There is a presidency at work in Washington, but it is not clear that there is a president at work in the Oval Office.
Ask Donald Trump about the goings-on of his administration, and there is a good chance he’ll defer to a deputy rather than answer the question. “I don’t know her,” he said when asked about his nominee for surgeon general, Casey Means, earlier this year. “I listened to the recommendation of Bobby,” he added, pointing to Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services.
Ask Trump to explain why his administration made a particular choice, and he’ll often be at a loss for words. Ask him about a scandal, and he’ll plead ignorance. “I know nothing about it,” Trump said last week when asked about the latest tranche of photographs released from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.
None of this, on its own, proves the president isn’t working. But consider the rest of the evidence. He is, by most accounts, isolated from the outside world. He does not travel the country and rarely meets with ordinary Americans outside the White House. Instead, he is shuttled from one Trump resort to another to play golf and hold court with donors, supporters and hangers-on.
Past presidents, whatever their flaws, made visible efforts to inhabit the office. Ronald Reagan met regularly with congressional leaders to discuss his legislative agenda. George H.W. Bush spearheaded negotiations with allies and led the United States into war in Iraq. George W. Bush was, for better or worse, “the decider,” performing leadership for the cameras even as he tried to exercise it from the Oval Office. Trump is a ubiquitous cultural presence, but there is little outward sign that he is an active participant in governing. He was mostly absent during discussions of his signature legislation — the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act — and practically AWOL during the monthlong government shutdown.
It is difficult for any president to get a clear read on the state of the nation; bridging the distance between the office and the public takes work and discipline. But Trump, in his second term, does not seem to care about the disconnect. Abraham Lincoln once remarked that it would “never do for a president to have guards with drawn sabers at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor.” A president has to be engaged — attentive to both the government and the people he was elected to serve.
Trump is neither. He is uninterested in anyone except his most devoted fans and would rather collect gifts from foreign businessmen than take the reins of his administration. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview with Vanity Fair, referring to the work of Elon Musk earlier this year. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
Instead, the work of the White House has been delegated to a small circle of powerful advisers. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, has become the de facto shadow president for domestic affairs. As one senior government official told ProPublica, “It feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.”
Vought has orchestrated the administration’s assault on the federal bureaucracy, including the effective destruction of the US Agency for International Development. He has frozen or canceled hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for anti-poverty programs, HIV reduction initiatives and scientific research. He has also pushed the boundaries of executive power in an effort to turn the federal government into an extension of the president’s personal will.
If Vought is the shadow president for domestic policy, then Stephen Miller is the shadow president for internal security. Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, is using presidential authority to try to reshape the ethnic composition of the country — to make America white again, or at least whiter than it is now.
Traditionally, presidents have exercised tight control over foreign policy. But here, too, Trump has ceded authority, allowing others to pursue wars, negotiations and deals that would once have required sustained presidential attention.
The White House, then, is a lost cause. One might hope that the Supreme Court would be attentive enough to the realities of the moment to reconsider its ideological project. But these are principled conservatives. They believe in their theories, and they intend to see them through — no matter the cost to the Constitution or the damage done to American democracy.
The New York Times