Cut the Presidency Back to Size

August 22, AD 2025 the American Presidency is doing too much

Aug 23, 2025

The news this week is all about the Presidency and the culture so I’ll just stick to that.

Okay we messed up. We forgot how unusually exceptional our Founding Fathers were. They were giants, especially General Washington. We have glossed over how gifted Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, and FDR were. Well we don’t make them like we used to, and that is to be expected. All countries have periods when they operate at a mean that is of quite a bit lower caliber than heights of their pasts. How long since the British had a Churchill or Gladstone figure? How long since France has a leader the stature of De Gaulle? The point is that offices need to be optimized for the mean not for the heroic deviation.

We have made the presidency into a monster that eats average and small figures. It is a beast. Every four years, Americans pretend that one person can be the national therapist, the economic manager, the moral compass, the global visionary, the figure of unity, the head of a political faction, head of arts and research, and the nation's favorite beer buddy. It is no wonder that the office now attracts men who talk big but shrink in stature once the weight of these expectations falls on them. The presidency is a big job, but it does not have to be.

The Constitution gives the president three core responsibilities in Article 2 of the US Constitution

The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.
- The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;
- he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment…he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed
- He shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint Ambassadors, other public Ministers and Consuls

Okay so the president is commander-in-chief, chief federal law enforcement officer, and chief diplomat, which means they have to conduct diplomacy, to investigate the violation of federal law, and to command the military. That is all. Even the other powers of clemency and appointing judges are not part of the day-to-day but can be linked to an extent to the law enforcement responsibilities although the courts are a separate branch. However the rest, everything else—the ribbon cuttings, the speeches at the Kennedy Center, the appointments to arts boards, the presentation of honors—was layered on later. The National Medal of Science did not exist until 1959 and was not awarded until 1963, it is not a timeless part of the president’s job to present it. Congress made those choices, and Congress can unmake them.

The president does not need to appoint the Librarian of Congress.1 He does not need to weigh in on the Smithsonian.2 He does not need to serve as chief patron of American arts or research universities.3 These are assignments Congress invented, distractions from the true duties of the office. The presidency was never designed to be the country's cultural curator. George Washington was an emotional replacement for King George III, no one can fill those shoes, so let’s cut laces, or put them in bronze of something, but stop trying to make our current crop of leaders into Cinderella. The shoe will not fit.

The Problem of Weak Men

This matters because we are living through an epidemic of weak men. Each recent president has arrived to office promising transformation and moral renewal, only to leave diminished. That is partly their own fault. But it is also our fault for imagining the president as head of state, head of government, and national mascot rolled into one. The office has grown into a stage for theatrics. We ask presidents to do everything, and so they do nothing well. And if their character is bad they can wreck more than just politics. Depoliticizing everything will mean getting the presidency out of too many spots.

A president is elected for a political agenda and while we would hope they know history the likelihood these days is they will know very little and so why should we care what they think about museum exhibits? And nothing in the Constitution requires them to be involved in what are really Congressional institutions, the Librarian of Congress has their role in the job title, they are not the Librarian of the Presidency. We are suffering from an inflation of expectations. (Likewise the President should never unilaterally set tariff policy, I mean a tariff is a tax, and Congress cannot just delegate the thing that kicked off the Revolution and expect that nothing bad will happen.)

Rethinking Head of State

There is no reason why the president must also serve as head of state. In other democracies, those roles are separated. Britain has a monarch and a prime minister. Even Germany splits the symbolic from the executive. The United States could experiment too: we could go without one for a time. Better to have no head of state than to fuse symbolic and executive power into one brittle office to be broken by political tantrums. Head of government is enough for the presidency, and reducing the presidency to those roles does not require a Constitutional amendment. It requires imagination and innovation.

This is not radical thinking even if it is not the way we are used to thinking as Americans. It is another failing of the Democrats that they are not discussing a reimagining of the presidency, as too many of them are thinking about how they would do so much better in a job that is clearly dangerously too big. The three main jobs are big enough for the chief executive of a global superpower. In the best of times does the president need to be thinking about the Kennedy Center?4

Congress should begin by stripping away the distractions. Remove the president from arts institutions, cultural boards, and museum oversight. The executive should not be involved in the distribution of research grants. All that can be run by Congress directly as Congress according to the Constitution sets tax policy and authorizes expenditures. The more we ask presidents to dabble in culture and science, the less seriously they take the hard business of diplomacy, law, and war, and the more things which should be political are in danger of political whims and bouts of frenzied point scoring.

Start with the obvious examples. Why should the president appoint the head of the Kennedy Center? Congress created the Kennedy Center, Congress funds it, and Congress should oversee it. The same applies to the Smithsonian, the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities, and dozens of other cultural institutions that have somehow become presidential responsibilities.

This expansion of presidential duties is historically recent. Early presidents understood their role more narrowly because the government itself did less. George Washington established important precedents, but he did not try to manage every aspect of American cultural life. The imperial presidency is largely a 20th-century invention. As the federal government grew, Congress increasingly delegated cultural responsibilities to the executive branch and the G.I. Bill and Cold War competition tied the federal government more directly to research. Putting these things in the president’s hands was convenient for Congress—it meant less work and fewer difficult votes. But convenience is not the same as wisdom.

We can return to the original more limited understanding of the president as Chief Magistrate without losing anything essential. The president's core constitutional duties remain as important as ever. If anything, they have grown more complex and demanding in our interconnected world. Foreign policy requires constant attention to multiple theaters. Federal law enforcement spans cybersecurity, immigration, and anti-terrorism efforts. Military command involves complex interoperability about forces and concentration of enemy capacity to attack or retaliate against the USA. The sort of risks that the Founder did create the presidency to confront. The rest is fluff that creates anxiety and do great harm in the wrong hands.

We need a humble presidency for the era of puffery and self-aggrandizement. The presidency was meant to be a vital but limited and focused office. It has since swollen into a national spectacle.5 If we want stronger, better presidents, we should ask less of them; making the job more circumscribed will also make it less attractive to those who want to stray into culture warring. America does not need a philosopher-king or a celebrity monarch. We need a competent manager of strategy, diplomacy, and crime fighting. Nothing more.

This requires humility from both presidents and the public. The public must accept that presidents are executives, not entertainers or spiritual leaders. Congress must reclaim the responsibilities it has carelessly delegated over the decades. The change would not diminish American democracy or culture. It would strengthen them by clarifying roles and expectations. The presidency will always be a big job. But it does not have to be so much bigger than the men who fill it that all hopes of growing into the office are fantasies rather than practical expectations.

John Adams is not going to reappear like a fairy godfather to nominate a new George Washington, and there is not one to be found anyway. We have to make the presidency fit the times through trimming the office.

Outside the Academy w/ Prof. Thompson

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