The Supreme Court Is Making an All-Powerful President—But the One We Have Isn’t All That Interested in the Job

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The Trump administration is investigating whether former President Joe Biden was so enfeebled that his advisers secretly ran the country on his behalf. House Republicans and Trump’s obsequious new pardon attorney are likewise probing whether Biden’s aides issued pardons without his knowledge. “Although the authority to take these executive actions, along with many others, is constitutionally committed to the President,” stated Trump’s executive order initiating the investigation, “there are serious doubts as to the decision making process and even the degree of Biden’s awareness of these actions.” If Biden wasn’t aware of them, the order states, the actions may be void.

Trump’s indifference to the job is the modern incarnation of a problem that defenders of a strong presidency have always ignored.

The country is only starting to understand the extent of Biden’s decline, with the truth somewhere between the fully capable Biden his White House insisted on and the Weekend at Bernie’s presidency Trump has conjured. But the ongoing investigations by Trump and his allies must inevitably reckon with a separate but important question: What exactly is the job of the president, and how much incapacitation or delegation is too much?