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May 5, 2025 
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 | By John Guida Senior staff editor, Opinion politics |
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President Trump has been widely criticized for his aggressive, some argue unconstitutional, use of executive power. But in a guest essay, Jack Goldsmith suggests that while the president has gone to an extreme place, others — like George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden — also unwisely pushed the powers of the presidency.
In a brief Q&A with Goldsmith, I dug a little deeper into his guest essay and the relationship of presidents to power.
President Trump has sidelined the Office of Legal Counsel, where you worked during the George W. Bush administration. How much has that contributed to the way he has approached legal issues?
The Office of Legal Counsel traditionally resolved major issues about the legality of presidential action, including executive orders. While O.L.C. has a pro-executive branch bent, it also has precedents and practices that constrain presidential action. Sidelining it thus eliminates an important legal check from within the executive branch on presidential discretion and in that respect is part of a larger Trump 2.0 trend.
What’s the difference between the usual, unremarkable change in personnel from one administration to the next and one that pushes the expansion of presidential power?
There is an upper crust of political appointees, some Senate approved, that a president can fire at will. And then there are lower-level executive branch officials with statutory protection from firing.
Hiring and firing in the former category is uncontroversial. It is the latter category where Trump has pushed the envelope, by claiming novel statutory and constitutional prerogatives to fire heads of independent agencies and civil servants of various sorts.
Who was the most restrained president since, say, Woodrow Wilson?
Jimmy Carter was the most self-consciously constrained president. He was also considered by many a failed president. There is a paradoxical lesson here captured by Clinton Rossiter’s adage that if a president is not “widely and persistently accused in his own time of ‘subverting the Constitution,’ he may as well forget about being judged a truly eminent man by future generations.” Rossiter had in mind presidents like Lincoln and F.D.R. Trump is testing whether there is a causal connection between charges of subversion and later eminence.
Read the guest essay:
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