding ticket when pulled over. James Garfield was shot while waiting for a train escorted only by his secretary of state.
Washington also established the tradition that presidents typically leave the capital and public office and go home. Unpopular and unsuccessful presidents such as James Buchanan and Franklin Pierce lived as outcasts after leaving office. Other than those who returned to Congress or the judicial bench, only Wilson and Barack Obama stayed on living in D.C.
We have strayed from the humble, republican concept of the presidency and its inhabitants. Partly this was necessary and inevitable. Modern presidents can talk directly to the people using technology that didn’t exist then; they command a global position that America didn’t have before 1945; they don’t answer the door or travel alone anymore for security reasons. But they also now dominate public attention and command a vast executive apparatus. The dysfunctions of Congress have ceded much domestic policymaking to the executive. Presidents have lifelong Secret Service protection and keep their title after leaving office. They make a fortune giving speeches just to be heard. Presidential libraries have become multimillion-dollar monuments devoted to reputational defense. We crossed another Rubicon when Biden pardoned his entire family to forestall inquiry into the sources of their fortune.
If the monarchical trappings and powers of the modern presidency are unavoidable, we at least should not encourage them. Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court has its own holiday. The presidency doesn’t and shouldn’t. The holiday belongs to Washington.