President Donald Trump’s domestic agenda is a shambles, and his administration is besieged by scandal. He has been badgering Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell all week for failing to repeal and replace Obamacare, a futile exercise in browbeating. The good news is that, as Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer noted recently, institutions have proven willing to stand up to Trump, ranging from the military (which won’t carry out his ban on transgender people serving) to the Senate (which defended Attorney General Jeff Sessions from Trump’s attempt to elbow him out of office) to the Boy Scouts (which criticized the president for politicizing his appearance at their annual jamboree). “The institutions of both political and civil society are holding up well,” Krauthammer wrote. “Trump is a systemic stress test. The results are good, thus far.”

But the more ineffectual Trump is in domestic politics, the louder and scarier he is on the international stage. Even if we accept Krauthammer’s contention that the “guardrails” of political and civil society are preventing Trump from fundamentally damaging American society, Trump still enjoys enormous unchecked power abroad. Perhaps precisely because he is thwarted at home, Trump is now more prone than ever to lash out against foreign foes. This week, he used the incongruous setting of a photo op at Trump National Golf Course in New Jersey to threaten North Korea with nuclear annihilation. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” he warned. “They will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.” He doubled down on those remarks on Friday, tweeting:

Military solutions are now fully in place,locked and loaded,should North Korea act unwisely. Hopefully Kim Jong Un will find another path! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 11, 2017

What makes these words terrifying, even if we make every allowance for Trump’s bluster, is that he has the power to make them true. America’s nuclear chain of command grants a president absolute authority to launch preventive nuclear strikes whenever desired. In 1974, as his presidency was capsizing, Richard Nixon reflected that, “I can go into my office and pick up the telephone, and in 25 minutes 70 million people will be dead.” Trump enjoys that same power.



Much has been made of Trump’s manifest authoritarian tendencies: that he sees politics only in terms of domination, his habit of praising extrajudicial violence, and his proclivity for breaking norms. Yet Trump’s authoritarian tendencies would not get him very far without a mechanism for enacting his wishes, and his nuclear threats make clear what that mechanism is: the Imperial Presidency. The powers of the office are not just those enumerated in the Constitution, but the extra-constitutional powers the presidency has acquired over the decades—especially the ability to start wars at whim. It’s taken someone as frightening as Trump to make plain that Congress must act to restrain not just the sitting president, but the office itself.

Historians and political scientists often use the term “Imperial Presidency” to refer to the fact that the American president, at least since the dawn of the Cold War in the 1940s, has war-making powers closer to that of an absolute monarch than an officeholder in a republic who is bound by the rules of law. If we are worried about Trump inflicting great harm on the world, it’s the powers of the Imperial Presidency that enable him to do the most damage.