# What's a good methodology for "is Trump unusual about executive overreach / institution erosion / corruption?"

*_Updated title to include "corruption", and changed some framing in the post._*

  

Critics of Trump often describe him as making absolutely unprecedented moves to expand executive power, extract personal wealth, and impinge on citizens’ rights. Supporters counter that Trump’s actions are either completely precedented, or are the natural extension of existing trends that the media wouldn’t make a big deal over if they didn’t hate Trump so much.[^vfelu9l3cwo] Other supporters say "yes, his actions are unprecedented and this is good, they're tearing down corrupt things that need tearing down."

In some recent posts, some people have been like "Wait why is there suddenly this abrupt series of partisan LW posts that are taking for granted there is a problem here that is worth violating the LW avoid-most-mainstream-politics norm?".

My subjective experience has been "well, me and most of my rationalist colleagues have spent the past 15 years mostly being pretty a-political, were somewhat wary but uncertain about Trump during his first term, and the new set of incidents just seems... pretty unprecedently and scarily bad?"

But, I do definitely live in a bubble that serves me tons of news about bad-seeming things that Trump is doing. It's possible to serve up dozens or hundreds of examples of a scary thing per day, without that thing actually being objectively scary or abnormal. (See: [Cardiologists and Chinese Robbers](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DSzpr8Y9299jdDLc9/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers))

Elizabeth and I wanted to get some sense of how unusual and how bad Trump’s actions are. “How bad” feels like a very complex question with lots of room for judgment. “How unusual” seemed a bit more likely to have an ~objective answer.

I asked LLMs some basic questions about it, but wanted a more thorough answer. I was about to spin up ~250 subagents to go run searches on each individual year of American history, querying for things like “\[year\] \[president name\] ‘executive overreach’” or “\[year\] \[president name\] ‘disobeying court order’”, and fill up a CSV with incidents.

That seemed… like it was approaching a methodology that might (with addititional workshopping) be cruxy for some Trump supporters or Trump-neutral-ers. It seemed like maybe good practice to ask if there were any ways to operationalize this question that’d be cruxy for anyone else. And, generally pre-register it before running the query, making some advance predictions.

\[ETA\] Of course, I know for many Trump supporters, the whole point is that he's destroying a bunch of institutions that need destroying. I am actually pretty sympathetic to the idea that if you want a better government, you need to tear down the old one quickly. There might be enough differences of values here that there's not much common ground to be had, but for me, the crux is that he seems to:

*   Not merely be tearing down various bureaucracies, but, eroding norms like "there is supposed to be rule of law, generally."
*   It does not look like this is laying the way for anything good to follow, it looks like it's just kinda making a more corrupt world.

But, I'm aware the world is already pretty corrupt, and there's generally been a trend of executive overreach for awhile. It wouldn't be too surprising if my intuitions here are just way off.

Each operationalization I’ve thought of so far seems a bit confused/wrong/incomplete. I feel okay with settling for “the least confused/wrong options I can come up with after a day of thinking about it," but, I'm interested in suggestions for better ones.

Some examples so far that feel like they're at least relevant:

*   How many incidents will an LLM find of a president ignoring a court order?
*   How many executive orders did they issue?
*   How many pardons did they grant? Do any pardons have evidence of being paid?
*   What was their wealth level before and after serving (perhaps normed by economic growth, or wealth change of congressmen)?
*   How many troops deployed without Congressional authorization?
*   How many incidents that "got heavy criticism of executive overreach" that don't really fit into a specific category?

These questions all have the form "checking if allegations by detractors about Trump are true", which isn't necessarily the frame by which someone would defend Trump, or the set of questions that'd be most salient to them. If you're trying to build a complete picture of what's going on, you probably also want to ask questions like:

*   How many nationwide injunctions did federal courts issue per year / per administration, and what were they blocking?
*   How often did SCOTUS use emergency orders to pause/restore major federal policies (stays, injunctions, admin stays) per term?

I also don't know that any of this is really the right frame for actually answering my own question of "is the US in a period of rapid decline in a way that's a plausible top priority for me or others to focus on?"

None of them really get at things like "tweeting a picture of yourself wearing a crown", which feels intuitively fairly bad to me but I'm not really sure how to think about that.

I'm interested in whether people have more suggestions for questions that seem relevant and easy to check. Or, suggestions on how to operationalize fuzzier things that might not fit into the "measure it per year" ontology.

  

Appendix: Subagents Ahoy
========================

A lot of these are recorded in places that are pretty straightforward to look up. i.e. there's already lists of [Pardons per President](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_pardoned_or_granted_clemency_by_the_president_of_the_United_States), and [Executive Orders per president](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_order).

But, I have an AI-subagent process I'm experimenting with that I expect to use for at least some of these, which currently goes something like:

*   Have a (dumb) Cursor AI agent make one spreadsheet of "incidents" where rows are "years of US history", there's a column for "what incident type are we talking about?" \[pardon, executive order, etc\], and a column for "specific incident" and a column for "source url."
*   H a A running websearches shaped like: "\[Year\] \[President\] 'ignored court order'" and "\[Year\] \[President\] 'conflict with court'", etc. (I might actually go "\[month\] \[year\] to get more granular results)
*   Give the AI a python script which downloads the full content of each resulting page that seems relevant.
*   Spin up AI instances that look at each page, check the corresponding year on the spreadsheet and see if there is already an incident there that matches that topic. If so, give it the same incident name in a new row with a new source.
*   After having accumulated all that data, another set of AIs look over each year, check for duplicates, look at whether a given source seems likely-to-be-real, etc, while extracting out the key quote from each that states the claim, copying it verbatim rather than summarizing it.[^sr6yibiubb]
*   Compile that all into another spreadsheet with the total incidents for each.

[^vfelu9l3cwo]: I do basically think it's true that 

[^sr6yibiubb]: I have a pet theory about leaning on exact quotes rather than summaries to avoid having to trust their summarization