Donald Trump and the White House have too much power. That's ruining democracy.

Lee Drutman wrote about the dangers of excessive presidential power for NBC Think.

The core problem with the central focus in the presidency is that it has consumed our ability to evaluate individual candidates for Congress — and state and local office — independent of the presidency. Every choice, from bottom to top of the November ballot, is a referendum on the presidency.

This phenomenon discourages individual representatives and state and local officials from carving out an independent record. And it collapses our two parties into two highly disciplined, hyperpartisan teams, competing for a narrow and elusive majority control. This makes for a fully binary partisan alignment fundamentally at odds with our constitutional structure of separated powers, which themselves demand broad compromise-oriented policymaking.

As the two parties have separated into discrete non-overlapping coalitions, the zero-sum emotional stakes of every election continue to escalate so that each one is the most important in a lifetime. Local issues and personal characteristics matter less than which party controls the White House and the Congress.

And if individual representatives' fortunes depend on the president's popularity, all energy naturally flows to boosting or disqualifying the current White House resident (depending on their party). Consider the recent impeachment proceedings as Exhibit A.