Trump replaces the caretaker state with a Daddy state

Copyright © HT Digital Streams Limit all rights reserved. Gerald F. Seib, The Wall Street Journal 6 min Read 05 Apr 2025, 06:00 AM IST (Illustration: Rui Pu) Summary The president uses the powers of his office in an aggressive, paternalistic way without precedent. Is an old form of invasive government replaced by a new one? Conservatives have long been riding against the federal government and complained that it is too deeply involved to tell Americans what they can and cannot do. Unexplained bureaucrats, they say, are too invasive to regulate the economy and force private institutions to achieve liberal goals. From Barry Goldwater to Ronald Reagan to this day, Conservatives wanted to eliminate this caretaker. Now President Donald Trump has arrived for a second term, and he is indeed attacking the caretaker. But rather than eliminating it, he turns the idea in a populist, even authoritarian direction. He replaces the Meddlesome Nanny State with an aggressive, Paternalist Daddy state, based on the reverence and dedication of his experience. Trump cuts off the size of the bureaucracy with a revenge. But he does not spread the power; He consolidates it in the Oval Office and uses the substantial weapons at his disposal rates, government awards and contracts, to pursue the power of law enforcement agencies-to pursue the goals he believes he is elected to achieve. Trump, who withdraws far from federal power from American society, confirms it in a raw, unpredictable and often unprecedented way. The difference is that the president is personally, rather than government agencies, or the congress, or the courts, his driving force. Trump supporter Tucker Carlson forwarded this philosophy before a pre-election meeting in October last year when he compared the excerpts of American society to the actions of irregular children and then stated: “There must be a point on which Dad comes home.” In this emerging model, a more muscular president – in effect, the head of the government’s household – confirms the powers once exercised by lawmakers and independent agencies. He reaches deeper in law enforcement and the decisions of the Justice Department. Perhaps he disputes the rights of courts to reverse his actions and even punishes law firms who punish those who experience him. The underlying assumption of the Daddy State is that Americans want a president and big and in charge of it-and that they asked one when they re-elected Donald Trump. Trump’s unions argue that presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden also aggressively used executive powers to impose a liberal agenda on schools, businesses and local governments. In general, conservative lawyer Jack Goldsmith said in a recent podcast, the US is ‘in a period of significant expansion’ of executive power that extends presidents of both parties. But what Trump does represent a dramatic acceleration of the trend. “It’s different from anything that has ever taken place throughout American history,” said J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge who worked to expand the presidential power while serving in the Justice Department under President George HW Bush. Because Trump has linked his offensive to attacks on judges questioning his authority, Luttig argues: “We are already in a constitutional crisis.” What is striking with the onslaught of Trump and the support it receives within the Republican Party is how much it represents a change in conservative thinking. Matthew Continetti, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of A History of the Conservative Movement, says that conservatives once elected legislative power and considered Congress as a brake on activist presidents, especially Franklin Roosevelt. It began to change during the Watergate scandal and by the end of the Vietnam War, he said, when conservatives began to think that Congress began to bow down to weakened presidents. They complained about the rise of what they called a ‘fourth branch’ of the government: independent agencies created by the congress and housed in the executive branch, but whose powers and leaders were outside the president’s reach. This, in turn, has led Conservatives to call the ‘Unitary Executive Theory’, which believes that the president should in fact exercise full control of all the agencies and their staff. Trump followed that lead. For example, he fired the head of the National Council for Labor Relations and by the executive order attempted to crash other authorized agencies. But Trump’s pressure goes much further. He takes action on a much broader series of issues and promotes an agenda of the right to replace what he considers an agenda from left. He uses the coercion of federal grants and contracts to force universities and businesses to drop DeI programs and even get rid of controversial professors and students activists. Although he ordered the dissolution of the Department of Education and declared that he wanted to return control of education to the states, he also tried to tell them how to treat transgender students. Last week, he signed an executive order that required voters to show proof of citizenship to register, in an area usually controlled by the congress and the states. At the same time, officials of the federal immigration and customs handshaft service have picked up immigrants at an accelerated rate in places across the country, often with little process. While the size of the Internal Revenue Service is reduced, Trump can also increase its power in some respects. He has signed an executive order that, according to legal experts, can open the IRS to recall the tax-free status of charities if they continue with the dei programs, just as it once did to schools that were considered racial. He also puts himself in the market by taking an exceptionally extensive view of his authority to impose rates without consulting the congress. And sometimes he follows a more personal agenda. Over the past few days, Trump has threatened to remove security clearances and contracts from law firms that employ lawyers who he said was improperly chasing. In perhaps the ultimate assertion of personal power, he has repeatedly spoken to run for a third term in recent days, although it is explicitly banned by the Constitution. How this approach is going to work out politically is an open question. The president’s approval ratings are the highest he saw in his two term, and voters are more likely to say that the country is moving in the right direction than they were at the end of Biden’s term. But there are warning signs. Republicans saw disappointing results in the election this week, with a loss in a Wisconsin High Court race and closer than expected margins in two special elections in GOP strikes in Florida. The president’s approval rating, although high for him, is lower than for any other modern president at this stage of his term. There are also signs of public skepticism about the Daddy State approach. In a poll taken in the early days of Trump’s term, the Pew Research Center found that 65% of Americans said it would be “too risky” to give him more power to deal with the country’s problems directly. Only a third said that the country’s problems could be dealt with more effectively if Trump didn’t have to worry about the congress or the courts. There is also the political reality that any power that Trump establishes for himself is likely to be used by a democratic successor. Perhaps a kind of back -handed two -party can consequently arise. Leaders in both parties have expressed concern about the powers exercised by presidents from the other side – a consensus that may just open the door to think of how much unpitulated authority any president should have. “Yes, we absolutely prefer a model of more limited executive power,” says Oren Cass, founder of American Compass, a conservative economic thinking tank that Trump generally supports. “But the path after that is not going to be one in which Democrats do what they want when they are in power, and Republicans turn the other cheek and act responsibly when they are in power.” He adds: “It seems to me that at this point there is room for a dual reconsideration of a dynamic that approaches mutually insured destruction and benefits from a weapons control treaty.” Gerald F. Seib is a former CEO of Washington and Capital Journal columnist of the Wall Street Journal and the author of “We must see it coming: Van Reagan to Trump, a front seat to a political revolution.” Catch all the business news, market news, news reports and latest news updates on Live Mint. Download the Mint News app to get daily market updates. More Topics #Donald Trump Mint Specials