David M. Shribman

NATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

Last month, the Supreme Court permitted Donald Trump to remove members of regulatory agencies and to curtail efforts of migrants to win asylum in the United States. In the last several days, the president has lectured NATO partners and described citizens of a longtime American ally as “hopeless, bad people.”

This isn’t a column about Trump’s excesses, bad manners or intemperate language. It’s a column about the office he holds. It’s expanding again. The president who follows him, Republican or Democrat, will inherit an office bigger, broader, and more powerful than the one he inherited from Barack Obama in 2017 or Joe Biden in 2021.

Biographers will have plenty to say about Trump’s two White House terms. Historians will have even more to say about the presidency. It’s a topic that attracts enormous interest and is redeemed by enormous scholarly attention. Inevitably, the question Americans in the future will weigh — almost certainly the answer will be apparent to them — will be whether the presidency Trump leaves behind will permanently bear his name, identity and likeness.

Commentators on this subject often reach for Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.’s “The Imperial Presidency.” It’s an impulse of our craft; the title of the book is evocative, the juxtaposition of “imperial” and “presidency” is provocative. And in truth, moments before sitting down to type this week’s column, I searched my bookshelf for that volume, released three weeks before Richard Nixon was sworn in for his second term. It wasn’t there. Instead, I pulled another Schlesinger book, “The Cycles of American History.” It was published 13 years later.

In that later volume, Schlesinger looked at the presidents who followed Nixon and found a weak bunch. He spoke of “presidential failure and popular resentment” toward the Nixon successors. He concluded, “The presidency appeared in rout.” Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, he argued, “proved incapable of mastering the discordant frustrations of the day.”

In the middle of the 1992 presidential campaign, with George H.W. Bush running for reelection, Time magazine ran a story titled “The Incredible Shrinking President.” Some 11 months later, Time plastered on its cover the exact same headline, this time screaming with urgency, a story aimed not at Bush but at the president who vanquished him, Bill Clinton.

Gone, it seemed at the time, were worries about presidential power run amok, in terms of impounding funds appropriated by Congress, taking advantage of presidential war-making powers and letting executive privilege — a term with origins in the Dwight Eisenhower years but weaponized by Nixon — run out of control.

Clinton seemed smaller than John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Nixon, likely because the earlier three were wartime presidents with characters more complicated and machinations more Machiavellian, and they served when there were insurrections at home and a ferocious Cold War opponent abroad. At least that’s what I wrote 28 years ago, concluding, “They were bigger because the job they held was bigger.”

The American presidency has had big men — not only the usual suspects, such as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but also Andrew Jackson, U.S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt and, in his way, Harry Truman. Johnson and Nixon also qualify. It also has had small men — Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding. Who today can say much about John Tyler?

One of the reasons the presidency seemed to have diminished wasn’t because the nation’s attention was diverted but because it was diffused. With the growth in cable television and then the advent of the internet, one of the most important elements of presidential power was weakened: the ability to monopolize — or at least, during the kind of nationally televised addresses from the Oval Office that were a hallmark of the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon years, to summon — the attention of the nation.

The shrewd reader will easily ascertain where we’re going.

Though denied the blast furnace of network attention, Trump nonetheless has maneuvered to the front lobe of every brain in the country — and, if the attention he received with his brutal criticism of Spain (over its failure to contribute more to NATO) and Denmark (over its refusal to deliver Greenland to the United States) in recent days is any measure, he’s had the same effect globally.

To be sure, American presidents, by virtue of the country’s power, always dominate NATO summits and other international gatherings. But when they travel overseas, they generally try to do so with a gentle rhetorical touch, even when visiting putative “enemy” nations.

Though wielding the big stick of American military power, Nixon nonetheless spoke softly in Moscow and Beijing — and even in Bucharest, where in 1969 the 37th president said, “Our meetings represent, I am sure, the desire of the Romanian people and of the American people that we do not allow our differences to prevent a deeper understanding of our national points of view.” This is not in the Trump argot. When, in 1975, Ford visited Poland, also under Communist rule, his dinner toast spoke of “the growing friendship between our countries.”

Trump has a point in criticizing American allies for failing to carry their weight; though previous presidents have made the same argument, none has prompted the improvements now underway. In that sense, he’s expanded the presidency to include the role of “chider-in-chief.” (Woodrow Wilson aimed for that presidential function and title, only to fail miserably to achieve it.)

The bigger, more consequential issue beckons:

At home and abroad, Trump has enlarged, even swollen, the presidency. The question is whether this enlargement is temporary, as it was in the Nixon years that Schlesinger originally used as the launching pad for his book-length meditation on the “imperial presidency” — a term he came to regret inventing. In that model, according to his second thoughts, the presidency shrank with the appearance of different circumstances and presidents of different personal characters and characteristics.

The answer comes down to physics and the term “plastic deformation.” One definition of this physical phenomenon, from the highly reputable Collins Dictionary, explains that it occurs when “a material changes shape when a stress is applied to it and does not go back to its original state when the stress is removed.”

Remember that term. Future American life will be shaped by the question of whether Trump, no physicist, has created plastic deformation with the presidency.

A Swampscott High School Class of 1972 member, David M. Shribman is the Pulitzer Prize-winning former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.