This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, April 25th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

For all the blusters surrounding and well from this president, the degree to which he's aggrandized the chief

executive is somewhat less than his recent predecessors. That's from Cato Vice

President Jean Healy he admits of, the bar is pretty low.

He details his case in the latest issue of Reason magazine.

To the extent that Trump derangement syndrome is a thing that afflicts a lot of people in Washington, D.C. and around the country.

Almost all of it seems to focus on his outlandish conduct.

And you've sort of taken a look at to what extent he's actually expanded the powers of the executive,

which is a more enduring thing, we think.

So to what extent has this president altered or expanded the presidency as compared with somebody

like Barack Obama or George Obama or George Bush or Ronald Reagan?

Well, in order to answer the question of how Imperial of President Trump has been,

you do have to try to separate the signal from the noise and it's kind of difficult because there's so much noise.

So much of it from the president himself. I mean, if nothing else,

this has been an exhausting,

distracting five alarm fire, his brand is crisis sort of presidency.

And you know I sat down to do this article for reason. I want to take a look at, all right, if you tune all that out, what has he done

with the vast powers of the presidency that he's inherited, and has he expanded those powers in meaningful ways.

And it turns out if you can distract yourself from the day-to-day drinking from a fire hose of news that comes out of this presidency.

This has been surprisingly kind of a low energy presidency.

Trump has certainly been made aggressive use of the powers that he inherited in January of 2017, but he's added very few new weapons to the presidential arsenal and he might even be

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