An Unprecedented Presidency?
The unorthodox, unusual, and in many ways, unprecedented presidency of Donald Trump has not only clearly challenged longstanding expectations of the public and the Washington âpolitical class,â but also the accumulated wisdom of the scholarly community. An extreme outsider, as the first President with no formal governing experience, Trump has done things differently, acting and communicating in ways unlike previous occupants of the office. His egoistic bluster, brusque style, refusal to divest himself of his businesses, use of close family members and business associates as official advisors or aides, and especially, his breaking of behavioral and verbal traditions, set him apart. For example, âTrumpâs norm-shattering rhetoric deviates from that of his predecessors butâŠ[it] both certified Trumpâs authenticity as a change candidate to a constituency eager for disruption of politics-as-usual, [and] now complicates his ability to govern in a political system still accustomed to those conventionsâ (Jamieson and Taussig 2017).
On the other hand, it could be that Trumpâs presidency is not unique or even so unusual (see Herbert et al. 2019), and merely serves as a flamboyant footnote in the presidential studies literature. Indeed, as Trump himself has discovered, in other respects, like presidents before him, he is but oneâalbeit the most visible, and vocalâactor in the US political system.
One way to understand the frenetic, protean presidency of Donald Trump is to look to scholarly analyses of the office and earlier presidents. It seems fitting, then, to turn to one of the âclassicâ works in presidential studies, Richard E. Neustadtâs Presidential Power (1960, 1990) to do so. His work broke new ground in the field by focusing on the personal and behavioral capacities of the individual in the Oval Office. A personal-power approach seems well-suited for explaining the turbulent trajectory of Donald Trumpâs tenure, especially given the focus of so much attention is on him; and indeed, he appears to want it that way.
Neustadt diverged from the scholarly conventions of his day by viewing the office from the perspective of the person holding it and the realities of presidential influence, rather than formal duties, roles and powers of the institution. Notably, his starting point was more political practice than theory. Having worked in the Truman Administration, upon becoming a professor at Columbia, he found academic views of the office âvery remote from what I had experiencedâ (quoted in Ellis and Nelson 2020, p. 134).
His book was in a sense the Dale Carnegie guide for presidents. As one scholar put it, âhis work is a veritable manual of personal power: how to get it, how to keep it, how to use it. [Journalist] James Reston called it the nearest thing America has to Machiavelliâs The Princeâ (Cronin 1980, p. 121). It launched the study of presidential power and behavior, and remains influential today. Another scholar recently noted that the âcore argument of Presidential Power is now more than a half-century old, but it has aged wellâ (Dickinson 2020, p. 137).
What the Book Does
This book attempts to make sense of the Trump presidency using the lens of Neustadtâs seminal work. It argues that his key elements of presidential persuasion, as well as other precepts, on âhow to be an effective presidentâ forged six decades ago help explain Trumpâs performance and especially struggles in office. Thus in some important ways, Trumpâs experience bears out the wisdom of the guidelines and model Neustadt enunciatedâlargely in disaffirming, or reverse fashionâbut in other respects Trump defies expectation. The explanation for this paradox is largely because the political and governing environment of today differs enough that it has so far allowed Trump to survive, if not thrive, in the contemporary world of DC politics. In that sense, just as Neustadt updated his work to fit new times, so does this effort, in an attempt to illuminate both the Trump presidency and the field more generally. To do so, it is important to first review the main components of Neustadtâs perspective.
Brief Review of Neustadt and His Model
Others have provided useful summaries and reviews of his major work and its updates (e.g., Cronin 1980; Cronin and Genovese 1998; Edwards 2000; Shapiro et al. 2000), which I highly recommend and will not try to duplicate. Still, since his model and ideas will be applied to Trumpâs presidency in subsequent chapters, and form the basis for those analyses, a discussion of his workâs major points follows.
Bargaining and the Power to Persuade
Neustadt is most famous for his adaptation of a quote by Harry Truman, that âpresidential power is the power to persuadeâ (1990, pp. 101â111). Rarely could presidents give commands, and even then they usually were a last resort. His innovative and key insight was that, beyond limited formal powers, viewed from the Oval Office, the presidency was more a source of potential weakness than strength. Neustadt rightly noted the distinction between powers and power. Grants of formal power in many cases did not translate into ârealâ power, or influenceâor, as President Lyndon Johnson once quipped, ââŠthe only power Iâve got is nuclear, and I canât even use that!â (quoted in Zelizer 2015).
Because of the fragmented, shared, and conflictual nature of the American system, presidents had to be active advocates and power brokers. Simply put, his model was one of elite bargaining, and importantly for presidents to remember, bargaining necessarily means compromise. Yet one can bargain from a position of strength or weaknessâtherefore, what determines the presidentâs bargaining context?
According to Neustadt, presidential power was related to three main sources. First, were bargaining advantages in the job itself, âwith which to persuade other men [sic] that what he wants of them their own responsibilities require them to do too. Second are the expectations of those others regarding his ability and will to use the various advantages they think he has. Third are those menâs [sic] estimates of how his public views him and of how their publics may view them if they do what he wantsâ (1990, p. 150).
The presidentâs âvantage pointâ in the Oval Office, or his intersection with other actors in the political system, along with their reciprocal personal and professional needs, gave presidents one set of advantages. Similarly, in related fashion were the responsibilities, authority and gravitas of the position itself.
Furthermore, the two main components of presidential power, which determined the strength of the presidential hand, were what he called reputation (elite support) and prestige (popular support) .
Reputation
Presidential reputation is the standing, at any one time, of the president in the minds of others with whom he must deal in governing and policy-making (pp. 50â72). Neustadt defined it as âthe impressions in the Washington community about the skill and will with which he puts those things to useâ (p. 185).
Neustadt, writing from the perspective of the Washington of the 1950s, where governing was conducted largely through interactions between elites, often behind closed doors, saw reputation as crucial to success. Presidents must guard it at all costs, for its loss meant the loss of influence: âwhat other men [sic] think of him becomes a cardinal factor in the presidentâs own power to persuadeâ (p. 52).
Prestige
Support of the public outside the Beltway is also a currency of presidential power (pp. 73â90). Popular support is especially important in dealing with members of Congress, but even unelected officials in the bureaucracy and courts, interest group representatives, and foreign officials, must take into account the degree to which the nation is behind the president. As presidents themselves, such as Lincoln and Wilson, have noted, a president with an aroused public on their side is more formidable than one whom the public distrusts, disapproves, or ignores.
Presidents must thus worry about their public standing as well, to the degree they can. But Neustadt astutely noted that many of the forces impacting prestige were out of a presidentâs control, and the public only paid attention when presidentially relevant events touched their lives. âA president concerned to guard prestige must keep his eye on the hopes and what happens to those hopes for lives lived outside Washington⊠what threatens his prestige is popular frustrationâ (p. 83).
Of course, merely having these main ingredients in place does not equal a complete dish. How presidents manage their power is crucial too. As Cronin (1980, p. 124) summarized it, â[p]residential power is not easy to come by and even the most skillful presidents⊠[will have to be flexible], always sensitive to the need for multiple channels of influence, always frugal in using power resources to get their way, and always employing the art of persuasion in bargaining situations, thereby avoiding at almost all costs the direct issuance of a controversial commandâ [emphasis added]. To Neustadt, then, it was the ability to get others to do things without force, and with as few concessions as possible, that was the real measure of presidential power. I thus use these ideas and concepts to analyze the behavior of Donald Trump and to a lesser degree the record of the Trump presidency through its first two to three years.
What Follows
This section provides an overview of the remainder of the book. Before actually applying Neustadtâs model, Chapter 2 first briefly makes the case that Trump has been rather unimpressive in terms of accomplishments, and arguably has been a subpar president. It documents a number of struggles he ha...