The Green Lantern Theory, Revisited

The further the right drifts from classical liberalism, the deeper it sinks into leftist modes of thought.

Identity politics. Centrally planned economies. Simping for Russia. When I was a kid—and by “kid,” I mean until I was in my early 40s—that was pinko stuff.

Another left-wing idea of more recent vintage that the right has warmed up to is the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency.

In 2014, Barack Obama was mired in Year 4 of being stymied by a Republican House majority dedicated to obstructing him at every turn. Frustrated liberals who’d been promised a golden age of Hope and Change demanded to know why the president wasn’t doing more to break the stalemate. He should use his powers!

To which smart Democratic wonks like Brendan Nyhan and Ezra Klein replied: Which powers?

“The belief that the president can achieve any political or policy objective if only he tries hard enough or uses the right tactics” is how Nyhan defined what he derisively called “the Green Lantern Theory of the Presidency.” For those who don’t know, the Green Lantern is a comic-book superhero who’s capable of generating immense amounts of force but only by mustering a similarly immense amount of courage and will.

That’s not how politics works in a system where federal power is divided among three branches and enumerated in a written Constitution, Nyhan and Klein reminded dejected Democrats.

Granted, some presidents’ abilities are more superheroic than others’. Nyhan cited Ronald Reagan as an example of a leader whose communication skills rallied the public behind his agenda and Lyndon Johnson as a master of twisting congressional arms to move landmark legislation. The White House isn’t powerless to influence American politics. But in the end, if Congress says no and the courts say no, there’s no Green Lantern scenario in which the president can simply will his way into getting what he wants.

Donald Trump’s second term will be an extended attempt to rebut that claim. Do presidents really lack super powers, or did prior presidents simply fail to summon the requisite courage to smash through institutional obstacles to their wishes? There’s no Green Lantern figure in a liberal system of government—but there sure is in a fascist one. That’s sort of the point.

Trump’s popular image as a political superhero is important to understanding why he behaves as he does, I think, and why so many of his policies end up as goofy garbage. Superheroes are expected to act boldly, impose their will, and achieve things that mere mortals can’t, and the president is very eager to meet those expectations. As he once famously said, “I alone can fix it!” That’s been his de facto motto for going on 10 years.

The problem with having a president who’s obsessed with proving that he can achieve things others can’t is that the things he ends up achieving are often quite stupid.

The hero’s journey.

Barack Obama was brimming with superhero potential when he took office in 2009.

He’d been elected in a national landslide with the most popular votes of any candidate in U.S. history. His party had won huge majorities in Congress. He’d broken a momentous racial barrier by becoming the country’s first black president. And he was an “outsider,” or as much of one as a sitting senator could be. He’d risen from obscurity in 2004 to win the White House just four years later at the tender age of 47. He wasn’t of the system; he was here to save America from it.

He had youth, charisma, a “coalition of the ascendant” behind him, and the numbers in the House and Senate to move any legislation he wanted. That’s as close to becoming the Green Lantern as a traditional president gets. No wonder liberals couldn’t cope when the GOP clobbered Democrats in the 2010 midterms and their superhero president’s powers disappeared overnight, a mere two years into what would end up being an eight-year tenure.

Two presidential election cycles later, Trump gave Republicans their own superhero as leader.

He was a true outsider, having never held office before and given to speaking in ways that no politician would. The TV game show he hosted solidified him as a national celebrity and bestowed upon him, laughably, a reputation as a business genius. He inflated his wealth and whispered to the tabloids about his sexual exploits to cultivate an image as the ultimate alpha male. And his pitch to voters leaned heavily on protecting them from threats like the many rapists supposedly pouring into the country from Mexico.

He would clean up the streets of Gotham, beginning with “the swamp” inside the Beltway.

To a far greater degree than Obama, a Trump presidency portended something radically more transgressive than what had come before. Obama was a mainline neoliberal Democrat, a lawyer by training, and a creature of party politics, like nearly every other Democrat in government. Trump was a nationalist in a party of conservatives, evinced not the faintest respect for the constitutional scheme, and has only ever seemed to regard the Republican Party as a vehicle for his own ambitions. In fact, he’s spent the last 10 years demonstrating superhuman political strength by vanquishing “villains” in his own party who dared to cross him.

Both men’s supporters had messianic ambitions for them early on but most of the gas for Obamamania had gone out of the left by the time he was reelected in 2012. Trump is the opposite: Between his ruthless dominance of his party, his improbable victory over the “deep state” that sought to imprison him, and his stature as the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote, he’s more of a national savior to populist fanatics now than he was in 2016. They’re expecting a superhero in his second term, even more so than in his first.

So that’s what he’s striving to give them. Befitting his identity as the Green Lantern, the president is constantly trying to prove that he’s willing and able to accomplish things no other president could.

Take Russia. (Please!)

Performative dynamism.

On Tuesday, Trump excitedly announced that his latest phone call with Vladimir Putin had gone well and that both sides of the war had agreed to immediately halt attacks against the other’s infrastructure and energy supplies.

A few hours later, Russian bombs began falling on Ukraine. One knocked out the power in the city of Slovyansk.

That wasn’t all. Although Ukraine had already agreed to the White House’s demand for a full 30-day ceasefire, the Kremlin declared after Putin’s call with Trump that no progress will be made toward settling the conflict until Ukraine’s western allies completely cut off weapons and intelligence to Kyiv. That’s an unserious demand, tantamount to rejecting peace talks entirely. Even if Trump is willing to comply, European nations won’t be.

In other words, the Russians made Trump look like a chump, and an ego as fragile as the president’s normally wouldn’t tolerate that. But Putin has an ace in the hole: He knows that the Green Lantern promised many times during last year’s campaign that he’d end the war in Ukraine “in 24 hours.” Trump has now begun to inch away from that pledge—he says he was “being a little bit sarcastic”—but he can’t give up on peace due to Russian recalcitrance without conceding that his peacemaking abilities aren’t so superheroic after all.

To prove that he can broker a truce that no one else could broker—he alone can fix!—he’s stuck humoring Moscow, potentially forcing concessions on Ukraine in the name of securing a deal that are so repellent even nations as illiberal as Turkey will struggle to condone them. The demands of being a superhero have left Trump in a weak negotiating position destined to produce an embarrassing settlement that favors Russia. No wonder Putin is driving a hard bargain.

Forget foreign policy, though. How about deportations? If there’s one aspect of domestic policy in which MAGA voters are expecting feats of political strength beyond what any mere mortal president could achieve, that’s it.

Last weekend, the White House delivered. Trump invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a statute previously used only in wartime, to authorize deporting certain criminal “invaders” without the usual due process for immigrants. That’s precisely the sort of Green Lantern-ism that liberals like Brendan Nyhan and Ezra Klein struggled to imagine in 2014. The president has lots of “emergency” powers under the law that he can exploit if only he has the ruthless will and imagination to try.

The one little catch is that some of the “gang members” shipped off to El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act … might not be gang members.

If you believe their relatives (a big “if”), some were misidentified based on tattoos that resembled gang insignias and sent to rot in a banana-republic dungeon without any chance to plead their innocence to a judge. Trump’s need to prove that not even due process can resist his border-enforcing super powers may have left law-abiding asylum-seekers stranded in a nightmare with no easy legal remedy. If true, that’s morally atrocious—and I suspect it’ll also be politically atrocious if the public starts paying attention to the plight of the deportees.

Everywhere you look in Trump’s first 60 days back in office, you’ll find him asserting outlandish abilities to shape events that his predecessors seldom or never claimed, all with lousy consequences for the country.

Other presidents have imposed “emergency” tariffs, for instance, but none in my lifetime has done so as prolifically, arbitrarily, or destructively as Trump has, effectively seizing control of U.S. trade policy. Other presidents have pressured American allies to comply with our wishes, but I’ve never seen one muse about annexing a neighbor, wrecking relations between our two countries to no obvious policy end. Other presidents have cut spending, but no one has dispatched a team of shadowy tech bros to dismantle federal agencies surreptitiously and possibly illegally.

DOGE is the purest expression of Trump’s Green Lantern identity, I think, because the ratio of performative dynamism to actual results is so large. Not only has it not saved much money, there’s a chance it’ll cost taxpayers dollars as lawsuits pile up, agency inefficiencies mount, and the IRS’ ability to collect revenue erodes. It’s terrible policy—but it’s fantastic theater. What is Elon Musk if not a superhero in his own right, possessed of an historic fortune, consumed with visiting Mars, and now kicking down the doors of villainous federal bureaucracies to tear out supposedly wasteful spending by the roots?

He and Trump are doing things no one thought possible and they’re doing them fast, heightening the mystique they’ve cultivated as men of extraordinary ability and indomitable will who intend to change the world whether existing institutions are ready or not. Bold action, daring reforms, garbage results: We have a Green Lantern presidency at last.

Chicken and egg.

Which leaves us with an interesting question. Does Donald Trump want to be a superhero because he’s an authoritarian or is Donald Trump an authoritarian because he wants to be a superhero?

I typically approach his gambits as fascist strategic ploys aimed at consolidating power under the executive branch. Everything I mentioned above can be analyzed that way. He’s going easy on Putin in Ukraine negotiations because he hopes to re-create Putinism here at home; he’s siccing DOGE on federal agencies because he’s keen to purge the government of rival “liberal” power blocs; he’s flouting due process in deporting gang members because he wants to get the public on his side in delegitimizing the courts; he’s tariff-ing his brains out because he wants the whole world to have to beg him for their livelihoods; he’s menacing Canada because seizing neighboring countries is just kind of what fascists obsessed with “national greatness” do.

His Green Lantern aspirations flow from his illiberalism, one might conclude, which is why Barack Obama was a poor match for the theory. The most distinctive “super power” Trump wields, in fact, is the certainty that if you resist him you’ll be threatened by the White House politically and economically and threatened by the scummiest elements of his base in more visceral ways.

But not every Trump political gambit lends itself so easily to strategic logic.

What’s the strategic logic, for example, of vowing to convert Gaza into a resort? What was the supposed strategic logic of holding a photo op with Kim Jong Un in 2019? Is there really a strategic rationale behind slapping tariffs on Canada and Mexico, then lifting them, then slapping them on and lifting them again?

When the president strong-arms nations like Ukraine and Canada while playing nice with international cancers like Russia and China, is it because of his ideological affinity for the latter? Or is it a simpler matter that smaller powers can be successfully bullied and major ones can’t? A superhero always wins in the end, after all, and it’s a lot easier to “win” over weak allies than hostile enemies.

And yes, Taiwanese readers should find that ominous.

His interest in Gaza and in meeting Kim are more easily explained as efforts to distinguish himself as a singular figure willing to venture where his predecessors didn’t dare. No other president would be so bold (or dumb) as to propose resolving the Israeli-Palestinian with a bit of ethnic cleansing and seaside development. No other president would take the political risk of meeting with a global pariah like Kim. No other president would toy with the American economy by imposing and then un-imposing tariffs on two of the country’s biggest trade partners as a matter of whim.

Only a leader endowed with superhuman courage and willpower is willing to confront and shatter the constitutional and international norms that have governed the world for the last 80 or so years. Trump is accomplishing things no other president could—or would want to. He’s a superhero.

Liberals wanted a Green Lantern behind the Resolute Desk 10 years ago. Now we have one. How do you like it?