Hobbes lived and died during the seventeenth century, so he could not really have anticipated a president of a constitutional republic like that of the United States. His nearest example would have been the reign of Oliver Cromwell, who was really a dictator of a so-called "commonwealth" after the English Civil War. In Leviathan, Hobbes argues that, in order to govern effectively over men, a king needs to have absolute sovereign power over them. This includes the power to make war. As mentioned above, Hobbes had lived through the political crisis that led to the English Civil War, one which really came to a head when Parliament denied Charles I the necessary funds to make war. As a consequence, the kingdom disintegrated into civil war, a condition Hobbes saw as inevitable when the sovereign powers of the state were divided. Hobbes, therefore, would have disapproved of the very idea of a president, and certainly with one whose powers (like the power to make war) were limited by a legislature. The power to make war was a crucial one for a monarch, one without which he could not function, so Hobbes would disapprove of any constitutional limits on this prerogative, which were in his mind irrational and self-defeating.

Thomas Hobbes had a jaded view of human nature and an even more jaded view of government. He believed that governments were founded for the purposes of self-preservation and that they were maintained by the fear of the citizens.

Hobbes was a proponent of absolute sovereignty in which a singular person is chosen by the citizens to be granted extraordinary executive powers. These include the power to wage war and levy taxes, so Hobbes is in favor of having a popular sovereign control the power to declare war.

He would have approved of a president having the power to declare war once he was chosen by the people.