Preemptive Presidents and President Trump
PRESIDENTIAL POWER
What kind of president was Donald Trump? Four years ago, my colleague, Ted Goertzel, and I published a book on comparative presidential leadership in the US and Latin America. Our book came out before the election, so we hazarded a guess based on Trump’s rise and campaign as an outsider. We suspected that would follow through into office. In the theoretical literature, this pointed to Trump behaving like a preemptive president.
Labelling Trump a preemptive president was based on the work of American presidential scholar, Stephen Skowronek, whose analysis played a prominent role in our own study. Skowronek observed that while American political institutions have been largely unchanged in form since the creation of the republic in the late eighteenth century, they have undergone change in their content. Moreover, that change occurs in a cyclical process in which presidents occupy one of four roles.
