The Presidency Reimagined (🇺🇸 US-UK🇬🇧 Edition)

The modern presidency has accumulated enormous power over more than two centuries. But have the constitutional safeguards surrounding it evolved sufficiently to keep pace?Theodore Roosevelt believed in an energetic presidency and trusted his own judgment about what the public interest required. Lyndon Johnson brought extraordinary governmental experience to the White House—and Vietnam demonstrated that even an experienced, patriotic president could be spectacularly wrong.Donald Trump presents a different problem.Presidential error, even catastrophic error, does not necessarily require hostility toward the constitutional mechanisms capable of saying no. Trump gives us the ultimate design-failure condition precisely because constitutional restraint itself became the adversary.The Presidency Reimagined opens Season 4 of Mr. Dunneagin Speaks by asking a larger question: How do we preserve a presidency powerful enough to govern while ensuring that the constitutional system surrounding it remains strong enough to constrain that power—even when some of its safeguards fail?We must try to design a better presidency.— Dunneagin Get full access to ~ Civics Unhinged: Dispatches From Trumpistan ~ at dunneagin.substack.com/subscribe