Trump’s business empire sprawls into hundreds of LLCs and licensing agreements, but at its core, it takes a familiar form: the proprietary firm. Built around its founder, generally branded with his name, its reputation intertwined with his, and its affairs directly under his management—this was the dominant form of business in the United States until the final decade of the 19th century.

There are real advantages to that arrangement. It confers flexibility, allowing leaders to react to shifting circumstances with speed, and to take risks without fear of being second-guessed. It mitigates the agency problem—the danger that professional managers will prioritize their own interests. And to the proprietors, it offers the satisfactions of independence; they control their own destinies.

It is a form almost perfectly adapted to play to Trump’s strengths, and cover his weaknesses. As a CEO hired by an independent board, he might not have survived the bankruptcies of some of his businesses, a string of failed ventures, constant lawsuits, or the other setbacks of his career. But the Trump Organization is his to do with as he pleases, and if not all the risks he chooses to take, the loopholes he exploits, the deals he strikes, or the ventures he launches have succeeded, enough have paid off to preserve and expand the fortune he inherited.

But America is now a century or more past its managerial revolution—the heyday of the proprietary firm is gone, displaced by the corporate bureaucracy. It swept through industry in the Great Merger Wave at the turn of the 20th century, and through the federal government in the decades that followed. Bureaucracies offer a solution to the challenge of scale; they create rules and procedures, and the corps of professionals who populate bureaucracies abide by them, allowing business to be performed in a predictable fashion, even between actors with no personal relationship. And they bring with them their own set of costs and benefits, requiring the surrender of a degree of autonomy and flexibility in exchange for stability and scale, and putting systems ahead of individual initiative.

The presidency itself underwent a similar transition. In the 19th century, as the historian Brian Balogh has argued, it was already tremendously powerful—but operated indirectly, through third-party entities like state and local governments. It was a great deal like the Trump Organization—a relatively small staff, multiplying its influence by striking deals with larger entities that had the personnel to put its plans into action. As late as 1900, William McKinley had just 13 staffers working directly for him in the White House. Today, the Executive Office of the President claims more than two thousand personnel; the federal government, more than two million.