The Great Conversation: What Happens to Power When There Is No Next Election?
Hello everyone, and welcome to The Great Conversation.
Power is usually shaped by consequences.
A politician knows another election is coming.
A business leader knows a board can remove them.
An employee knows their performance may determine their next promotion.
A coach knows another season will eventually test the results of today's decisions.
The future creates accountability.
But what happens when someone still possesses enormous power while one of the most important future consequences has disappeared?
A recent Foreign Affairs article by Daniel W. Drezner and Elizabeth N. Saunders examines this question through the final years of Donald Trump's presidency.
Following the 2026 midterm elections, Trump enters a political period unlike the one that preceded it.
He cannot run for another presidential term under the Constitution.
There is no presidential reelection campaign ahead of him.
And there is no longer another midterm election during his presidency.
In American politics, this is commonly described as the lame-duck period.
But the phrase can be misleading.
"Lame duck" sounds powerless.
A president in this position may indeed become politically weaker in certain respects.
Members of Congress may have less incentive to follow a president whose name will never again appear on a presidential ballot.
Potential successors begin positioning themselves for the future.
Political parties start thinking about the next election.
And legislators may increasingly calculate their own interests independently of the departing president.
But the presidency itself does not suddenly lose its constitutional authority.
The commander in chief remains the commander in chief.
Executive powers remain.
Diplomatic authority remains.
Military capabilities remain.
The ability to shape foreign policy remains substantial.
And that creates a strange political paradox.
A lame-duck president may become politically weaker while simultaneously becoming personally freer.
The president still possesses power.
But one of the ordinary mechanisms that disciplines political behavior has disappeared:
The need to win another election.
That does not automatically make a leader more reckless.
Freedom from reelection can work in the opposite direction.
A president who no longer needs to campaign may be willing to make decisions that are politically difficult but potentially beneficial.
Negotiations that would provoke voters may become easier.
Compromises that would look weak during an election campaign may become possible.
Long-term policies may receive more attention when immediate electoral calculations matter less.
History contains examples of presidents using their final periods in office to pursue diplomacy, agreements and initiatives that might have been politically harder earlier.
Freedom from elections can therefore create room for statesmanship.
But freedom from elections can also remove restraint.
If voters cannot punish a president in another election, one important feedback mechanism has disappeared.
And foreign policy makes this particularly significant.
Congress can legislate.
Courts can intervene in some circumstances.
Officials can resist unlawful orders.
The press can investigate.
Public opinion can create political pressure.
But presidents possess considerable latitude in diplomacy, military affairs and international relations.
And decisions made in those areas can have consequences lasting far beyond a president's remaining time in office.
Wars do not end when presidential terms end.
Treaties can reshape relationships for generations.
Military deployments create commitments.
Sanctions alter economies.
Diplomatic ruptures can take years to repair.
A decision made during the final months of an administration may still shape the world decades later.
This creates an unusual mismatch between political time and historical time.
A leader may have two years remaining.
A decision may have consequences for twenty.
And the voters who normally judge the leader's decisions may never again have the opportunity to vote for or against that person.
But this is not simply a question about Donald Trump.
It is a question about power itself.
Versions of the same problem appear throughout society.
Consider a chief executive who has announced retirement.
For years, the executive's decisions may have been shaped partly by career incentives.
Reputation.
Compensation.
Board approval.
Shareholder confidence.
Future opportunities.
But once departure becomes certain, some of those incentives change.
The executive still possesses authority.
Yet the future consequences of using that authority may no longer operate in quite the same way.
The same thing can happen with founders preparing to leave companies.
Coaches entering their final seasons.
Political leaders approaching term limits.
Managers who have already accepted another position.
Employees after submitting their resignation.
Even students during their final weeks before graduation.
Whenever the future relationship between a person and an institution begins disappearing, behavior can change.
Sometimes people become more cautious.
Sometimes they become more courageous.
Sometimes they finally make decisions they previously avoided.
Sometimes they take risks they would never have taken if they expected to remain responsible for the consequences.
This reveals something important about accountability.
We often imagine accountability as a moral quality.
A responsible person behaves responsibly.
An ethical leader behaves ethically.
But institutions are rarely designed on the assumption that character alone will protect them.
Instead, institutions create incentives.
Elections.
Audits.
Boards.
Courts.
Term limits.
Performance reviews.
Checks and balances.
Transparency requirements.
Oversight.
These mechanisms exist because societies understand something fundamental about human beings:
Power behaves differently depending on what surrounds it.
The same person may make different decisions depending on whether consequences are immediate, distant or nonexistent.
That does not mean people are inherently corrupt.
It means incentives matter.
And sometimes removing an incentive can produce something surprisingly positive.
Imagine a leader who knows that doing the right thing will be unpopular.
If another election is approaching, political survival may encourage caution.
But if reelection is impossible, that same leader may finally have the freedom to act according to long-term judgment rather than short-term popularity.
This is one of the strange possibilities of lame-duck power.
The disappearance of electoral accountability can also create independence from electoral pressure.
And independence can produce either wisdom or recklessness.
The structure itself does not determine which one appears.
That depends on the person, the institutions surrounding that person, the decisions being considered and the strength of other forms of accountability.
Perhaps this is why democracies cannot rely entirely on elections.
Elections are powerful mechanisms of accountability.
But they are periodic.
Government continues between them.
And eventually every term-limited leader reaches a point when another election can no longer personally reward or punish them.
Other institutions must therefore continue functioning.
Congress.
Courts.
Law.
Professional norms.
Transparency.
A free press.
Civil society.
Public scrutiny.
Institutional resistance to unlawful action.
And perhaps most importantly, a culture in which holding power does not mean owning power.
Because democratic authority is temporary even when its consequences are not.
The office continues.
The person leaves.
And that distinction may be one of democracy's most important ideas.
Political leaders borrow authority from institutions that existed before them and will continue after them.
They exercise power temporarily on behalf of a political community whose future extends beyond their own tenure.
Seen this way, the lame-duck problem is really a test of whether accountability belongs to the individual leader or to the system surrounding the leader.
If accountability depends primarily on the leader wanting something from us in the future, then the disappearance of that future changes everything.
But if accountability is embedded in institutions, laws, norms and other centers of power, then the system should remain capable of imposing boundaries even when electoral incentives weaken.
And perhaps that is the larger lesson.
The most revealing moment for any system may not be when power and incentives are perfectly aligned.
It may be when they separate.
When someone still possesses authority but no longer needs the reward that once helped discipline its use.
Because that is when we discover whether accountability was built into the institution...
or merely borrowed from ambition.
Which raises a deeper question...
When someone still possesses enormous power but no longer has to win the future approval that helped constrain that power, what should keep authority accountable?
Take a moment to reflect.
And click the link below to see more on this subject.
