Trump is no king and has not sought dictatorial powers. But he has, like several of his predecessors, exercised executive power under Article II of the Constitution. In fact, Trump is a Hamiltonian president.
Alexander Hamilton wrote Federalist 70 to counter those among the founding generation who claimed that “a vigorous Executive is inconsistent with the genius of republican government.” The Constitution vested the president with broad and mostly undefined executive powers while providing the other branches of the national government with powers to limit or check those powers under certain circumstances. Unlike some other Founders, Hamilton was worried not so much about a tyrannical executive as a feeble one.
“Energy in the Executive,” Hamilton wrote, “is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks; it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.” When the Roman republic suffered from the “intrigues of ambitious individuals . . . and the seditions of whole classes of the community” who sought to undermine the government from within, and when “external enemies” threatened Rome’s very existence, it turned, Hamilton explained, to “the absolute power of a single man” to save the republic.
Rome suffered at times from a “feeble executive,” which “implies a feeble execution of the government.” “A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution, and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be in practice, a bad government,” Hamilton wrote. He and the other Founders experienced the defects of a structure of government without a national executive under the Articles of Confederation.
Not every American president has been an energetic executive, but most of our consequential presidents have had an expansive view of their constitutional powers in line with Hamilton’s vision. George Washington established the precedent of executive privilege in the St. Clair Affair and in connection with documents related to the Jay Treaty. He set the course for presidential dominance in foreign affairs by issuing his Neutrality Proclamation in 1793 despite what others believed our treaty obligations were to France in its war with Great Britain. He also exercised broad presidential powers in response to the domestic uprising known as the Whiskey Rebellion in 1794.