President Donald Trump has wasted no time upending the federal government and altering the office of chief executive. He has moved with lightning speed implementing sweeping changes with his executive orders by declaring a state of emergency at the U.S.-Mexican border, ending federal Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) policies, keeping biological men who claim to be (transgender) women from participating in female sports, and firing career agency employees.

Dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley Erwin Chemerinsky last Friday said: ‘We are in the midst of a constitutional crisis right now. There have been so many unconstitutional and illegal actions in the first 18 days of the Trump presidency. We never have seen anything like this.’

There are those Republican lawmakers who have joined their Democratic colleagues accusing the president of undermining Article 2 of the U.S. Constitution: ‘The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.’ Trump’s actions, like them or not, can be seen as an application of a highly contested ‘unitary executive theory’—an expansive interpretation of presidential power that aims to centralize greater control over the government in the White House. Trump’s measures, however, reflect the constitutional philosophy of the Founding Father who effectively created the American system, Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton’s Position on a Strong Executive

Hamilton, who served as the first U.S. Secretary of the Treasury, held that in order for government to be effective, it needed a strong and powerful president. In Federalist Paper No. 70, he wrote:

‘Energy in the executive is the leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks…to the steady administration of the laws, to the protection of property…to justice; [and] to the security of liberty’.

By energy, however, Hamilton did not just mean physical and mental vigor, but the power to act decisively, including the need to impose consequences for poor performance or misconduct. The opposite of this is a ‘feeble Executive’ which is ‘a bad execution; and a government ill executed’. We saw this during the Biden administration, when no one was held responsible for his or her incompetence or negligence, despite President Biden’s promise to do so.

‘Energy in the executive is the leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks’

‘If you’re ever working with me and I hear you treat another colleague with disrespect, talk down to someone, I promise you I will fire you on the spot,’ Biden vowed upon taking office. Yet he was loath to fire his appointees no matter their blunders, like Martin Gruenberg, Chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, who despite documented personal outbursts and profanity against colleagues, in addition to nearly one in ten FDIC employees complaining of sexual harassment, discrimination, or other personal misconduct in the workplace, was never released from his position. Another example, among many others, was when Biden’s Secretary of Defence Llyod Austin went missing for days in January of last year without informing his staff, let alone the president—he had checked himself in a hospital. Such negligence of responsibility went without any accountability.

Hamilton pointed out that in the days of the Roman Republic, the Romans were often ‘obliged to take refuge in the absolute power of a single man, under the formidable title of Dictator’, in order to defend themselves ‘against [those who] threatened the existence of all government’. And so, Americans, at times must do likewise.

A classic case in point of such dictatorial actions were those undertaken by President Thomas Jefferson (1801–1809). A campaigner for limited government, upon taking office Jefferson went over the top when, for example, he never consulted Congress, as he was supposed to, with the Louisiana Purchase. He also carried out impeachments at will of federalist judges, ordered the arrest and trial of Aaron Burr for treason, and coerced Congress to pass the Embargo Act of 1807, which stopped nearly all American exports to foreign countries with the hope to pressure Great Britain and France into recognizing America’s maritime rights as a neutral nation. On a personal note, why Libertarians—who argue for small government—hail Thomas Jefferson as their idol, I do not have the slightest idea, other than they have little understanding of American history, for as American historian Henry Adams said:

‘If the Federalist differed from the Republican only in the shade more or less of any power to be given the Executive—it was hard to see how any President could be more Federalist than Jefferson himself.’

Nothing New Under the Sun

Despite all the Democratic and mainstream media hoopla over Trump’s executive orders, there is nothing unconstitutional about many of them; such as offering buyouts to federal workers and placing employees, like those at the U.S. Agency for International Development on paid administrative leave to get around civil-service and union job protections. Indeed, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) did the same under the Biden administration.

The CFPB in June 2021, according to the news site Government Executive, ‘offered separation incentives including early retirement and launched investigations into career senior executives to sideline them, targeting about a half-dozen of the highest-ranked non-political staffers at the bureau’. The bureau’s purpose was to ‘ensure it can install its own hires into top career positions’.

Of course, some of Trump’s executive orders, such as ending birthright citizenship for those born in the U.S. from undocumented migrants have been put on hold by federal judges—it is not solely the unconstitutionality of the act that is being questioned but its conscienceless, too. Yet others, like the Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation, which seeks to halt ‘gender-affirming medical treatments for children and teenagers under 19, directing agencies to take a variety of steps to curtail surgeries, hormone therapy and other regimens’, are morally valuable—to think that it is a human right for an adolescent to change his or her biological sex is diabolical, which makes it unfathomable how some seek to block this.

‘Being an energetic leader, as Hamilton called for, does not necessarily give the U.S. president the green light to do “whatever” he wants, as Trump claims’

Others raise questions, as with the recent freezing humanitarian assistance to South Africa over a controversial law that allows the government in rare cases to seize farmland from ethnic minorities—namely White farmers. They can do so for public purposes, such as to build schools, hospitals, or highways, and if there has been no mutual agreement with the owner, the government can proceed without compensating them. Trump’s decision is also partly due to Elon Musk, a native of South Africa. He caught the president’s attention accusing Johannesburg of a ‘white genocide’. His claims, however, were groundless. In fact, statistics show by far the biggest victims of violent crime in South Africa are poor Black people.

Being an energetic leader, as Hamilton called for, does not necessarily give the U.S. president the green light to do ‘whatever’ he wants, as Trump claims. Hamilton also stressed that the other two branches of government were there to keep the president in check. Nevertheless, if Trump continues on his present course, the end result may be worse than that of a ‘feeble Executive’ as it has been for so many presidents who took it upon themselves to disregard the rule of law; as when President George W Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, which opened up a Pandora’s Box, to say the least.

The views expressed by our guest authors are theirs and do not necessarily represent the views of Hungarian Conservative.

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