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What does the president do?

Kids might learn the answer to that question in school, but they also learn it from life — from eavesdropping on grown-ups, from snatches of news on TV or TikTok, from arguments on the playground or on the bus. The people who serve as president during one’s childhood necessarily shape one’s view of the office; my early conception of American political parties, for example, came largely from Presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. And now multiple generations of young people are forming their understanding of the US presidency based on Donald Trump’s tenure.

Trump has been either serving as president or seeking the presidency for a decade at this point, and he has approached the job, shall we say, differently than his predecessors. From assuming control over congressionally appropriated funding to posting a video of himself bombing protesters with poop to demolishing the East Wing of the White House, Trump’s actions in office have upended previous ideas about what constitutes presidential behavior.

To find out how, if at all, Trump’s break-stuff approach to the presidency has affected young people’s ideas of who the president is and how a head of state should act, I reached out to teachers, students, and experts around the country. What I learned is that while kids don’t always understand the Hatch Act or the separation of powers, they do care what the president does. The actions of the person in the Oval Office influence the future that young people want to see, both for themselves and for the country.

There’s some evidence that Trump’s consolidation of power is affecting how kids and teens growing up right now see the role of the president, with potentially disturbing consequences for the future of checks and balances. At the same time, some young voters who were kids during Trump’s first term tell a different story — one of a historically unpopular leader whose time in office pushed them to imagine something different.

Madalyn Probst was 10 years old when Trump was elected for the first time in 2016. Now a 20-year-old Florida college student who volunteers with the state’s Democratic Party, she told me that the most important quality a president should have is integrity. “They’re supposed to be a public servant,” she said. “I miss knowing that my........

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