The impossible prime ministry

Can “300 million people … expect so much from one individual and still consider themselves involved in something that can be described as self-government"? asks Professor Sidney Milkis of the University of Virginia, referring to U.S. President Donald Trump, as quoted in an article by John Dickerson in the May issue of The Atlantic.

Lots of us believe the presidency is overwhelming Trump. Dickerson, the co-anchor of CBS This Morning, doesn’t disagree. In his article, How the Presidency Became Impossible, he argues the presidential job is now too big for any human being.

“When Harry Truman placed a sign on his desk reading: THE BUCK STOPS HERE,” Dickerson writes, “it meant that some decisions, only the president can make. It did not mean that the president is responsible — and therefore to blame — for everything that happens in the executive branch, much less the nation.” Yet, implicit responsibility for just about everything has become line one of the presidential job description.

Americans now even demand that their president be, as Dickerson puts it, a first responder, jetting to the sites of natural and man-made disasters to reassure citizens that he personally and the federal government he leads care and are on the case. (Were Canadians truly much more reassured that Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale from Ottawa and Premier Kathleen Wynne from Queen’s Park — she of the imminent election campaign — showed up to say all the expected things after Monday’s mass murder, despite Toronto’s police chief and mayor having already done so perfectly well?)

Dickerson contrasts this now compulsory solicitude with how, in 1955, then president Dwight Eisenhower continued his vacation despite three hurricanes hitting the U.S. He later said the real catastrophe would be if Americans were “unready as a nation, as a people, to meet personal disaster by our own cheerful giving.” (In this he echoed his Democratic predecessor, Grover Cleveland,