It’s time to end the celebrity-in-chief role the American presidency has taken on.

Like it or not, the president of the United States embodies America itself. The individual inhabiting the White House has become the preeminent symbol of who we are.

It was not always so. Millard Fillmore, the 13th president (1850-53), presided over but did not personify the American republic. He was merely the federal chief executive. Contemporary observers did not refer to his term in office as the Age of Fillmore. With occasional exceptions (Abraham Lincoln) much the same could be said of Fillmore’s successors. When Chester Arthur (1881-85) or William Howard Taft (1909-13) left the White House, there was no rush to immortalize them by erecting gaudy shrines – now known as presidential libraries – to the glory of their presidencies. In those days, ex-presidents went back home or somewhere else they could find work.

In the past century, that has changed. Ours is a republic that has long since taken on the trappings of a monarchy, with the president inhabiting rarified space as our king-emperor.

Prompted by a seemingly endless series of crises since the Great Depression and World War II, presidents have accumulated ever-greater authority and extra-constitutional responsibilities. Americans now take it for granted that the occupant of the Oval Office should function as prophet, moral philosopher, style-setter and celebrity-in-chief.

Few saw this cult of the presidency as cause for complaint.

Then came Nov. 8, 2016.

Suddenly, all the habits and precedents of the modern American presidency no longer made sense. If we have embarked upon the Age of Trump, the defining feature of that age might well be the single-minded determination of those intent on ensuring its prompt termination.

The unspoken assumption of those most determined to banish Trump from public life appears to be this: Once he’s gone, history will be returned to its intended path and all will be well again. Yet such an assumption strikes me as wrongheaded. Expectations that Trump’s ouster will restore normalcy ignore the very factors that first handed him the Republican nomination. Trump is not cause, but consequence.

The cult of the presidency has provided an excuse for treating politics as a melodrama staged at four-year intervals and centering on hopes of another Roosevelt or Kennedy or Reagan appearing as the agent of American deliverance.

I am a conservative. Yet even I am prepared to admit that the status quo appears increasingly untenable. Incremental change will not suffice.

The one good thing we can say about the election of Trump, to borrow an image from Thomas Jefferson: It ought to serve as a fire bell in the night. If Americans have an ounce of sense, the Trump presidency will cure them once and for all of the illusion that from the White House comes redemption. 

Andrew J. Bacevich writes regularly for TomDispatch.com, where this story first appeared.