Smaller Government Can Protect Against a Vengeful President
Whether through policy or prosecution, the president's ability to punish his political enemies should be sharply constrained.
A number of the wealthiest Americans are choosing not to publicly endorse a candidate for president in 2024, and new reporting suggests they fear retribution if former President Donald Trump is reelected. No matter which side of the aisle you find yourself on, the solution to this quandary should be simple: shrink the size of government and constrain the powers of the president.
"Numerous billionaires and other leading executives have taken steps in recent months to stay out of the race," as Jeff Stein, Jacqueline Alemany, and Josh Dawsey reported in The Washington Post on Monday. "Others who previously backed Democrats have stayed silent this election, which some critics and Trump supporters alike have interpreted as a peace offering to the GOP presidential nominee."
Warren Buffett endorsed the Democratic candidate in the 2008, 2012, and 2016 contests, but he announced last week that he "does not currently and will not prospectively…endorse and support political candidates." (Buffett also declined to endorse in 2020.)
Meanwhile, both the Post and the Los Angeles Times planned to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris, before Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong—respectively, the papers' owners—intervened to prevent the endorsement of any candidate. Each move sparked considerable backlash, with 8 percent of the Post's paid subscribers having since canceled their subscriptions. Semafor's Max Tani reported that The New York Times even saw "a small but noticeable wave of cancelations" from confused subscribers after the Post's non-endorsement, including "emails to the effect of 'fuck Bezos.'" (The New York Times endorsed Harris in September.)
The Post report is clear about the rationale, with billionaires "expressing real concerns about the potential Trump administration and whether they will be punished for publicly coming out in favor of Harris." This could take the form of either unfavorable policies or a more existential threat: Trump has pledged to impose double-digit tariffs on all imports to the United States, and he has also openly sworn "revenge" on those he feels have wronged him.
Obviously, the prospect of an executive weaponizing the federal government to suit his whims is chilling—and as the Post article points out, Trump was no stranger to it in his first term, "exploit[ing] the power of the federal government to try to punish a wide range of perceived enemies in the business community who he thought were defying him in various ways."
But no matter the particulars of one's political leanings, the most straightforward solution should be clear, which is to shrink the size of the government and constrain the president's increasingly unchecked power.
On the one hand, progressives may feel that it's improper for billionaires to exert any sort of influence on politics. (Remember, some feel that billionaires shouldn't exist at all.) But one quote tucked into the Post article provides some necessary context: "It's a natural phenomenon of people who depend on government support for their wealth," according to Harvard Law professor and Trump defender Alan Dershowitz.
Indeed, as the Post authors point out, "Amazon has billions of dollars in cloud computing contracts with the federal government, and Blue Origin, Bezos's rocket company, has contracts with the Space Force and NASA. Soon-Shiong, a biotech investor, could have future business before federal regulators."
In that sense, if the complaint is that business leaders exert too much influence over government, one easy solution is for government to stop exerting so much influence over the economy. When the government is no longer in the business of doling out multi-billion dollar contracts to private enterprises, then their billionaire owners will have fewer reasons to weigh in on who the next president will be.
Some also fear that Trump's wrath may take the form of unfavorable economic policies.
"What's alarming isn't just the prospect that Trump will brazenly violate the law to punish companies he's decided are his enemies," The Bulwark's Andrew Egger writes. "It's that he may not even have to. Trump's proposed mega-tariff economic agenda will give him all the arm-twisting authority he needs to bring America's moguls to heel….To punish Harris-backing CEOs, all Trump has to do is hurt their companies with onerous new trade policies, then decline to pick up the phone when they petition for relief."
Indeed, while the Constitution gives the legislature the sole authority to impose taxes and duties, Congress has largely ceded that role to the executive. As a result, while the founders clearly intended that tariffs should be set by Congress—which currently encompasses more than 500 people—a single person instead has nearly unchecked authority to set trade restrictions at his whim.
"While the durable implementation of broad and damaging US tariffs is not guaranteed, its risk—and related economic and geopolitical risks—will remain real and substantial until US law is changed to limit presidential tariff powers," Clark Packard and Scott Lincicome wrote in a recent Cato Institute report. "We therefore recommend Congress enact such amendments immediately."
Some, on the other hand, worry that Trump's retribution could be more punitive. The Post notes that at a recent meeting of business leaders, former President Bill Clinton "warned about the dangers Trump poses to democracy and the nation's rule of law."
While the former is a more existential threat, it has obvious real-world applications, namely Trump's refusal to acknowledge his loss in the 2020 election and his repeated attempts to subvert its results. During his campaign rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday night, Trump referenced Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R–La.) and said, "He and I have a secret, we'll tell you what it is when the race is over." Politico suggested that this "could be a reference to the House settling a contested election."
This would be a reference to the pressure put on then-Vice President Mike Pence in January 2021 to, as Pence later put it, "overturn the election by returning or rejecting votes." In 2022, The New York Times called Johnson "the most important architect of the Electoral College objections."
But the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022 cleared up some of the confusion that Trump attempted to seize upon in the first place. While affirming that the vice president, not the speaker of the House, is in charge of counting electoral votes, the law further notes that the vice president's duties are "solely ministerial." Johnson could marshal Republicans in Congress to object to the electoral results, but that would require "at least one-fifth" of the members of both the House and Senate to sign on, and a majority in each chamber would then have to affirm the objections.
Clearly, one lesson learned in 2020 is that taking power away from the executive branch can be useful in preventing an overt power grab from a chastened candidate. Republicans should celebrate this move, too: After all, in the event that Trump wins next week, the 2022 law would prevent the candidate they refer to as "Comrade Kamala" from exerting any undue influence on the vote-counting process, as the sitting vice president.
Perhaps Trump could go even further, opening prosecutions of disfavored individuals. In 2020, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg donated more than $400 million to help shore up local elections before that year's presidential election, which Trump and his allies have characterized as illegal campaign spending. In a book released in September, Trump wrote, "We are watching [Zuckerberg] closely, and if he does anything illegal this time he will spend the rest of his life in prison."
This, too, is an argument for constraining the power of the president to go after his political opponents—something which Republicans, Democrats, and everyone in between should be able to agree upon.
Clearly, Americans as a whole agree on little, least of all whom they would like to be their next president. But if we can agree on anything, it should be that the president's power to punish his political enemies should be severely limited.
