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George Washington established the presidency. How much of it would he recognize now?
George Washington crosses the Delaware River during the American Revolutionary War in 1776.
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The U.S. president may be referred to as the most powerful person in the world now, but that wasn’t what the Founding Fathers intended.
In fact, when the United States was born, they didn’t really have much of a plan for the executive branch. After years of British royal rule, the framers were fearful of giving the new nation’s leader too much power.
“Framers never intended the presidency to be a public office. It was meant to be more of a clerk role in charge of the executive office,” says Brandon Rottinghaus, a political science professor at the University of Houston. “There is no one moment where a switch flipped where the presidency became a public office. It happened gradually.”
It’s the nation’s first president, George Washington, who understood the potential significance of the role. He helped establish a balance of being a strong leader while not mimicking British royal rule and established traditions that we still see today, historians tell NPR.
As we head into the final two months before Election Day, let’s learn more about the history of the presidential office, how Washington influenced so much of what we see today and just how much the journey to the White House has changed.
The founders didn’t have much of a plan for the executive
In the early days after the Revolutionary War, the Founding Fathers struggled with the question of what type of executive leadership the nation would have, Arizona State University history professor Catherine O’Donnell says.
Their experience with executive leadership was that of a king or royal governor — “not a great model,” she says.
The founders viewed having one executive for the United States with great suspicion. At one point, they considered having a three-man executive leadership, but the founders settled quickly on a one-person executive.
Nonetheless, Alexander Hamilton, one of the Founding Fathers, felt it was necessary to defend this choice, O’Donnell says. Writing in the Federalist Papers, Hamilton argued that a single executive would be more energetic and ultimately less risky, as the American people would be able to closely watch this one man, she says.
Having one leader, the president, was settled. But what that role should consist of was still a question. In fact, there seemed to be a better idea of what it shouldn’t be — i.e., nonthreatening, absolutely not a king, a man of the people, O’Donnell says.
“People were uneasy about it from the start,” she says.
George Washington, the first president of the United States of America, circa 1789.
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Three Lions/Getty Images/Hulton Archive
The man who set the precedents
Enter the first president: George Washington. He was the commander in chief of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and was revered after the conflict, says Denver Brunsman, a history professor at George Washington University. Washington never wanted the top job but “had an incredible reputation across the nation,” Brunsman says. “It was a foregone conclusion that he would be president. Then they had to convince him to stay on for a second term.”
Washington is the only president to have been elected unanimously by the Electoral College twice, Brunsman says. “Having Washington as the first president establishes it as an important office from the start,” he says.
O’Donnell notes that Washington was extremely cautious every step of the way, knowing his actions would set a precedent.
“He really thought the office had to convey respect,” she says. “A lot of people were unsure of even what to call him. They can’t use ‘your highness.’ They can’t call him ‘George.’”
They settled on “Mr. President.” And Washington approached the role with formality, O’Donnell says.
The president’s role has changed and evolved along with the United States’ prominence on the world stage, but Brunsman says, “I think he would recognize broad elements of the job” since many traditions and precedents Washington started still remain.
He had a brown suit of American fabric made especially for his inauguration, and he wore this special president’s suit whenever he met with people, she says.
He took extremely seriously the task of meeting with people who called on the president, including statesmen and foreign dignitaries, as he wanted to ensure the public understood it had access to the country’s leader. He established days and times for these face-to-face interactions, which included meetings and formal dinners. Today, the president regularly hosts state dinners for foreign leaders visiting the United States.
Washington created his own Cabinet, much like his war cabinet during the Revolutionary War, when he met regularly with close advisers in the military. That system remains.
Washington’s Cabinet was completely different from the British government at the time. To get a role with the British government, it was all about who you knew. Washington focused on picking qualified people with relevant experience to run the government, according to the George Washington Presidential Library at Mount Vernon.
The Washington administration Cabinet had just four members — Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Secretary of War Henry Knox and Attorney General Edmund Randolph — compared with today’s 16 positions (the vice president and the 15 department heads).
Washington also established the tradition of making an inaugural address and a farewell address. His final address, which called for political unity among Americans, is still revered today and read each year in the U.S. Senate.
Washington retired from office after serving two terms as president — and no more — a tradition that continued until President Franklin D. Roosevelt took office for a third term in 1941. The two-term limit was later enshrined in the 22nd Amendment.
Presidents didn’t campaign until the 19th century
Texas Gov. George W. Bush, then a Republican candidate for president, attends a Hispanic community breakfast at Jalapeno’s restaurant on Aug. 13, 1999, in Davenport, Iowa.
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Kissing babies, eating hot dogs and stopping at state fairs have become common practices for presidential candidates itching to get face time with voters on the campaign trail.
But they are purely modern tactics that weren’t even thought of during Washington’s time, say historians whom NPR spoke with. There was no national campaigning as we know it now.
“It was considered ungentlemanly, crude, even crass to say you wanted the gig,” says Justin Vaughn, an associate professor of political science at Coastal Carolina University.
In the 19th century, as political parties began to form, candidates were selected by party leaders, George Washington University’s Brunsman says.
For his part, Washington opposed the formation of political parties, believing they fueled partisanship and weakened the nation. But this development was out of his control, as political parties began to form by the end of his first term, Brunsman says.
The country’s most wealthy, powerful men and political bosses in “smoke-filled rooms” decided the parties’ nominees for president well until the 1960s, says Vaughn. It wasn’t until the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention that a presidential primary system to select candidates was adopted; the Republican Party followed suit shortly after.
With the earliest parties in the 1790s, newspapers affiliated with either the Federalist Party or the Democratic-Republican Party — the main parties at the time — became a crucial form of media for publicizing their parties’ ideologies and their candidates of choice across the nation, Brunsman says.
“That’s really the start of this modern campaigning,” he says.
Historians consider the election of 1840 — Democrats versus Whigs — to be the first truly modern presidential election.
“Both sides really employed all these modern techniques of the commercialization of politics: posters, songs, all kinds of media,” Brunsman says.
The 1840 presidential election pitted Whig candidate William Henry Harrison — known as Old Tippecanoe, a nickname from his 1811 military victory against Native Americans at the Battle of Tippecanoe — against the then-president, Democrat Martin Van Buren.
That’s when the Whig Party created the “log cabin” campaign and the famous “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” song that praised the achievements of Harrison and eventual Vice President John Tyler.
The log cabin campaign grew out of a Democratic newspaper’s attempt to mock Harrison, saying essentially that he was a simple man who was too old for the job.
Kamala Harris, then a U.S. senator and Democratic presidential candidate, cooks pork burgers at the Iowa Pork Producers Association tent while attending the Iowa State Fair in 2019 in Des Moines, Iowa.
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Instead of fighting it, the Whigs embraced this attempt at mockery and presented Harrison as an “everyman” frontier fighter who lived in a log cabin and drank cider, in contrast to the wealthy, out-of-touch Van Buren. This, despite the fact that Harrison came from a wealthy plantation-owning family in Virginia.
The Harrison campaign put log cabins on various campaign items, like cups and teapots, and held “log cabin and hard cider” rallies to push the idea that he was a man of the people — and it worked. Harrison won the 1840 election.
Brunsman says that Washington’s successors “understood that in a democratizing America, you had to campaign and you had to put yourself out there.”
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Brass bands in Beijing make way for sticker shock at home as Trump returns to escalating inflation
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump returned from the spectacle of a Chinese state visit to a less than welcoming U.S. economy — with the military band and garden tour in Beijing giving way to pressure over how to fix America’s escalating inflation rate.
Consumer inflation in the United States increased to 3.8% annually in April, higher than what he inherited as the Iran war and the Republican president’s own tariffs have pushed up prices. Inflation is now outpacing wage gains and effectively making workers poorer. The Cleveland Federal Reserve estimates that annual inflation could reach 4.2% in May as the war has kept oil and gasoline prices high.
Trump’s time with Chinese leader Xi Jinping appears unlikely to help the U.S. economy much, despite Trump’s claims of coming trade deals. The trip occurred as many people are voting in primaries leading into the November general election while having to absorb the rising costs of gasoline, groceries, utility bills, jewelry, women’s clothing, airplane tickets and delivery services. Democrats see the moment as a political opportunity.
“He’s returning to a dumpster fire,” said Lindsay Owens, executive director of Groundwork Collaborative, a liberal think tank focused on economic issues. “The president will not have the faith and confidence of the American people — the economy is their top issue and the president is saying, ‘You’re on your own.’”
The president’s trip to Beijing and his recent comments that indicated a tone-deafness to voters’ concerns about rising prices have suggested his focus is not on the American public and have undermined Republicans who had intended to campaign on last year’s tax cuts as helping families.
Trump described the trip as a victory, saying on social media that Xi “congratulated me on so many tremendous successes,” as the U.S. president has praised their relationship.
Trump told reporters that Boeing would be selling 200 aircraft — and maybe even 750 “if they do a good job” — to the Chinese. He said American farmers would be “very happy” because China would be “buying billions of dollars of soybeans.”
“We had an amazing time,” Trump said as he flew home on Air Force One, and told Fox News’ Bret Baier in an interview that gasoline prices were just some “short-term pain” and would “drop like a rock” once the war ends.
Inflationary pain is not a factor in how Trump handles Iran
Trump departed from the White House for China by saying the negotiations over the Iran war depended on stopping Tehran from developing nuclear weapons. “I don’t think about Americans’ financial situation. I don’t think about anybody. I think about one thing: We cannot let Iran have a nuclear weapon,” Trump said.
That remark prompted blowback because it suggested to some that Trump cared more about challenging Iran than fighting inflation at home. Trump defended his words, telling Fox News: “That’s a perfect statement. I’d make it again.”
The White House has since stressed that Trump is focused on inflation.
Asked later about the president’s words, Vice President JD Vance said there had been a “misrepresentation” of the remarks. White House spokesman Kush Desai said the “administration remains laser-focused on delivering growth and affordability on the homefront” while indicating actions would be taken on grocery prices.
But as Trump appeared alongside Xi, new reports back home showed inflation rising for businesses and interest rates climbing on U.S. government debt.
His comments that Boeing would sell 200 jets to China caused the company’s stock price to fall because investors had expected a larger number. There was little concrete information offered about any trade agreements reached during the summit, including Chinese purchases of U.S. exports such as liquefied natural gas and beef.
“Foreign policy wins can matter politically, but only if voters feel stability and affordability in their daily lives,” said Brittany Martinez, a former Republican congressional aide who is the executive director of Principles First, a center-right advocacy group focused on democracy issues.
“Midterms are almost always a referendum on cost of living and public frustration, and Republicans are not immune from the same inflation and affordability pressures that hurt Democrats in recent cycles,” she added.
Democrats see Trump as vulnerable
Democratic lawmakers are seizing on Trump’s comments before his trip as proof of his indifference to lowering costs. There is potential staying power of his remarks as Americans head into Memorial Day weekend facing rising prices for the hamburgers and hot dogs to be grilled.
“What Americans do not see is any sympathy, any support, or any plan from Trump and congressional Republicans to lower costs – in fact, they see the opposite,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said Thursday.
Vance faulted the Biden administration for the inflation problem even though the inflation rate is now higher than it was when Trump returned to the White House in January 2025 with a specific mandate to fix it.
“The inflation number last month was not great,” Vance said Wednesday, but he then stressed, “We’re not seeing anything like what we saw under the Biden administration.”
Inflation peaked at 9.1% in June 2022 under Biden, a Democrat. By the time Trump took the oath of office, it was a far more modest 3%.
Trump’s inflation challenge could get harder
The data tells a different story as higher inflation is spreading into the cost of servicing the national debt.
Over the past week, the interest rate charged on 10-year U.S. government debt jumped from 4.36% to 4.6%, an increase that implies higher costs for auto loans and mortgages.
“My fear is that the layers of supply shocks that are affecting the U.S. economy will only further feed into inflationary pressures,” said Gregory Daco, chief economist at EY-Parthenon.
Daco noted that last year’s tariff increases were now translating into higher clothing prices. With the Supreme Court ruling against Trump’s ability to impose tariffs by declaring an economic emergency, his administration is preparing a new set of import taxes for this summer.
Daco stressed that there have been a series of supply shocks. First, tariffs cut into the supply of imports. In addition, Trump’s immigration crackdown cut into the supply of foreign-born workers. Now, the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz has cut off the vital waterway used to ship 20% of global oil supplies.
“We’re seeing an erosion of growth,” Daco said.
Dr. Tracy Beth Hoeg, the Food and Drug Administration’s top drug regulator, said she was fired from the agency Friday after she declined to resign.
She said she did not know who had ordered her firing or why, nor whether Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. knew of her fate. The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The departure reflected the upheaval at the F.D.A., days after the resignation of Dr. Marty Makary, the agency commissioner. Dr. Makary had become a lightning rod for critics of the agency’s decisions to reject applications for rare disease drugs and to delay a report meant to supply damaging evidence about the abortion drug mifepristone. He also spent months before his departure pushing back on the White House’s requests for him to approve more flavored vapes, the reason he ultimately cited for leaving.
Dr. Hoeg’s hiring had startled public health leaders who were familiar with her track record as a vaccine skeptic, and she played a leading role in some of the agency’s most divisive efforts during her tenure. She worked on a report that purportedly linked the deaths of children and young adults to Covid vaccines, a dossier the agency has not released publicly. She was also the co-author of a document describing Mr. Kennedy’s decision to pare the recommendations for 17 childhood vaccines down to 11.
But in an interview on Friday, Dr. Hoeg said she “stuck with the science.”
“I am incredibly proud of the work we were doing,” Dr. Hoeg said, adding, “I’m glad that we didn’t give in to any pressures to approve drugs when it wasn’t appropriate.”
As the director of the agency’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, she was a political appointee in a role that had been previously occupied by career officials. An epidemiologist who was trained in the United States and Denmark, she worked on efforts to analyze drug safety and on a panel to discuss the use of serotonin reuptake inhibitors, the most widely prescribed class of antidepressants, during pregnancy. She also worked on efforts to reduce animal testing and was the agency’s liaison to an influential vaccine committee.
She made sure that her teams approved drugs only when the risk-benefit balance was favorable, she said.
The firing worsens the leadership vacuum at the F.D.A. and other agencies, with temporary leaders filling the role of commissioner, food chief and the head of the biologics center, which oversees vaccines and gene therapies. The roles of surgeon general and director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention are also unfilled.
The U.S. Supreme Court
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The U.S. Supreme Court refused Friday to allow Virginia to use a new congressional map that favored Democrats in all but one of the state’s U.S. House seats. The map was a key part of Democrats’ effort to counter the Republican redistricting wave set off by President Trump.
The new map was drawn by Democrats and approved by Virginia voters in an April referendum. But on May 8, the Supreme Court of Virginia in a 4-to-3 vote declared the referendum, and by extension the new map, null and void because lawmakers failed to follow the proper procedures to get the issue on the ballot, violating the state constitution.
Virginia Democrats and the state’s attorney general then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, seeking to put into effect the map approved by the voters, which yields four more likely Democratic congressional seats. In their emergency application, they argued the Virginia Supreme Court was “deeply mistaken” in its decision on “critical issues of federal law with profound practical importance to the Nation.” Further, they asserted the decision “overrode the will of the people” by ordering Virginia to “conduct its election with the congressional districts that the people rejected.”
Republican legislators countered that it would be improper for the U.S. Supreme Court to wade into a purely state law controversy — especially since the Democrats had not raised any federal claims in the lower court.
Ultimately, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with Republicans without explanation leaving in place the state court ruling that voided the Democratic-friendly maps.
The court’s decision not to intervene was its latest in emergency requests for intervention on redistricting issues. In December, the high court OK’d Texas using a gerrymandered map that could help the GOP win five more seats in the U.S. House. In February, the court allowed California to use a voter-approved, Democratic-friendly map, adopted to offset Texas’s map. Then in March, the U.S. Supreme Court blocked the redrawing of a New York map expected to flip a Republican congressional district Democratic.
And perhaps most importantly, in April, the high court ruled that a Louisiana congressional map was a racial gerrymander and must be redrawn. That decision immediately set off a flurry of redistricting efforts, particularly in the South, where Republican legislators immediately began redrawing congressional maps to eliminate long established majority Black and Hispanic districts.
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