A year after his election to a second term in office, Donald Trump has concentrated more of the federal government’s power in the White House than any other modern president. The vision of a strong executive that conservatives dreamed about for decades has been put into practice, and then some. The paradox is that Trump looks increasingly politically vulnerable at the same time.
Republicans were clobbered earlier this month in off-year elections that showed discontent about high prices; Trump’s approval rating has slid to its first-term norm of the low 40s; congressional Democrats have opened a clear lead in 2026 polls; and political mania around Jeffrey Epstein caused the Republican-controlled Congress to at least symbolically break with the president.
Maybe the combination of unprecedented presidential powers and declining political fortunes is not actually a paradox. With great power, after all, comes great responsibility — and therefore great blame. In his 1986 paper, “The Politics of Blame Avoidance,” scholar R. Kent Weaver argued that politicians need to “avoid blame for unpopular actions” more than they need to “claim credit for popular ones.” When the White House tries to be all-powerful, it might get more credit when things go well. But it also quickly runs out of places to redirect blame when they don’t.
Deflecting blame — and doing it credibly — is an age-old political art. For hundreds of years, monarchs and their supporters blamed ministers when subjects were displeased. American presidents have made use of the same tool, often pointing the finger at institutions such as Congress, the courts, the Federal Reserve or Cabinet departments.
In his 1994 book “Presidential Lightning Rods,” Richard J. Ellis explained how President Dwight D. Eisenhower profited politically by delegating authority to subordinates. Eisenhower was able to off-load blame for his administration’s free-market agriculture reforms to Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson to such a degree, Ellis noted, that in 1958 “two-thirds of farmers approved of Eisenhower, while slightly less than 30 percent approved of Benson.” By contrast, everyone knows that Trump’s tariff policies, for example, are his and his alone.
Eisenhower also delegated responsibility to the Justice Department. He told his first attorney general, “It’s your responsibility … as well as your authority. Now if anything goes wrong, you know who’s going to get it, don’t you.” Compare that with Trump’s situation. It would be hard for him to make Attorney General Pam Bondi take the fall for the administration’s flailing on the Epstein files, or any other mishap, because no one is under the impression that she is an independent actor. Trump does not even try to conceal the fact that the Justice Department takes orders directly from him.
Trump sees independent institutions as a political liability, and they can be. His first term was dogged by an unnecessary special counsel investigation. This time he has removed officials from historically independent executive-branch agencies and turned his Cabinet meetings into ceremonial shows of loyalty to him.
But independent power centers in the government — or at least power centers perceived as independent from the president’s desires — can also be a political asset. Take the Federal Reserve: The perception that Paul Volcker, the Fed’s chairman, was responsible for the early-1980s downturn probably mitigated the political damage to President Ronald Reagan. Trump has been trying overtly to take control of the Fed, including through the unprecedented removal of a governor. Good luck blaming it for inflation under those circumstances.
Nor is Congress a plausible scapegoat for the country’s problems when Republican majorities have shown so much loyalty to the president — and when Trump has circumvented the legislature so frequently with executive actions. Even though it was Senate Democrats who caused the latest government shutdown, journalist Josh Barro observed online that it was natural for the public to blame Trump because he “has spent 10 months sending the message that the govt does what he wants.”
Who’s left to hold responsible for things Trump doesn’t want to own? Well, the Biden-Harris administration that voters fired last year. But out-of-power Democrats might become a less effective foil as Trump reaches a year back in office himself.
Another possible repository of blame is the Supreme Court. If the justices limit Trump’s tariff powers in the coming months, they might be just the scapegoats he needs. While ferociously attacking them, the administration could use such a decision as a face-saving way to cut border taxes and respond to the public’s discontent with high prices. (Republican-appointed justices on the court, meanwhile, would show their independence: win-win.)
Whatever happens with tariffs, Trump will have changed the presidency. He’s making the office more powerful relative to the rest of the executive branch and relative to Congress and the states. One fear is that this is a one-way ratchet — that the office will keep aggrandizing itself. But the politics of blame avoidance might be a countervailing force.
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