The Era Of Pretend Powerlessness Is Over

Trump's rampage has laid waste to the Obama Era's biggest lie.

Former President Barack Obama talks with President-elect Donald Trump before the state funeral for former President Jimmy Carter at Washington National Cathedral in Washington, Thursday, Jan. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

There are a few of us who are old enough to remember everyone in the Obama White House and in liberal media defending Obama’s failures by insisting that he never had the power to do any of the big things he promised.

Those who pushed Obama to at least try to do what he promised were ridiculed by Ezra Klein as deranged believers in a so-called “Green Lantern Theory” of the presidency. When Obama’s own grassroots supporters tried to help round up congressional votes for his promised populist policies like a public health insurance option, his White House lambasted those supporters with epithets:

The friction was laid bare in August when Mr. Emanuel showed up at a weekly strategy session featuring liberal groups and White House aides. Some attendees said they were planning to air ads attacking conservative Democrats who were balking at Mr. Obama’s health-care overhaul.

“F—ing retarded,” Mr. Emanuel scolded the group, according to several participants.

The Obama era’s “but Joe Lieberman and Zell Miller!” rotating villain game metastasized into the “but Kyrsten Sinema and Joe Manchin!” rotating villain game of the Biden era — the latter punctuated with some new “but the parliamentarian!” excuses for inaction.¹

I bring this all up not because I live eternally in the past, and not just because I’m still mad about what happened in the Obama years and I still believe that was the entirely preventable meltdown that explains this whole godforsaken era. I bring it up with an eye on the future: I want to remind everyone in the horrible here and now that Donald Trump’s ongoing second-term rampage of unilateral executive power shows what a complete lie all of that pretend Democratic powerlessness really was. And that reminder is important so that nobody accepts that horseshit excuse ever again.

Look, I’m not celebrating the rise of unitary executive theory here. The monarch-ization of the presidency is a deeply dangerous result of a convergence of forces — from new legal doctrines to media worship of strongmen to America’s bizarre cultural valorization of presidents. But clearly, the fact that Trump could wield executive power in as extreme a way as he has proves that there was far more power available for Democratic presidents to use than they pretended.²

And the more tyrannical Trump’s use of that power now gets — and unfortunately, yes, it probably will get worse — the more intense that reminder should be: the more mayhem and terror and chaos that this White House unilaterally inflicts on the country, the more it exposes the Democrats’ Big Lie that they just never had any power to do much of anything.

Back in the Obama days, Democratic leaders’ pretend powerlessness was an obvious lie to the non-Republicans who weren’t lobotomized by the hope-and-change vibe. Those with clear eyes — those who were told to expect transformative change and not just a Democratic version of country club Republicanism — they could see Obama aggressively using his power to actually ether his own promises on behalf of his donors, and provide a future president like Trump even more power to do horrible things.

But sadly, that was relatively few people.

And now here we are.

If there is any potential silver lining in Trump’s frenzy, it is that the next time there’s a non-MAGA president, far fewer Americans should accept at face value the notion that a president can’t do much.

But I say “should” not “will” because I’m old enough to remember what happened the last time — old enough to not underestimate the Democratic political and media machine’s power to lobotomize liberals into complacency.

1. To be fair, Biden did ram through Congress a much bigger stimulus than Obama ever tried, and pockets of the Biden administration at the Federal Trade Commission, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the antitrust division of the Justice Department did laudably exercise much more power to deliver in a real way than their Obama predecessors ever did. And yet, in his rhetoric and deference to norms, Biden himself did his own part to enshrine the overall idea of the powerless president as Democratic dogma.

2. For those reading this who will claim I’m calling for a Democratic dictator, I call bullshit. You don’t have to be a dictator to at least try to use existing executive authority to, say, shut down the most indefensible loophole in the entire tax code that you promised to close. You don’t have to be some unitary executive zealot to use longstanding executive authority to require the disclosure of at least some dark money. The fact that Obama never even tried to do that lays bare the whole lie of pretend powerlessness.