Gene Healy
The pivotal moment in the September 10 debate came roughly 28 minutes in when Vice President Kamala Harris successfully baited the world’s most baitable man. If you attend a Trump rally, she told the audience, you’ll “notice that people start leaving his rallies early out of exhaustion and boredom.” On the split-screen, the former president’s eyes visibly widened, and you could almost see self-restraint and message discipline leaving his body. It was off to the races from there.
Though it got lost in the multicar pileup that followed, I found what Harris said next more interesting. As Trump fumed, the vice president continued:
“And I will tell you the one thing you will not hear [Trump] talk about is you. You will not hear him talk about your needs, your dreams, and your, your desires. And I’ll tell you, I believe you deserve a president who actually puts you first. And I pledge to you that I will.”
Your needs; your dreams; your desires. What sort of job is this supposed to be anyway? Throughout the evening, Harris unspooled a vision of the office that evoked life-coach-with-nuclear-weapons or HR-administrator-gone-berserk. “I’d invite you to know,” she proclaimed at one point, “that Donald Trump actually has no plan for you”—hardly the most terrifying charge that’s been laid against Trump, and possibly less menacing than the notion that President Harris will “wake up every single day thinking about you and your families.” Please… don’t?
In fairness, Donald Trump’s conception of presidential power and responsibility, while less touchy-feely, is equally unhinged. Examples are legion: “I alone can fix it”; “I will give you everything”; “If I win all the bad things happening in the US will be “rapidly reversed.” If elected, he said on Tuesday, he’ll get “the Middle East… settled and fast,” and end the war in Ukraine “even before becoming president.”
For her part, Harris promised to provide “discourse about how we’re going to invest in the aspirations and the ambitions and the dreams of the American people”; she’ll be a president, she pledged in her closing statement, who will ask us, “are you ok?”
Are we ok? Maybe not, if we no longer even notice when presidential candidates talk about the position they seek as if it’s a combination of guardian angel, shaman, and supreme warlord of the earth.
Some 15 years ago, I wrote a book arguing that “Americans’ unconfined conception of presidential responsibility is the source of much of our political woe and some of the gravest threats to our liberties.” In The Cult of the Presidency: America’s Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power, I made the case that, for far too long, Americans have looked to the presidency for far too much. As a result, the officeholder wields powers that no one fallible human being ought to have: “The Imperial Presidency is the price of making the office the focus of our national hopes and dreams.”
It’s a message that remains depressingly relevant today, which is why Cato has just released an updated edition of The Cult of the Presidency. In an extensive new preface, I take stock of what’s changed in the years since Cult was published, as our politics grew increasingly feral, and the “most powerful office in the world,” even more powerful. More than ever before, I argue, in Election 2024, the presidency itself is the problem.
Credit (or blame?) for the re-release goes to my colleagues in Cato’s books department, who looked out upon our ongoing national nightmare and perceived a marketing opportunity—a chance to put Cult’s themes in front of a new set of readers. They pressed me to update the book for a fall release (“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”), and I submitted the manuscript the first week of June. Here’s how the new preface originally described the 2024 state of play:
This coming November, we face the second matchup between a man who ginned up a riot hoping to intimidate Congress into overturning the results of an election he’d lost, and a sundowning octogenarian whom 69 percent of Democrats consider “too old to effectively serve.” Little wonder, then, that according to a 2023 voter survey, the most prevalent sentiment in this election cycle is “dread” (41 percent), followed by “exhaustion” (34 percent). Toward the end of Cormac McCarthy’s novel Suttree, the ne’er-do-well protagonist, having lately recovered from a barfight skull fracture followed by a bout of typhoid fever, muses to himself: “There are no absolutes in human misery and things can always get worse.” So here we are.
That last bit still holds, but the rest of the passage has been overtaken by events. First, on June 27, a stumbling, shambolic debate performance laid bare the extent of President Biden’s decline. Then, as pressure mounted on Biden to withdraw, the nation watched former President Donald Trump survive an assassination attempt by mere inches, thanks to a chance turn of the head. Eight days later, in a cryptic note released via the social media platform X, President Biden announced his decision to bow out. Since then, we’ve seen a burgeoning “Cult of Kamala” memed into existence by Democratic-Party aligned media—and, on September 15, another foiled assassination attempt on former President Trump. At this writing, the outcome of the 2024 contest remains radically uncertain, but dread and exhaustion persist.
In the new preface to the 2024 edition, I trace two dangerous trends that emerged in the years since Cult was first published. The first is the rise of what’s been dubbed “political sectarianism”: an intensifying partisan hatred in which American politics has taken on a quasi-religious fervor. The second is the simultaneous concentration of vast new powers in the executive branch. As our national divisions have widened, we’ve raised the stakes of our political differences dramatically. Recent presidents have asserted the power to decide what kinds of cars Americans can drive, who gets to come to the United States and who gets to stay, and which children can go to which bathroom in every K‑12 school across America—all that and more can now be settled—winner-take-all—by whichever political party manages to seize the White House.
In our partisan myopia, we’ve laid down the infrastructure for autocratic rule and sectarian warfare, making the presidency powerful enough to tear the country apart.
It turns out, things were even worse than I thought. But in the new edition of The Cult of the Presidency, I show how we got into this mess and chart the path for getting us out. It may not be the cheeriest book you read this campaign season, but I think its message has never been more urgent.
