Executive power abuse: Obama’s ‘pen and phone’ had nothing on Trump’s
Do you remember how Barack Obama abused executive power and how he promised to use his “pen and phone” to bypass Congress? And do you remember how “conservative” Republicans objected to it? Well, in 2025 A.D. (After Donald), it turns out that Barry had nothing compared to Donald Trump.
In early 2014 at his first Cabinet meeting of the year, Obama declared that he wouldn’t wait for Congress to create the legislation he wanted, choosing instead to usurp the House and the Senate by issuing decrees to do as he pleased to advance his agenda despite his commitment as a candidate in 2007 to roll back executive overreach.
“We’re not just going to be waiting for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help they need. I’ve got a pen and I’ve got a phone.
”And I can use that pen to sign executive orders and take executive actions and administrative actions that move the ball forward in helping to make sure our kids are getting the best education possible, making sure that our businesses are getting the kind of support and help they need to grow and advance, to make sure that people are getting the skills that they need to get those jobs that our businesses are creating.”
Conservatives and Republicans — they’re not the same thing — were rightly outraged by Obama’s clear abuse of power and executive overreach. For example, calling Obama’s pen and phone threat “executive order tyranny,” Judge Andrew Napolitano explained the president’s motivation:
“In a menacing statement at a cabinet meeting last month . . . the president has referred to his pen and his phone as a way of suggesting that he will use his power to issue executive orders, promulgate regulations and use his influence with his appointees in the government’s administrative agencies to continue the march to transform fundamentally the relationship of the federal government and individuals to his egalitarian vision when he is unable to accomplish that with legislation from Congress.”
Ironically, another voice chiming in on the subject of Obama’s executive overreach was none other than the current occupant of the White House, Donald Trump:
Another voice was the man who served during Trump’s first term in office as his vice president: Mike Pence, who was governor of Indiana at the time when Obama made his threat.
“I think it would be a profound mistake for the President of the United States to overturn immigration law with the stroke of a pen. Issues of this magnitude should always be resolved with the consent of the governed. Signing an executive order, giving a speech, barnstorming around the country defending that executive order is not leadership.” (Emphasis mine)
During his 2016 campaign, Trump continued complaining about Obama and his abuse of executive power, and in March 2016 he promised NOT to do as Obama had done:
“I want to not use too many executive orders, folks. Executive orders sort of came about more recently. Nobody ever heard of an executive order. Then all of a sudden Obama, because he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him, he starts signing them like they’re butter. So, I want to do away with executive orders for the most part.”
But as the Monkees once sang, that was then and this is now. In 2025, it’s as if Trump’s previous comments criticizing Obama for taking executive action via his pen and phone “because he is unable to negotiate w/ Congress” had never spoken.
Besides the fact that in just his first three years in office Trump had already issued more executive orders than we witnessed under Obama in his first three years, Trump 2.0 is out to set the all-time record for using his pen and phone to abuse his executive power (via Reason.com):
[Last] Monday, President Donald Trump signed executive orders federalizing law enforcement in the District of Columbia and lengthening the suspension of threatened tariffs on China by three months. They were the 187th and 188th executive orders of Trump’s second term, on just its 203rd day.
That’s more executive orders than predecessor Joe Biden issued in his entire presidency, 162. It’s also more than George H.W. Bush (166), Gerald Ford (169), and 24 of the first 25 presidents. (Ulysses S. Grant, with his 217 over eight years, will likely be eclipsed by Trump’s 2025 totals this fall.) Neither the famously power-expanding George W. Bush, nor Barack Obama of the notorious “pen and phone,” signed as many as 188 executive orders in any of their combined four terms.
The only American president to compete with the size of Trump’s second-term pen was the man whose energetic aggrandizement of the executive branch inspired generations of conservative and libertarian opposition: Franklin Delano Roosevelt. That a MAGA Republican is competing on process with the ultimate progressive Democrat is an indicator of just how radically Trump has reshaped the ideology of the GOP.
FDR averaged 307 E.O.s per year across his 12 years in office, fewer than Trump 2.0’s annualized rate of 342.
The move toward federal government by presidential fiat comes as a transformation not just of Republican orthodoxy, but of Trump’s own prior statements and actions. (Emphasis mine)
Since becoming president, Trump has used his pen and phone to latch on to executive power as a means to advance his non-conservative agenda while routinely going where no predecessor has gone before. But in so doing, he’s also built a flimsy foundation that can be quickly unraveled by a future president — assuming that America survives — because executive orders can be undone by executive orders. Every bit of Trump’s self-declared awesomeness can, and most likely will, be undone in short order.
Trump once accused Obama of abusing his executive power, but he should be looking at the man in the mirror because, to paraphrase his own words in the tweet above, Trump has used his pen and phone “to subvert the Constitution of the US for his own benefit and because he is unable to negotiate w/Congress” far more than Obama — or any other president for that matter — ever dreamed.
Donald Trump has wielded his pen and phone and abused his executive power as a substitute for genuine leadership and to cover his innumerable failures as president.
David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative and the author of The New Axis of Evil: Exposing the Bipartisan War on Liberty. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.
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