Noah Feldman, Columnist

The Presidency Can Bend to Fit Trump's Personality

Bush and Obama expanded executive power in ways that reflected their temperaments.

November 27, 2016 at 3:00 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

It's a yuge job.
Photographer: Win McNamee/Getty Images

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Donald Trump is inheriting a more powerful presidency than any of his predecessors. And if history is any guide, he will seek to expand the power of the office. But how will he do it? One clue lies in noticing how the personalities of the last two presidents were reflected in their techniques of expansion. Barack Obama’s administration took a very different route to its expansion of executive authority than did George W. Bush’s -- and Trump’s will probably be different still.

The imperial presidency, as historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it during the Nixon years, always had two faces. The president’s domestic empire grew out of the New Deal expansion of the welfare state, enhanced by regulatory agencies born in the 1960s and ’70s that gave the executive primary authority over the air we breathe and the food and drugs we ingest.