Trump Doesn’t Have What It Takes to Be a Great President

Donald Trump enters his second presidency, as he did his first, pledging to wield executive power in novel and aggressive ways. This is neither new nor necessarily bad. “Presidents who go down in the history books as ‘great’ are those who reach for power, who assert their authority to the limit,” the presidential scholar Richard Pious noted.

But pushing power to the limit does not guarantee presidential success, much less greatness, as Mr. Trump is about to discover.

Mr. Trump ran thrice and won twice on increasingly fervent claims that establishment institutions and practices were damaged, and on pledges to upend the way Washington does business. When he is inaugurated as president on Monday, he will have a second shot at fixing the institutions, policies and ideas that he has criticized: immigration, the “deep state,” wokeness, suppression of speech, government inefficiency, free trade, crime and education.

Some critics claim that Mr. Trump will be acting illegitimately in seeking to reimagine the nature and operations of the federal government, as if the way things have run traditionally, or during the post-Watergate period, are invariably good or set in stone. They are not.

Eminent presidents acting in new circumstances have since the founding taken a sledgehammer to the norms and constitutional principles thought to govern the executive branch and its relationship to other American institutions.

George Washington acted before there were executive branch precedents. But he unleashed controversy when he asserted an independent power to interpret the Constitution, unilaterally proclaimed America’s neutrality in the early wars of the French Revolution and denied the House of Representatives documents related to the Jay Treaty. Washington was widely accused of monarchical tendencies in his day.