The Man of the People: Political Dissent and the Making of the American Presidency by Nathaniel C. Green

The organizing insight of Green’s book is unmistakably beholden to the populist presidency of Donald Trump (xvi–xviii, 284, 285, 332 n. 4). In The Man of the People, Green argues that fierce contests over the nature and extent of presidential powers have been part of the American tradition from the beginning. But Green puts his own twist on these political struggles by claiming that in the past, they played a creative role in defining us “as one people” (xxxii). He sees the dynamic as a complex process to which the public have contributed as much as have the chief executives. In his re-examination of the early republican period, Green explores the many ways in which people have “projected onto the presidency their competing visions of nationhood” (xxxii). He draws heavily on the newspaper accounts of events because on his view, they reveal both the “widespread prejudices” of the period...