The Presidential Toddler Theory of Government

Trump’s Denials of Responsibility Reveal the Infantile Logic of Authoritarian Power

There comes a moment in every collapsing democracy when absurdity and menace fuse into something uniquely destabilizing—a phenomenon I'm tempted to call “malignant farce.” We've reached that moment. The President of the United States, after invoking a 1798 wartime law to mass-deport migrants to a third country, now claims he didn't do it. “Other people handled it,” he told reporters today, despite his signature appearing on the document.

This is not merely a lie—though it is certainly that—but something more fundamentally corrosive: the introduction of the Toddler Theory of Presidential Power. Like a child caught with his hand in the cookie jar insisting “I didn't do it,” Trump has advanced the novel constitutional principle that presidential actions somehow occur without presidential agency. Documents bearing his signature, orders issued under his authority, and policies implemented by his administration apparently materialize through some mysterious process for which he bears no responsibility.

The obvious absurdity of this claim would be comedic if it weren't deployed to evade accountability for using the Alien Enemies Act—a law intended for declared wars against nations, not immigration enforcement—to justify mass deportations that a federal judge has already ruled likely unconstitutional. We have now entered territory where the head of the executive branch simultaneously claims the power to ignore judicial rulings while denying responsibility for the very actions judges are ruling against.

This isn't just a president lying—a common enough occurrence in any administration. This is a president who wishes to exercise power without accountability, who signs documents then disclaims knowledge of their contents, who demands obedience to his authority while disavowing his own actions. It is the logic of the autocrat who wishes to be unbound by any constraint while maintaining plausible deniability for the consequences.

The pathetic spectacle of a president who claims vast powers while shirking basic responsibility reveals the infantile core of authoritarianism. For all its pretensions to strength and decisiveness, the authoritarian personality cannot bear the weight of consequence, cannot accept that power entails responsibility, cannot face the fundamental reality that actions have effects for which one might be accountable.

Two plus two equals four. There are twenty-four hours in a day. And a president's signature on an executive order means he ordered it. These are not complicated truths, yet their denial suggests something profoundly broken in our political system. When the most powerful person in the country can point to his own signature and say “I didn't do that,” we've moved beyond normal political dishonesty into the realm of reality dissolution.

The Founders designed a system based on the assumption that those in power would at least acknowledge their own actions, even if they abused their authority. They never envisioned a president who would simultaneously claim unlimited power while disavowing the exercise of that very power—a constitutional Schrödinger's cat, both authoritarian and abdicated, depending on which serves his interests in the moment.

This is the essence of despotism—not the iron fist, but the infantile will that demands absolute authority without corresponding responsibility. It is, as Hannah Arendt recognized, the banality of evil clothed in the childish refusal to acknowledge reality itself.

If there is any comfort to be taken from this spectacle, it is the realization that such profound dishonesty reveals not strength but weakness. A president secure in his authority and confident in his actions would not need to deny his own signature. He would not hide behind the claim that “other people handled it.” He would own his decisions, defend them on their merits, and accept the constitutional constraints that make a president a democratic leader rather than a petulant monarch.

But comfort is cold indeed when the lie is in service of violating human rights, defying court orders, and systematically dismantling constitutional governance. The Presidential Toddler Theory may be absurd, but its consequences are deadly serious. And recognizing the absurdity, while necessary, is no substitute for confronting the danger.