Explaining the U.S. Presidency in 2025

Typically, one asks about the formal and informal powers of the President. The formal powers sound balanced and reasonable. For example: you explain that they're the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces, but cannot declare war. They can veto what Congress passes as law, but the veto can be overridden. They can appoint members to their Cabinet and the Supreme Court of the U.S., but who they pick requires Senate approval. It's all very nice and tidy and you feel professional.

The informal power of the President, though, is one area where the real game lies. (Another, of course, is foreign policy, where it turns out our sins abroad have unforeseen consequences.) For now, I'll remark there's never been anything clean about the "bully pulpit," the enormous rhetorical platform the President has for setting far more than a legislative agenda. You don't need to reflect too much to see a given presidency as establishing a certain culture, if not actual cults.

And that brings us to the "Medbed" video which President Trump shared on his social media platform, Truth Social, on Saturday night. The President of the United States "re-truthed" an AI generated video featuring himself, announcing the future creation of hospitals with beds specially built to cure every medical problem in existence:

I already know some will ask why this is important to cover. Don't people say crazy things all the time? Why can't we cut the President of the United States slack? He did delete the video! What do "presidential" and "unpresidential" mean as a standard, anyway?

Some might try to argue this behavior is normal. Shouldn't the President aim to cure every disease? How is this different from Biden wanting more money for cancer research or JFK wanting to put a man on the moon?

I hope you can see that while there is no such thing as a bad question, the spirit of those questions is not to advance knowledge. They only mean to say "What about?", as if a promise to cure every disease is not an extremely dangerous game. To be sure, the video the President posted is a complicated text. It pushes us to ask serious questions about the office itself, its occupant, and the state of the American public. We need to think quite a bit about how Presidential rhetoric works. How does it help or hinder the public's ability to reasonably engage each other? If someone firmly believes the government has a cure for all diseases and their fellow countrymen are blocking access to it, that is extremism. We would expect it to become a destabilizing force in society, to say the least.

As a complicated text, the video has several parts which demand the attention of a number of fields. I wonder about this, especially: What does it mean the President shared an AI generated version of himself to a mass audience? Ben Collins, CEO of The Onion, shared this opinion:

I take Collins' comment about his not adhering to reality to heart. Does Mr. Trump know whether he said those words in the video or not? Is it possible that he confused the AI version of himself for the real thing? Put like that, Collins' point strongly implies that the President doesn't care.

AI, then, isn't just a vehicle for creating slop. As many have noted, a number of those who are fascist-curious love AI because it puts artists and writers who need commissions out of business. Quite literally, slop trolls people out of payment. What AI allows is the cult around the President to imagine anything they want and instantly create media which looks legitimate enough. It's not just a megaphone for a man famous for making big promises, not delivering, and pocketing the money he requested. It serves as a propaganda machine for those addicted to the promises. Independent of Trump, this thing will create its own reality. In a way, he's just joining his own fandom as a fan.

Compare this with the more traditional perspective on the rhetoric of the American Presidency: TR's "bully pulpit." The "bully pulpit" is not about putting the "cult" in "culture" in order to profit from miracle cures you and your allies sell. (Note that some do sell "medbed" "services" already.) It is about a national agenda which galvanizes people and gets Congress and the Courts to act. A President may speak about the various beauties natural wonders possess, and that in turn gets people to take conservation seriously, passing laws to preserve certain areas and restricting those eager to exploit the land. What we're dealing with is obviously nothing like that.

A mentor of mine, Glen Thurow, wrote about the "Rhetorical Presidency." His and his co-authors contention: the modern presidency talks too much about too many things. Doesn't this weaken the office? The President asks you to turn the heat down in your home so oil can be saved; that does not seem to compare with launching a war or addressing a grieving nation. I'm not sure the thesis really takes seriously how being the most powerful person on Earth and the demands of the office do not complement each other. The constitutional duties of the President are distorted heavily by American hegemony. The person will always be more than the office because of the sheer power they are granted by the position of the United States.

Political scientists during the first Trump term would call him "weak" because he didn't understand how Congress worked or the precise levers of foreign relations. That was an incredibly mistaken frame. While Trump made mistakes in terms of his own power during the first term, he was far from a weak President. Because he bullied entire populations any and every chance he got, because he didn't let ignorance stop him from pressuring anyone and everyone, because he took full advantage of the media the President gets, he reshaped the office. A major fault of Biden's was not understanding the office had been reshaped and that going back to norms was impossible. When the Courts are willing to tell you that you cannot grant emergency relief to student debtors but the former President is immune from any and all prosecution, you have to recognize what's happening and act accordingly. The other branch is making a power play knowing you will back down in the name of some incomprehensible norms. But the office is shaped not by norms only a few in DC recognize but what legitimacy means to the American people. That has always been the prerogative of the President: the logic is older than Machiavelli's linkage of the "one" to the "many," itself antecedent to the modern presidency, but perhaps receives its best expression in that idea. The Framers establishment of an Electoral College was doomed because it refused to link the legitimacy of a strong executive to popular rule.

Trump, as someone known for stiffing his creditors and running any number of shady enterprises, intuitively addresses the problem of legitimacy. He is America's id, the right to profit at all costs. It isn't really about profit, but the daring. This is why grifter evangelists recognize each other, why they see kindred spirits in hedge fund managers, football coaches, wellness gurus, and anyone responsible for a commercial telling you to buy a kitchen gadget in the next 30 minutes for a $20 discount. That daring is a right to rule and more. It pushes all sorts of boundaries as it is fundamentally a manifestation of greed and domination.

That claim to legitimacy, that daring, doesn't just have to talk all the time. It has to immerse us, baptize us. It doesn't know what it dares; Trump literally has everything. The eschatology and AI and cults and ideas about success and business and the Presidency are all linked. It is a wonder we have not had a President explicitly like Trump before. And it is no wonder that Trump is clearly scared of what lies beyond. The promise of a medbed, a miracle cure for anything, a hint of immortality, is not simply a con for gullible cultists. It's something he personally wants, too.