Rob Montz

Opinion contributor

Another day, another avalanche of news about the President: berating Democratic leaders on camera; unceremoniously announcing the departure of his chief of staff; calling his former Secretary of State “dumb as a rock.”

It never lets up. Trump is a ubiquitous, suffocating presence in American life.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The modern presidency is the framers’ worst nightmare, a flatly unconstitutional concentration of power. As the Trump era has made abundantly clear, the office itself — its size, scope, and prominence in American life — is the driving force of dysfunction in our politics.

Article II of the Constitution outlines a modest office. The president was to execute the laws passed by Congress, appoint some key government posts, interface with foreign leaders, and use the veto to check populist passions.

That’s it. The president was basically a lackey to Congress, the deliberative and more democratically sensitive branch of government.

That design worked pretty well for the first 150 years. On the rare occasions when the executive branch assumed excessive powers — such as Lincoln suspending habeas corpus protections at the height of the Civil War — the office’s constitutional constraints kept the commander-in-chief in check.

Connection with the public created expectations

All of that changed with Franklin Delano Roosevelt. His “fireside chat” radio addresses — delivered in his charming aristocratic lilt — provided comfort, advice, and moral instruction to millions. Along the way, they created an unprecedented, immensely exploitable emotional connection with the public.

This connection formed the nexus of the obscene set of expectations that have come to define the office: the president is the savior of the national soul; the healer-in-chief administering alms in the wake of disaster; the superhero battling America’s enemies; the master executive personally credited with the performance of the economy.

Under FDR, these expectations fueled a radical expansion of presidential power, specifically through his use of executive orders. FDR’s predecessors averaged a couple hundred per administration; he issued over 3,700, creating vast new jobs programs and public agencies.

Concentrating power makes the system more vulnerable to abuse. It was an executive order, after all, that established the internment camps for Japanese Americans in the wake of Pearl Harbor. There was little public debate over whether FDR actually had the authority to lock a hundred thousand innocent citizens into cages, though there was a Supreme Court case. The mystique worked its magic.

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Likewise, immediately following the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush, riding the highest presidential approval ratings in modern history, erected a vast extrajudicial surveillance apparatus to tap citizens’ phone calls and emails.

The advent of television provided presidents an even more powerful tool to craft their image. Personal charisma could now be leveraged to create a cultish devotion.

That’s how JFK, a pill-popping sex addict who shared a lover with a Chicago mob boss, became the youthful icon of Camelot mythology.

That’s how Ronald Reagan, who’s actual policy record is a lot less libertarian than Jimmy Carter’s, became the mascot of small government conservatism.

And that’s how Barack Obama, who railed against the Bush-era expansions of the national security apparatus during the 2008 campaign, got away with retaining that apparatus in its entirety once he got into office. The mystique incapacitates people’s critical faculties.

A full third of the White House staff is exclusively devoted to image management. And that image — and the popularity it produces — is largely detached from the president’s concrete accomplishments.

Executive power goes up, but not down again

Executive authority operates on a one-way ratchet. The powers presidents annex during emergencies tend to get retained in peace and passed along to their successors.

That includes the power to wage war. The Constitution explicitly vests that authority in Congress. The president, as commander-in-chief, is charged with leading the military once called into service, but it’s Congress that’s supposed to do the calling.

This order is shattered in June 1950. North Korean dictator Kim Il-Sung launches a surprise invasion of South Korea and President Harry Truman, without any congressional authorization, sends tens of thousands of troops to the peninsula. The White House brands its response — which eventually builds to a three-year battle claiming the lives of 30,000 Americans — as a “police action.”

And Congress completely capitulates, setting the blueprint for unilateral executive warmaking: Vietnam under LBJ; Cambodia under Nixon; Bosnia under Bill Clinton. Congress doesn’t start wars anymore; it just signs off when presidents say we’re in one.

Given the evolution of the presidency, Donald Trump, the ubiquitous overlord of American politics, is not a fluke, or some historic anomaly. He’s an inevitability.

A president who treats the office as his own private fiefdom, dismissing critics as the enemy of the people. A reality TV star with a genuine genius for driving the news cycle. A man with the power to shake the stock market with a tweet. As Gene Healy, author of the The Cult of the Presidency, puts in my new mini-doc for We the Internet TV: “Trump is the extreme energy drink version of what’s been on tap for a long time.”

This isn’t democracy; it’s a soft monarchy. A single person dominating government — that’s exactly what the founders designed against. Fixing our politics requires draining the office of both its formal powers and out-sized importance in American life.

Rob Montz is a director at We the Internet TV. Find his work at: RobMontz.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Robmontz