As Donald Trump bellowed, smirked, and grimaced his way through two high-profile speeches this week, the public ignored him, even as he swung between contrasting poles. That a power vacuum is forming at the top of the American political system can no longer be denied. The people, it seems, are tuning out the president—a sensible enough reaction to Trump’s dysfunctional and embarrassing term in office, but also one that runs the risk of undermining a cornerstone of America’s democracy.



On Monday, President Jekyll read a teleprompter as he articulated a troop build-up in Afghanistan that goes against his own longstanding stance that Americans should withdraw from the country. On Tuesday, in Phoenix, President Hyde returned to the full-on savagery of his campaign, castigating the press as traitors to the country and letting loose with language designed to rile up his hard-core white-nationalist base. The response of America to both Trumps—the puppet politician who is just repeating what his military advisers are telling him and the demagogic racist—was essentially the same: meh.

The Monday speech received very poor ratings, drawing less than half the number of viewers President Obama did when he spoke on the same subject in the first year of his presidency, and the Phoenix rally was poorly attended, with plenty of room at the back of the venue for bored fans to mill around. In other words, Trump is losing his audience, and they’re starting to look elsewhere. To a show-business veteran accustomed to orchestrated fawning, this must be coming as a nasty surprise.

It could also be a blow to democracy. Trump—derided, distrusted, and singularly ineffective—is a weak president, but more important, he is weakening the presidency. One of the key presidential powers is access to the bully-pulpit, which Trump is remarkably inept at commanding despite (or perhaps because) of his long career as a showman. Without it, Trump has been unable to persuade those outside his base to go along with him, so instead he reverts to hectoring and browbeating, tactics that he’s increasingly using against Republicans as his political support shrinks. He has trouble getting his own party, let alone Democrats, to line up behind major legislation.





There’s more than one man’s vanity at stake. What Trump may not realize is that after all the campaigning is over, a president’s influence comes not from any gyrations of his charisma but from the accumulated legitimacy of the office. The presidency is a quasi-monarchical institution, and so citizens are taught to respect the commander in chief, no matter what the party. The American political system as it exists needs a president the people can respect, if only to keep this legitimacy from withering away. As a polarizing president with a history of bigoted comments, Trump has had trouble assuming moral authority from the start, but with his response to this month’s neo-Nazi demonstration in Charlottesville, he has lost whatever chance he had of earning it.