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Abstract
There have been many accounts of Donald Trump's assault on America's constitutional norms and institutions. Journalists have detailed how a real estate mogul and reality television star with no experience in public office captured the Republican Party and disrupted the regular protocols of the executive branch. Legal scholars have lamented Trump's politicization of the Justice Department breaking through the fragile guard rails put in place in the wake of the Watergate scandal. Psychiatrists have sought to diagnose Trump's politics of resentment, which they attribute to the rage and narcissism of a sociopath. Amid this frenzy John Campbell's Institutions Under Siege: Donald Trump's Attack on the Deep State provides a comprehensive study on Trump's assault on American political and government institutions. He shows persuasively that Trump's presidency had a deep and dangerous imprint on elections, the Republican Party, the bureaucracy, and fiscal policy. Critically examining Campbell's theory and evidence, this essay considers where Trump stands in the long train of democratic crises that have occurred throughout American history, how his presidency and its provocative aftermath were a symptom of long-standing changes in the relationship between the presidency and the party system, and why the presidency itself might be a polarizing institution.

AbstractThis article focuses on Franklin Roosevelt's influence on the Democratic Party. It brings to light the significant, but underexamined "Third New Deal," the controversial program Roosevelt pursued during his second and third terms. Shortly after his landslide 1936 re‐election, Roosevelt pursued three polarizing initiatives: the Court‐Packing Plan, the 1937 executive reorganization bill, and the 1938 "purge" campaign. These measures, while far from completely successful, began an important transformation that replaced the decentralized, patronage‐based party system, which had dominated the 19th century and remained regnant through the first three decades of the 20th century, with an executive‐centered partisanship, which subordinated parties to the ambitions of the White House. Roosevelt's assault on existing partisan practices—most notably, the unprecedented "purge" campaign—imposed his personal brand on the Democratic Party. More broadly, his profound influence on the Democratic Party led to what Max Weber called the "routinization of charisma," whereby the disruptive leadership of a charismatic leader is displaced by a "mechanism of rules" that transcend "personal authority." The deinstitutionalization of the Democratic Party was part of a broader objective to build an executive‐centered administrative state that Roosevelt and his political allies considered a more effective means to pursue their partisan objectives. Ronald Reagan's presidency signaled that Republicans, no less than Democrats, embraced executive‐centered partisanship. Eventually, as became all too clear during the presidency of Donald Trump, the fusion of executive prerogative and partisanship resulted in a "personal president," as Theodore Lowi termed it, and a plebiscitary politics that denigrated political parties as collective organizations and threatened to turn political parties into cults of personality.

The modern presidency emerged not from an effort to escape constitutional propriety, as Tulis argues, but, rather, to emancipate presidents from the localized political parties of the nineteenth century, which had come to be viewed as sites of provincial and corrupt forms of popular rule. As the troubled tenure of George W. Bush suggests, contemporary presidents are torn between the public expectation that they stand apart from party politics and act as the chief executive of the administrative state; and their role as party leaders, which links them to political allies in Congress and loyalists in the electorate. In its contribution to the development of a 'new' national programmatic party system, the Bush administration reveals the potential for a novel, disturbing meld of party and administration, in which presidents seek to exploit the powers of the modern executive office for partisan gain. Adapted from the source document.