James' World 2

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Ronald Reagan took regular meetings with congressional leaders to discuss his legislative agenda; George H.W. Bush spearheaded negotiations with the nation’s allies and led the United States to war in Iraq; and George W. Bush was, for better or worse, “the decider” who performed leadership for the cameras as much as he tried to exercise it from the Oval Office. Trump is a ubiquitous cultural presence, but there is no outward sign that he is an active participant in running the national government. He was mostly absent during discussions of his signature legislation — the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act — and practically AWOL during the monthlong government shutdown.

It is difficult for any president to get a clear read on the state of the nation; it takes work and discipline to clear the distance between the office and the people. But Trump, in his second term, does not seem to care about the disconnect. Abraham Lincoln once remarked that it would “never do for a president to have guards with drawn sabers at his door, as if he fancied he were, or were trying to be, or were assuming to be, an emperor.” A president has to be engaged — attentive to both the government and the public he was elected to serve.

Trump is neither. He is uninterested in anyone except his most devoted fans, and would rather collect gifts from foreign businessmen than take the reins of his administration. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, said in an interview with Vanity Fair, commenting on the work of Elon Musk in the first months of the year. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”

Instead, the work of the White House has been delegated to a handful of high-level advisers. Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, is the de facto shadow president for domestic affairs. As one senior government official told ProPublica, “It feels like we work for Russ Vought. He has centralized decision-making power to an extent that he is the commander in chief.” It was Vought who orchestrated the administration’s assault on the federal bureaucracy, including the wholesale destruction of U.S.A.I.D. It was Vought who either froze or canceled hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for anti-poverty programs, H.I.V. reduction initiatives and research into science, medicine and technology. And it is Vought who has been pushing the boundaries of executive power as he attempts to turn the federal government into little more than an extension of the personal will of the president — as channeled through himself, of course.

If Vought is the nation’s shadow president for domestic policy, then Stephen Miller is its shadow president for internal security. Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy adviser, is using the president’s authority to try to transform the ethnic mix of the country — to make America white again, or at least whiter than it is now. He is the primary force behind the expansion of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection into a roving deportation force. He has pushed both agencies to step up their enforcement operations, targeting schools, restaurants, farms and other work sites and detaining anyone agents can get their hands on, regardless of citizenship or legal status. It is Miller who is behind the militarization of ICE, the use of the National Guard to occupy Democrat-led cities and assist deportation efforts, and the plan to blanket the United States with a network of detention camps for unauthorized immigrants and anyone else caught in his dragnet.

Traditionally, presidents have had a mostly free hand in the conduct of American foreign policy. But here as well Trump has handed the power of the presidency over to a set of figures — inside and outside of government — who are not so much acting on his behalf as they are acting in his stead. Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, and Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, are orchestrating a war — and possibly regime change — in Venezuela, while Steve Witkoff, a real estate developer, and Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, are busy pushing a so-called peace deal that would give large parts of Ukraine to Russia, rewarding Vladimir Putin for his decision to wage a war of conquest.

In his foreword to Theodore Sorensen’s 1963 book, “Decision-Making in the White House,” President John F. Kennedy wrote that the “heart of the presidency is therefore informed, prudent and resolute choice” and that the “secret of the presidential enterprise is to be found in an examination of the way presidential choices are made.”

What do we make of a president who chooses not to make these choices?

For Chief Justice John Roberts and the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, the answer is to deliver that president an expansive grant of executive power. In a series of decisions on the court’s so-called shadow docket, Roberts and his allies have backed Trump’s repeated claims to virtually uncontested authority over the entire executive branch. The court has allowed the president to fire officials otherwise shielded by for-cause protections created by Congress, and has signaled quite clearly that it intends to overturn a New Deal-era decision that affirmed the power of Congress to create agencies that are independent of the president’s direct control.

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Kenny Holston/The New York Times

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