Our podcast guest, historian Joshua Zeitz, referenced the world of Arthur Schlesinger, a renowned historian and leading light of liberalism, who popularized the concept of the imperial presidency. He wrote biographies of FDR and Andrew Jackson, both of whom he viewed favorably in terms of how they used executive power to drive popular democratic reform. However, by the early 1970s in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, he had grown skeptical of an imperial presidency that overshadows the other branches of government. Former president Trump took this to a new level and in doing so, may have demonstrated the limits of an imperial presidency.
