Presidential Leadership in Feeble Times: Explaining Executive Power in the Gilded Age. By Mark Zachary Taylor. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2024. 608p.

accountability is normative, suggesting efforts to counter inappropriate uses of presidential authority, including actions viewed as illiberal, immoral, and/or imprudent.Accountability itself is in the eye of the beholder.Consider, for instance, whether it is a failure of accountability when a majority of Congress, the public, and the executive bureaucracy support and/or enable a president who violates international law, undermines traditional American values in foreign policy, and pursues what experts deem reckless gambits abroad.It depends in part on one's partisan affiliation and in part on one's views about democracy and the appropriate applications of military force.A deeper engagement with the concept of accountability may have prompted the authors to consider more systematically not just the inability, but also the unwillingness of many U.S. domestic actors to "check" presidential foreign policy in a second Trump administration, and to explore the implications of this new reality for the United States' role in the world.