What Can Presidents Actually Do?

This presidential election, like the previous two featuring Donald Trump, is unusually weird and sinister. But in one basic sense it resembles previous presidential contests: the almost complete unreality of both candidates’ programs and promises. As we approach election day, it’s worth recalling just how little an American president can actually do, at least in some respects.

First, a president only has very limited control over what happens in the economy. It is simply far too large and complicated a thing. A president does have a certain ability to wreck the economy—for instance, by imposing absurdly exaggerated tariffs on foreign goods, or completely exploding the national debt. But there is much less a president can do to improve the economy. If things go in the right direction presidents get the credit. If things go south, they get the blame. They mostly deserve neither. The recent episode of inflation in the US had very little to do with the policies of the Biden Administration, as shown by the fact that it was a world-wide phenomenon. The US did better than most countries in quickly bringing the inflation rate back down, but while Biden gets some of the credit for this, a lot of it happened for reasons beyond the control of any single individual.

A president also cannot simply implement large and ambitious new programs. There is this thing called Congress that has a role in the process. If the opposition to the president controls even just one house of Congress, then the president may have trouble passing any legislation. The president can achieve a certain number of things through executive order. But even then, there will be lawsuits; a large company of federal judges eager to stymie virtually any executive initiative; plus that pesky thing called the Supreme Court.

A president cannot simply “close the border” and halt illegal immigration. For one thing, a large proportion of the migrants here illegally came in on valid visas and simply didn’t leave when their time was up. No border wall, however tall and imposing, would have stopped them. In addition, our borders with Mexico and Canada run for nearly 8,000 miles (OK, a lot of that is Alaska, but still…), and fencing it all off, and patrolling it all, is not easily accomplished. Remember Donald Trump’s wall? Hardly any of it was actually built, for reasons explained above.

Finally—and, yes, for Americans this is often a shocking thing to recognize—the American president cannot usually dictate what foreign countries do. Often, foreign countries actually have their own reasons for their actions. Presidents can bluster and threaten, but even there they face limits. Can a president simply “cut off aid” to a country? See above, the part on “Congress.” Barack Obama restored diplomatic relations with Cuba but was utterly unable to lift the now sixty-year-old idiotic and cruel embargo on trade with Cuba, because that depended on Congress.

As illustration of all the above, consider the presidency of Donald Trump. As is well known, Trump spent a large part of every day watching cable television. He golfed a lot. He spent much less time than most presidents in substantive meetings, and almost no time reading briefing materials or in other ways learning anything of substance about the issues he was dealing with. To a very large extent, his actual actions as president consisted of making bombastic public statements and rage-tweeting. He got very few things of substance through Congress except for the massive tax cuts desired by the Republican party and their wealthy backers, and appointments to the Supreme Court and other offices suggested to him by various conservative pressure groups. Those appointments did matter—a lot. They were his most substantial legacy. He also managed the ‘Abraham Accords”—although this was a step that the countries in question were already moving towards. But otherwise, he mostly sat back and took credit for the good things that happened, while blaming the bad things on others (which, too be fair, all presidents tend to do). In the great crisis of his administration, the pandemic, he took the obvious step of backing an operation to make vaccines available as soon as possible, and otherwise mismanaged things disgracefully, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of American lives.

This is about the only reason to be at all hopeful that Trump’s election will not be as bad as many of us fear. For Trump and Harris alike, what they are now promising and prophesying about their administrations bears very little relation to what will actually happen if they take office in January.