A president’s license to lead has always been temporary

After past emergencies, Americans insisted that regular constitutional order be restored

By Russell Riley

Americans are famously good at creating commanding presidencies. In moments of genuine emergency—war, economic crisis, or mass terrorism—we have readily recognized the need for unified leadership and rallied to the president’s flag, repeatedly divesting ourselves of normal constitutional checks and balances. Those presidents who have subsequently directed us through gravest national peril are among the most celebrated in American history.

What they have earned in popular esteem and marble monuments clearly beguiles the current president. Deprived, however, of a Fort Sumter or a Pearl Harbor to generate common purpose, this White House instead has had to manufacture its crises, fostering distress through sky-is-falling rhetoric and deploying the odds and ends of legal authorities left over from past emergencies. The results have resembled less the organic union embodied by a Lincoln or an FDR than a presidency stitched together by Mary Shelley: “gigantic in stature, yet uncouth and distorted in its proportions.”

Neither Congress nor the Supreme Court (with the sole exception of last week’s ruling striking down President Trump’s tariffs) has thought today’s innovation—a “crisis”-enlarged presidency without the system-threatening crisis—worthy of an intervention. And so the raw power this president has amassed and displayed has indeed put him in the company of our nation’s greatest.

Does this portend a permanent change in the way our constitutional system works? Maybe not. For there is another tradition in American politics that is equally robust. Yet few seem fully aware of it.

While Americans may indeed turn to the presidency when crisis demands it, the license to lead has always been temporary, issued with an expiration date in mind. After an emergency has passed, Americans expect—no, we insist—that regular constitutional order be restored. We have proved to be remarkably adept at shoving commanding presidencies back into their constitutional boxes—regardless of what loosed them in the first place. Consider the most prominent instances of crisis leadership in American history.

Abraham Lincoln was said to have exercised “the power of a god” as he pursued the Union’s war aims from the White House, including the issuance of an executive order for emancipation later termed “the most stupendous act of sequestration in the history of Anglo-Saxon jurisprudence.” But when the shooting stopped, so did the willingness by others to follow.

Even while the Civil War raged, Lincoln encountered strong resistance from Congress when he broached the topic of postwar planning—an extension of power beyond his wartime remit. Having heard from the president, for example, about his inclination to adopt relatively lenient terms for the readmission of southern states into the Union, Congress passed the Wade-Davis bill in 1864, asserting its intent to restore its primacy in making such decisions. This Lincoln promptly vetoed, drawing loud objections from the bill’s primary sponsors for daring to project his wartime leadership into the peace. “A more studied outrage on the legislative authority of the people has never been perpetrated.”

Within a year, Lincoln had been felled by John Wilkes Booth, to be succeeded by Andrew Johnson—who in a new postwar environment was impeached for exercising a fraction of the power a wartime Lincoln had wielded shortly before.

Although Johnson’s main offense was firing a cabinet officer, something Lincoln had done with impunity before the postwar Congress made it illegal, he was also charged more generally with disrespecting the legislative branch by electioneering against his opponents in the 1866 midterms. In so doing, according to Article 10 of the impeachment charges, he attempted to “bring into disgrace, ridicule, hatred, contempt and reproach the Congress of the United States, and … to excite the odium and resentment of all good people of the United States against Congress and the laws by it duly and constitutionally enacted.”

Johnson’s attempt to perpetuate wartime executive powers backfired spectacularly. Midterm voters swelled the ranks of his opposition on Capitol Hill, energizing the movement to restore congressional primacy. An impeached president survived in office on the basis of a single vote in the Senate. But eminent historian Eric L. McKitrick has concluded that Johnson “brought executive power to the lowest point it has ever reached before or since.” This, only a single congressional election after the “godlike” Lincoln’s death.

Woodrow Wilson’s vast powers during World War I overshadowed even Lincoln’s. But as the war was winding down, Wilson, too, sought to preserve his expanded authorities into the postwar era. The American people would have none of it.

The 1918 midterms were set to occur at almost the exact moment the armistice was to be signed in early November. Wilson detected in this happenstance a rare opportunity. He sought to nationalize the election, releasing an unprecedented “Appeal for [Keeping] a Democratic Congress” to the American people, directly pleading for their support in continuing his wartime leadership license into the peace.

“Unity of command,” Wilson wrote, “is as necessary now in civil action as it is upon the field of battle. . . . The return of a Republican majority to either House of the Congress would . . . certainly be interpreted on the other side of the water as a repudiation of my leadership.” So informed, the voters doubled down, giving control of both chambers to the Republicans, a midterm reversal against the president’s party seen only once before in the nation’s long history.

Wilson subsequently worked himself into an early grave trying to gain his primary postwar aim, the League of Nations, over a resistant Congress. That postbellum “return to normalcy” was completed by an undistinguished Warren Harding.

Harry Truman inherited the wartime leadership regime of Franklin Roosevelt, who exercised during his presidency the greatest array of executive powers then experienced, including the creation and deployment of the most awful weapon of war ever used. But when the war ended, so, too, did Americans’ patience with presidentially led crisis government. Truman’s biographer Robert Donovan left no room for misinterpretation about the backlash.

“For President Truman the postwar period did not simply arrive.” It “broke about his head with thunder, lightning, hail, rain, sleet, dead cats, howls, tantrums, and palpitations of panic. The storm of war had passed. But the turbulence in its wake . . . all but capsized the Truman administration.” The president himself was moved to joke at a Gridiron Dinner just months after the war was over: “Sherman was wrong. I’m telling you I find peace is hell.” Americans were tired of sacrifice—and of following the president.

Voters then did exactly what they had done to Wilson: They reversed control of both houses of Congress against the president’s party in the 1946 midterms, leaving anti-Truman legislators in charge of both chambers. Indeed, the same thing happened to Dwight Eisenhower at the first midterm after the Korean War. And the first midterm after the American exit from Vietnam brought to Capitol Hill an energized class of “Watergate babies” intent on eviscerating an imperial presidency regardless of party.

With the Cold War’s end, Bill Clinton won the White House by declaring “It’s the economy, stupid,” ending a half century of presidential preoccupations with national security. But voters soon sought to ensure the return to normalcy using a more reliable check. At Clinton’s first midterm, he, too, lost both houses of Congress to the political opposition. Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution seemed for a time to portend congressional supremacy as a new way of doing business in Washington. Moreover, Clinton’s impeachment in 1998 was made possible by a Supreme Court decision rejecting presidential privileges to an extent improbable while the Cold War endured. The institutional equilibrium entering the 21^st century thus looked far more balanced than at any time since FDR had been in the White House.

Until 9/11. Then, a new generation of Americans learned the unifying impulses of a genuine national crisis. But in 2006 voters repeated their time-honored pattern, sending Democratic majorities to the House and Senate to end George W. Bush’s wartime leadership regime. In this instance, the war on terror, and the occupation of Iraq, continued. But voters no longer supported a president with relatively unchecked powers to lead the nation. This was, ironically, partly a sign of presidential success, voters no longer feeling that the vulnerabilities of September 12 required a commanding presidency at home. It was safe—and preferable, given the administration’s failures in expanding the War on Terror abroad—to return to divided government again.

The key question, then, approaching the midterms of November 2026 is this: Have Americans sufficiently wearied of today’s extraordinary displays of presidential power to restore something approaching constitutional normalcy? It’s been done before.

Russell Riley is the Miller Center’s White Burkett Miller Center Professor of Ethics and Institutions, where he co-directs the Presidential Oral History Program.