Few of President Trump’s actions early in his second term have provoked as much furor as the executive order freezing certain federal spending programmes. A federal trial judge in Rhode Island issued a nationwide injunction against the freeze, insisting that he intends to stop the administration from “any federal funding pause”. Five former Treasury secretaries published a protest op-ed in The New York Times, warning that “not since the Nixon administration has this type of executive action been contemplated”.
They’re right about that. Trump’s assertion of the president’s power to pause funding — the right of impoundment — reverses the standard practice of the past two generations. Team Trump aims to restore the traditional exercise of presidential authority to impound congressional spending, a power which was restricted by the Impoundment Control Act of 1974. In doing so, the Trumpians aim to put an end to what political analyst Kevin Phillips called the “Watergate warp” that weakened American presidents, Republican and Democratic, pulling them down from the Caesarist heights summited by pre-Watergate chief executives.
The principle behind impoundments is simple. Congress has the authority to set the ceiling on spending, the thinking runs, but not the floor. If the goal of a programme is achieved without spending the full amount authorised by the legislative branch, the president can decide not to spend the difference. So argued FDR, a frequent user of impoundments. Forcing the president to spend every last dime, he said, “would take from the chief executive every incentive for good management and the practice of commonsense economy”.
If the legal battles over Trump’s executive order freezing some spending lead to a Supreme Court decision clarifying the constitutionality of impoundments — and holding the 1974 act unconstitutional — it would be a huge win for the administration, and they are gearing up for it. But legal battles are downstream of political ones. In Trump’s first term, the president was frequently stymied by coordinated media, legal, and security-apparatus efforts to generate public outcry. After some bluster, Trump usually withdrew to a more conventional position. But he is pulling no punches this time around, and noticeably, he doesn’t need to. The American people appear much less susceptible to supposed threats to “our democracy” than they were in 2017, and Trump’s approval ratings have climbed since he re-entered the Oval Office.
The flashpoint over impoundments reveals a deeper shift in the American political imagination. The key to understanding what’s happening lies the mythical role played by the person to whom the five former Treasury secretaries compared Trump: Richard Nixon, whose downfall took away the vast presidential powers amassed by FDR.
Presidents before FDR had used impoundments. But from FDR to Nixon, impoundments were a major part of a bipartisan consensus. Americans wanted a strong president. In May 1932, FDR asserted that “the country needs and, unless I mistake its temper, the country demands bold, persistent experimentation”. In his first Inaugural Address, FDR threatened to rule by decree if Congress failed to back him: “I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me.”
FDR capitalised on the Great Depression to launch an era in which Americans expected the president to act decisively and master all the resources of the federal government to resolve problems. This expectation remained strong throughout World War II and into the early Sixties. Trust in government, and the president, remained high through the New Deal order. But by the late Sixties, as the war in Vietnam worsened and the excesses of social liberalism disturbed the public, confidence in the executive began to wane.
It was this discontent that catapulted Nixon to the presidency. Campaigning on law and order and against the failed Democratic record, Nixon won the 1968 election as a moderate conservative. He set out to run the federal government along the lines that the FDR had set down with the New Deal. Nixon was the last president to try and govern in Roosevelt’s Caesarist model. It would prove his undoing.
While he supported the New Deal, LBJ’s Great Society, and civil rights for black Americans, Nixon thought that the decades-long trend had been for federal bureaucrats to carve off fiefdoms for themselves, in which they were accountable to no one. His aim was to reassert presidential control over the federal bureaucracy. In his first term, he would focus on the foreign-policy bureaucracy; in his second term, he planned to focus on the domestic bureaucracy. As he put it in his memoirs, his objective was to “break the Eastern stranglehold on the executive branch and the federal government”.
“Within the government, Nixon’s most powerful opponents weren’t liberals, but conservatives in the military and security services.”
There was a partisan element to Nixon’s actions, revealed by his reference to an “Eastern stranglehold”. To wit, bureaucracies were largely run by East Coast liberals ideologically opposed to him. Yet the real divide wasn’t between liberals and conservatives, but over the role of the bureaucracy in a post-FDR America.
Within the government, Nixon’s most powerful opponents weren’t liberals, but conservatives in the military and security services. From FBI boss J. Edgar Hoover to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, these actors sought to defend their institutional prerogatives and autonomy from presidential oversight. To keep the Vietnam War going on their terms, the Joint Chiefs used media leaks to destabilise Nixon’s withdrawal plans and even spied on the president.
Hoover claimed that “political attempts to hamper and interfere with the federal and other police and prosecuting agents are the real menace”. He countered Nixon’s efforts at intelligence reforms that would have required the FBI to cooperate with other agencies under White House supervision. “Hoover has to be told who is president”, Nixon wrote to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, to little apparent effect.
Nixon’s project wasn’t revolutionary. Like his predecessors, he made extensive use of impoundments. Like his predecessors, his solution to administrative problems was to try to centralise power in the White House, bypassing unreliable bureaucrats. Like his predecessors, he appointed outsiders who could bring a fresh perspective and, when necessary, clean house. And like his predecessors, Nixon also authorised quasi-political surveillance.
His practices were ambiguous. On the one hand, it looked like the elected president, the figure who in the American system most closely embodies popular sovereignty, was wresting control of the government from unelected bureaucrats — Caesarism in the positive sense, a popular, regal presidency akin to that of Charles de Gaulle in France. On the other hand, it looked like the troubling apex of the “imperial presidency” that FDR had created — Caesarism in the negative sense, an emperor in waiting.
When Hoover died in 1972, Nixon passed over the FBI’s top lieutenants and appointed government attorney L. Patrick Gray as his replacement. This infuriated FBI Associate Director Mark Felt. A Hoover loyalist, Felt thought that Nixon’s actions were compromising the institutional autonomy of the FBI that Hoover had set up. So when Washington Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began examining the Watergate burglary, Felt saw an opportunity to undermine the new acting director of the FBI and embarrass the administration that had passed him over for the top job. As historian Beverly Gage has written, “Felt cooperated with Woodward not to preserve the American Constitution or to limit the imperial presidency, as the standard Watergate myths would suggest, but to protect the legacy of J. Edgar Hoover”.
Nixon’s attempt to reassert presidential power set off a political conflict against a partisan Congress and, more important, bureaucrats jealous of their own institutional expertise. Public opinion turned against Nixon, aided by media outlets united in their hostility; back then, there were only three national television stations, which all agreed to coordinate their programming so that at least one was always broadcasting the Senate hearings on Watergate.
“Nixon became a scapegoat, taking the fall for decades of executive-branch and intelligence-agency abuses.”
Nixon became a scapegoat, taking the fall for decades of executive-branch and intelligence-agency abuses. As a matter of public opinion, his downfall was possibly inevitable. The American public was exhausted with the Vietnam War, with the dirty tricks of their politicians and spies, and with runaway inflation, especially at the gas pump. Somebody had to pay, and Nixon, who had been at the top of American politics since the 1950s, fit the bill.
When the Erwin Committee issued its report on Nixon’s wrongdoing in June 1974, it said less about Watergate than about a culture of executive abuse of power. “From the early days of the present administration”, the introduction went, “the power of the president was viewed by some in the White House as almost without limit”. Presidential power had become outré. One month after the report’s release, a critically weakened Nixon signed the Impoundment Control Act. It didn’t save him. In August 1974, he resigned to avoid impeachment. His successor, Gerald Ford, pardoned him, hoping that this would bring an end to America’s “long national nightmare”.
By the early Eighties, the passions of Watergate subsided; many thought the country had moved on. Kevin Phillips, the political consultant-turned-writer and analyst, wasn’t so sure. Hence, his coinage of “the Watergate warp” to describe how Nixon’s disgrace might continue to reshape American politics.
The first way it did so was to help conservatives. Liberals hoped that Watergate would poison the GOP brand for a generation. Yet the scandal couldn’t be wielded along partisan lines. Across the board, the warp reinforced Americans’ suspicion of their government. The American electorate tilted toward the ideology that manifested that suspicion, giving conservative Republicans control of the White House until 1992, and control of Congress shortly after that.
But the Watergate warp didn’t bring about conservative small government. It merely led to a weaker president. This was the second way it distorted American politics. The Seventies saw the explosion of the powers of the administrative state. The New Deal’s “economic regulation” of the banking and commercial sectors transformed into “social regulation” affecting most of American life. Anxious to dodge the “imperial” accusation, presidents acquiesced to legislation that took decision-making out of the White House and handed it over to administrative agencies.
Watergate the break-in was a petty political burglary; Watergate the myth was an act of robbery. It stole power from the president and distributed it to faceless and unaccountable bureaucrats. The Watergate warp was the destruction of Rooseveltian presidential power by a mean and hungry legal and media elite. And therein lay its third, most tedious disfiguration. Watergate became the founding myth for journalists, judges, and lawyers who dreamed of orchestrating investigative reports and special prosecutions that would topple presidents. It turned political and media elites into aspiring regicides, each fancying himself a Cassius taking down Caesar.
The result has been that every few years, Americans are subjected to scandals narrated along Watergate lines: Iran-Contra, Whitewater, the Valerie Plame affair, and “Russian collusion” all followed a familiar path of public inquiry, a push for a special prosecutor, and then incessant questions about what the president knew and when he knew it. Their supporters, Left and Right, saw themselves vindicating the rule of law; to their critics, they looked like lawfare designed to undo the democratic will.
Over the past decade, we’ve seen signs that the Watergate warp is fading. For starters, the lawfare strategy hasn’t been all that successful since Nixon. The closest that America has come to a repeat of the Watergate saga was with #Russiagate during Trump’s first term. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s probe was supposed to follow the Watergate script. Indeed, in 2018, it inspired a court petition to unseal grand-jury documents — normally sealed forever — from the Watergate Special Prosecution Task Force. The hope was that this might provide some readily applicable lessons. The judge granted the request, but it didn’t help. The Mueller probe missed its target, concluding that there had been no collusion between Team Trump and the Kremlin during the 2016 campaign.
“The lawfare strategy hasn’t been all that successful since Nixon.”
L’affaire collusion also failed to reshape public opinion. Scapegoating is a collective endeavor, and unlike in Watergate, Mueller couldn’t even convince half the country. Trump’s opponents tried again with the Jan. 6 Commission; like the Mueller investigation, it was a well-organised operation, a made-for-TV drama. Each such effort failed for precisely that reason. They were designed to replicate the homogeneous media environment of the Seventies, which no longer exists. To work, scapegoating demands that the collective doesn’t perceive a victim. As soon as they see one, the mechanism falls apart. Trump I’s failed scapegoating led to Trump II’s victory over Kamala Harris.
In retrospect, it is revealing how much of the Biden presidency and Harris campaign were devoted to warning that Trump was a dictator-in-waiting because he wanted to fire the bureaucrats. This strategy was only marginally effective: the only demographic that the Democrats gained ground with between 2020 and 2024 was voters over age 65. But younger voters admire Trump for precisely the reason that the Watergate generation fears him: his dynamism, his determination to achieve results.
Then, too, the Left’s glorification of the bureaucracy has often been revealed to be a fig leaf covering an inept federal workforce. Paeans to the unimpeachable authority of the civil service are amusing at the best of times, but become less funny when their failures are obvious to millions. Progressives quietly acknowledge the need to circumvent lethargic agencies; after all, the precedent for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency stems from Obama’s struggles with bureaucratic incompetence. In 2014, because of the failures around the rollout of ObamaCare and the website healthcare.gov, Obama set up the US Digital Service, with 300 staffers drawn mainly from Silicon Valley. Its head was a political appointee, not a civil servant.
What progressives admit in private, Trump bellowed across the land. In 2024, the desire to fix a dysfunctional state apparatus overcame older Americans’ anxieties about the imperial presidency. Victorious, Trump rechristened the US Digital Service as DOGE, giving him an entity that could operate throughout the whole federal government with personnel selected free of normal civil-service channels.
Nixon is having his revenge. The Supreme Court’s ruling last year asserting broad presidential immunity is a kind of posthumous vindication of Nixon’s presidential defense; had the ruling been issued in 1973, it would have shipwrecked the Watergate special prosecution. The high court read the law — and the national mood — correctly. Voters don’t want lawfare to harass former presidents, nor to paralyse presidents in office. They do want an effective and decisive executive. The model of personal power that presidents from FDR to Nixon embodied is back in style.
This changes the terms of American politics. Back in the Seventies, Nixon realised that the fundamental political conflict facing America was not that between liberals and conservatives, but between those who wanted the bureaucracies to exercise institutional autonomy and those who wanted them subordinated to the elected officials. That remains true today. Trump’s most controversial Cabinet picks (RFK, Tulsi Gabbard, Kash Patel, and Pete Hegseth) had liberal critics, but particularly vehement conservative ones. This was because they swore to take back control of entrenched scientific, intelligence, or military bureaucracies. Just like liberals, conservatives have their favourite bureaucracies.
This was why movement conservatism was never at peace with Nixon, and why it will likely never be at peace with Trump. The electoral appetite is for restoring competence and efficiency in government, as well as purging the state apparatus of ideological absurdities. It doesn’t exist to realise movement conservatism’s visions of a small, shrunken government.
Finally, if the resurgence of American Caesarism is “red” and Nixonian at the moment, another “blue” Caesar is certainly possible in a country that remains so narrowly divided. Caesarism isn’t the product of a stable constitutional system; it is always a volatile phenomenon, its trajectory is difficult to predict or control. The Roman emperors were great not because of their steady hand, but because they went further than anyone else in good or evil.
So far, Trump’s impact lies with demolition, not creation. Whatever the future holds, he has brought an end to a lingering national myth. The elite obsession with Nixon, as it appears in op-eds and lawfare, has never been less effective. For decades, the Watergate script was endlessly rerun and rebooted. But Trump has pulled the plug.
