The Problem with Trump Is Not the Existence of the Executive Branch

Over at the Atlantic, McKay Coppins writes about the prospects of a second Trump term, and includes this paragraph in his assessment, as if its contents were wildly and self-evidently controversial:

Even if mainstream Republicans did want to work for him again, Trump is unlikely to want them. He’s made little secret of the fact that he felt burned by many in his first Cabinet. This time around, according to people in Trump’s orbit, he would prioritize obedience over credentials. “I think there’s going to be a very concerted, calculated effort to ensure that the people he puts in his next administration—they don’t have to share his worldview exactly, but they have to implement it,” Hogan Gidley, a former Trump White House spokesperson, told me.

Okay. As opposed to what? I do not want Donald Trump to become president again. If he is the nominee for president, I am not going to vote for him. And, if he wins the presidency nevertheless, I want him to be harshly checked by the system whenever, and wherever, he attempts to stretch his power. But those are separate questions from Trump’s entirely reasonable expectation that “the people he puts in his next administration — they don’t have to share his worldview exactly, but they have to implement it,” which seems to me to represent about as elementary a premise of our constitutional order as it is possible to state aloud.

Simply put, there is nothing wrong with a president expecting the people within his own branch to follow his instructions — providing that those instructions are consistent with the law. Happily, the American constitutional order still contains a whole bunch of checks and balances that exist to ensure that consistency. But — and this is the key point — those checks and balance exist between branches, not within branches. The president is the only elected official within the executive branch. If he is not in charge of that branch or the policy that it advances, then someone else is in charge. And that is an absolutely enormous problem for our democracy.

Coppins also writes:

Beyond the high-profile posts, the Trump team may have more jobs to fill in 2025 than a typical administration does. [Paul] Dans and his colleagues at Heritage are laying the groundwork for a radical politicization of the federal civilian workforce. If they get their way, the next Republican president will sign an executive order eliminating civil-service protections for up to 50,000 federal workers, effectively making the people in these roles political appointees. Rank-and-file budget wonks, lawyers, and administrators working in dozens of agencies would be reclassified as Schedule F employees, and the president would be able to fire them at will, with or without cause.

I remain astonished that this is controversial, or that it ever became so. If the president cannot fire everyone in the executive branch — and fire anyone in the executive branch for any reason whatsoever — then he is not in control of the executive branch, is he? Coppins suggests that to allow the president to control who works for him is to render “the people in these roles political appointees.” And? They are political appointees. Providing that it is consistent with the will of the democratically ratified Constitution and of the other democratic branch (Congress), all the staff that work in the executive branch are there to execute the will of the guy who was elected. There may be good practical reasons for our presidents to wish to retain a good chunk of the civil service between administrations, and there are certainly solid historical explanations for why we developed a civil service whose low-level, non-policy jobs aren’t doled out as rewards for partisans each time the executive branch changes hands. But that is a wholly discrete matter from whether those presidents are obliged to keep any employees on, which they are not, and which, within the logic of our constitutional framework, they cannot be. A civil service that exists independently of the elected leader of the executive branch is not a part of the executive branch, but separate from it. It is a fourth branch of government. Or, to use a term I don’t particularly like, it is a “deep state.”

Which is all to say that the problem with Trump is Trump. The issue is not that he has a structural view of the executive branch that is consistent with our constitutional system, but that, as his behavior in early 2021 showed, he is likely to use that structure to issue orders that are illegal or immoral or both, and that he will thus need to be checked from the outside. I agree that this presents a challenge — as I’ve said ad nauseam, the man tried to stage a coup, and he should have been impeached for it — but it is a challenge that ought to be met by our refusing to elect him in the first place, and, more broadly, by massively reducing the power that our presidents can wield, by making sure that Congress does its job, and by demanding that our courts are filled of people who will uphold the law as it is written. The Founders installed a good number of prophylactics into our governmental scheme, and precisely none of them involved the establishment of a shadow government within the executive branch that exists to push back against the president when he is wrong. Yes — even when that president is Donald Trump.