This event was a book talk and discussion built around Dean William Howell’s new book, The Trajectory of Power: The Rise of a Strongman Presidency, presented as a conversation between Howell and his colleague Jim Steinberg. Howell, a longtime scholar of the American presidency, explained that the book was completed just before the 2024 election and is therefore less a reaction to current headlines than an effort to trace the long-running historical forces behind what he calls a “strongman presidency.” His central claim locates the origins of this trajectory not in recent years but in the Progressive Era more than a century ago, rooted in the rise of the federal administrative state.

“All this precedes Trump. All this involves dynamics that have nothing to do with his vanity or his impulses….
The starting point for us is with the progressive period more than a century prior.”

Dean William Howell

Howell described two intertwined dynamics. The first is shared by both parties: as the administrative state grew, presidents of both parties worked to bring its capacity under their control through centralization and loyal appointments. The second, more provocative argument is an asymmetry. Because the administrative state was largely built to serve progressive ends, the political right faced a problem the left did not—and the solution articulated in the 1970s and acted upon in the 1980s was a far more powerful presidency. Howell traced this to the rise of the unitary executive theory and, ultimately, to contemporary efforts aimed at dismantling the administrative state itself.

“If you sit on the right of the political spectrum and you look out on the administrative state…you say, I see enemies everywhere, and what am I to do?… It comes from one party, because one party has a problem that the other party doesn’t have.”

Dean William Howell

Drawing on his experience in government, Steinberg repeatedly tested the asymmetry thesis, arguing that both parties have used unilateral executive power to work around a gridlocked Congress and that the difference may lie in purpose rather than in kind. Howell held to the distinction, contrasting ordinary partisan readings of agency mandates with efforts to render agencies functionally broken. The two also discussed foreign policy, where Howell acknowledged far more continuity between the parties, as well as the Supreme Court’s embrace of the unitary executive theory, the dysfunction of Congress, and the book’s deliberately sober ending.

“There are no quick fixes, either in the forms of particular reform or in the form of one standoff election…. This is not the stuff of natural recovery. This is going to require intention and a lot of hard work, and it’s going to have to play out over many years.”

Dean William Howell

The audience Q&A broadened the discussion considerably. Questions explored how distinctly American this phenomenon is, what might actually be done about it, and the apparent paradox of a small-government party embracing interventionist policies. Others raised the role of individual presidential agency versus larger structural forces, whether constitutional constraints on Congress lie at the root of the problem, and what these dynamics mean for democracy’s standing abroad—including a striking parallel drawn from Costa Rica’s recent elections. The session closed on the slippery, cross-ideological nature of populism and on a cautiously hopeful note: that the verdict on the American republic is not yet in.