The FRONTLINE Interviews
Bill Kristol
Fmr. VP Dan Quayle Chief of Staff
Bill Kristol founded The Weekly Standard. From 1989 to 1993, he served as chief of staff to the vice president in the George H. W. Bush administration. Kristol is currently an editor-at-large for The Bulwark and a co-director of Defending Democracy Together.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group's Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on March 27, 2025. It has been annotated and edited for accuracy and clarity as part of an editorial and legal review. See a more complete description of our process here.
This interview appears in:
TOP
Bill Kristol
Chapters
Text Interview:
Highlight text to share it
Trump’s Speech at the DOJ
One place we’re thinking of starting the program is the moment when President [Donald] Trump goes to the Department of Justice and goes to the Great Hall and gives an over-hour-long speech.What is he doing there?What is he doing when he goes to the Justice Department?What do you see?
It was extraordinary when President Trump not just went to the Justice Department but spoke there, and didn’t just speak there and give a kind of conventional speech about the rule of law and the importance of the Department of Justice and how much he respected the Department of Justice, which I think other presidents have done things like that ceremonially when their new attorney general was sworn in.
He gave a campaign speech.He was introduced by the attorney general who pledged fealty to Donald Trump.I can’t remember her exact words but something like, what was it, “We’re here to carry out Donald Trump’s agenda,” something like that.She didn’t mention the Constitution or the rule of law, and he didn’t really mention the Constitution or the rule of law except that he invokes the rule of law as a way of defending going after his political opponents who he claims went after him, so it’s payback.I suppose that’s fair play.
But no, it was very striking.I was in the White House many years ago.I actually went to the Justice Department very rarely when I was vice president’s chief of staff, and partly that was because we were really not just encouraged, but required not to deal directly with the Justice Department much.I had many friends there who were kind of my level.But we would meet for lunch or something, but we wouldn’t—you sort of went out of your way to establish—independence is probably too strong, but to establish quasi-independence with the Justice Department, and not just quasi—to establish a real sense of separation from White House political agenda and Justice Department legal agenda.
Obviously the president’s in charge, and he can say, “We want you to focus on X and not Y, and we should be tougher on—we should have a war on drugs or whatever,” but not in terms of—but certainly in terms of particular prosecutions, particular criminal actions especially, it’s one thing to say, “We would like you to focus on making sure there is not financial fraud in America.” Then you launch investigations, and you have a study group.
But in terms of picking out people to target for criminal prosecution, that was just forbidden.You could not do that.If someone called me at the White House and said, “You’ve got to look into this.There is a problem here.” I was instructed I could not call the Justice Department.I could not tell him I would look into it.I would say, “You should call the Justice Department, and here is the appropriate assistant attorney general’s office, and good luck,” right?We really—it was just considered a terrible abuse of power to try to use the Justice Department for your own personal purposes or political purposes, especially the criminal part of the Justice Department.
And that’s what Trump focused on.He says he wants to go after the law firms; he wants to go after the lawyers.He mentioned lawyers by name whom he wants to go after, so it was really a startling moment for those of us who have been around Washington a while.
Norm Eisen is one of the people who is mentioned.1… [Trump] calls him “scum.” He says he’s “vicious.” He says he’s “violent.” What is the implication of statements like that when he’s there, and the attorney general is there, and the director of the FBI?2
A, it’s just amazing for a president to target individuals like that, especially individuals who have been senior White House aides; an ambassador, in Norm’s case ambassador to the Czech Republic, and who’s brought a lot of lawsuits on the liberal side of things.But when they’ve lost, he’s won.When he lost, he’s, of course, abided by the rule of law.That seems to be intolerable to Donald Trump, and it is pretty startling for him to attack any individual in those terms but especially someone who’s a serious lawyer, who has, as I say, respects and even kind of reveres the rule of law. …
What did it seem like he was doing there with, especially with who’s around him?
Who’s around him is important.The attorney general of the United States—we know how much [then-President Joe] Biden went out of his way to give Merrick Garland, not just give but insist that Merrick Garland was independent.Merrick Garland brought a case against Joe Biden’s son, or authorized bringing a case by a subordinate of the Justice Department against Joe Biden’s son, and it went ahead.Biden decided after the election to pardon his son.That’s the president’s prerogative.He did not stop the case.He did not, so far as we know, intervene at all.… But that’s happened so many times.[Former Secretary of State] Hillary Clinton was investigated by the Justice Department of President [Barack] Obama, [former President] Bill Clinton by his own Justice Department.They appointed special counsels.People in the Bush administration were investigated by special counsels appointed by the attorney general.
So since Watergate, the norm—it’s been a healthy norm, I think—it’s got its own complexities and problems sometimes, but it has been really to keep hands off the Justice Department, hands off the FBI.[U.S. Attorney General] Pam Bondi was there cheerleading for Donald Trump, and [FBI Director] Kash Patel was there.In a way, that’s almost more striking.The head of the FBI.The FBI is a powerful agency.It investigates crimes.And for him to be there, again, cheerleading for the president and the president referencing people he thinks are criminals and should be investigated.And as we know, Kash Patel tried to have a direct phone installed to the White House so he didn’t have to go through any procedures before talking with the president or presumably other senior officials, [White House Deputy Chief of Staff] Stephen Miller, or others at the White House.
… This whole distinction between the president and politics on the one hand and the Justice Department and the rule of law on the other, they’ve collapsed it, and they’ve knowingly collapsed it.They want to collapse it.
He had been a criminal defendant, charged by that department just months before, weeks before.There were cases pending.Was it personal for him?Is that the reason why he does it, or is his motivations deeper?… What do you make of all that?
It’s a good question.He certainly is very resentful that he was investigated for criminal behavior or for alleged criminal behavior and was going to be brought to trial.Now I would say that the Justice Department under Biden had certainly investigated him, but they did so in a very legal way.They brought charges to a court.The president and the White House stayed out of it.In his case, he ended up with a friendly judge in Florida.The Justice Department lost various efforts to try to accelerate that trial.They lost before the Supreme Court on immunity.
And so the legal system worked for Donald Trump.In a way, if you were Donald Trump, you would think, “You know what?I had”—he would regard it as a very hostile administration “going after me.” What saved him?What saved him was that we have a complex and independent legal system that doesn’t just roll over if the president of the United States doesn’t like you or even if the attorney general personally might think that there’s a strong legal case against you that goes to court.
Trump didn’t take that lesson, though, that he should respect the courts; he should respect the integrity of the legal system.We want to have a system where one person can’t decide that you’re guilty of something or prejudice the jury and so forth.Trump took the opposite lesson.He felt they got after him.Or maybe that’s an excuse for what he wants to do anyway, honestly, because of course in the first term he went after a lot of people.I guess then he felt they got after him, too, so maybe that also was resentment.But I just think the resentment is there, but it’s a bit of an excuse to justify going after his political enemies through legal means.For him, the law is not a restraint on him; it’s a weapon for him to use.
Trump’s Executive Orders
… Let’s go to the first day, because every president signs executive orders.The presidents you’ve worked for, I’m sure, on the first day signed an executive order.Was there something different about the way he did it, about what he did on his first day of his second term?
Trump had a very ambitious agenda.He’s entitled to have that, but the degree to which there was no sense of, “Look, I’m pursing these policy goals that I said I would pursue, and otherwise I’m going to be submitting my agenda to Congress”—that’s how you get big things done.The executive orders can change some, the implementation of some laws, but obviously they’re pursuant to the law, and so Congress is what you need to focus on.
Think of [former President] Franklin Roosevelt, his famous first 100 days.What did he do in his first 100 days?3He got 77 bills—I think I read that number recently—through Congress.That’s what he did.He did a few executive orders.He did some emergency stuff to deal with the Depression.But mostly the first 100 days is what you try to get through Congress, especially when your own party controls Congress.So you actually can get stuff through, right?
3
The London School of Economics and Political Science blog: The pace of Trump’s executive orders during his first 100 days is a significant departure from his recent predecessors
Trump, there was not much mention of that, right?You didn’t get the sense Donald Trump has a big legislative agenda.He has a small—he has a big legislative agenda in the sense that he has a big tax cut package, but the rest of it, he doesn’t really want Congress to do much.4He wants to be free to do what he wants to do, free of Congress.And of course, right away Elon Musk showed up, and we had DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency], and we had the attempt to not spend funds or cut off funding that Congress has appropriated and the like.
So the degree to which it’s about his own executive power is really striking.I guess I’d put it this way.It’s about two things at least: It’s about executive power as opposed to trying to shepherd legislation through Congress, and it’s about his personal power within the executive.So there was no sense of “I’m appointing these Cabinet secretaries, and I’ve asked them to take a look at a few things here where I think we should be changing course.”
That’s the normal way it’s presented, even if it’s a little phony in the sense that you kind of know where this review is going to end up.There is still a review; there’s consultation; people can weigh in.There was none of that.Cabinet secretaries were mostly not appointed in that first week, and he was busy issuing executive orders.So he’s telling the Interior Department or the Energy Department or the Justice Department what to do before there’s … secretary of energy or secretary of interior or attorney general.He’s entitled to do that.They had worked out their agenda ahead of time, so to speak.But again, the degree to which it’s a personal agenda run from the White House is really striking.
A lot of Americans had gotten frustrated with government, with the inability of Congress to deal with complicated issues, the inability of other presidents to deal with them sort of effectively.Was this part of his political promise that he was making to voters, that he was going to sort of just take charge?
Yeah, I think so.And what did he say in 2016, “I alone can fix it”?Think how different that is from the normal way the American system works.Obviously presidents are important.They have a high opinion of themselves.They say they are necessary to be there to fix things.But still, it’s more “we” can fix it, “we” being the president, his Cabinet, the federal government, the executive branch, Congress—especially his own party in Congress, but not only his own party.Even Joe Biden, in this very polarized age, got his major legislation through with Republican votes, infrastructure and the like.
So that’s one way of thinking about what the job of the president is.The other is, “I alone can fix it.” I’ve always thought that sentence of his from 2016 is so revealing and so important to understanding how he thinks of what being president means.
One of the campaign promises he’d made was that he was going to pardon people who were involved in Jan.6.I’m not sure that everyone expected the extent to which he would do it.What did you think about it, and what was the message that was sent?
I was always someone who was—I was anti-Trump, and one reason I was particularly anti-Trump this second, I guess third time around, really, was that I thought his second term would be much more—there would be fewer guardrails; he would be more unleashed than he was in his first term.He was new in his first term.He had establishment people working for him.They did constrain him in all kinds of ways.
I think we probably underestimated how much they constrained him internally, some stuff we didn’t even know about at the time.Whether it was the White House counsel’s Office or the secretary of defense or the secretary of state, there were a lot of people saying, who—they didn’t agree with me politically, but they also said, “Mr.President, this is a bridge too far.We can’t do that.” He has none of that now.And so he has loyalists, and he has true believers, and they’re all for going all out.
So the pardon of the Jan.6 insurrectionists is really a good example.He said he was going to do it, so we shouldn’t have been surprised that he would do it.But I guess if you had asked me right before Jan.20 what he would do, I would have said, well, he’ll probably ask the attorney general to review all the cases, and that will take two or three weeks.It’s going to be—I don’t know how serious a review it will be, but at least there will be the form of looking at the cases.They’ll look at them individually, and probably he’ll pardon the misdemeanors, the ones that weren’t violent.But some of them, where there was really was terrible behavior and assaults on police officers and so forth, maybe there he will commute some of the sentences, lessen them, I don’t know.He’ll certainly not want to simply let everyone go.And you’ll want to have the form at least, the appearance of a kind of thoughtful, proper review with a prejudice towards coming out with pardons, so to speak, with ameliorating the sentences, but not simply coming all in and just saying, “Yep, everyone is free.Get out of jail card.I’m not reviewing anyone individually.I don’t care what they did.This one may have been swept up in in the crowd.This one spent a lot of time attacking, in a pretty vicious way, police officers.They’re all free.”
He went in, and he said, “They’re all free.” Two dozen maybe, who only had commutations rather than pardons.But even they totally—their sentences were finished, and they were let out, and many of the most violent protesters got real pardons.
So that’s very striking.And I thought, boy, this will be unpopular.And it was sort of for a few days.It’s kind of been forgotten now, right?People don’t talk much about it.I’ve got to say, this is where Trump’s political instincts have not always been wrong.I think this is unfortunate for the country.But he said, “Rip the Band-Aid off,” and basically he assumed people may not like it for 48 hours, but then they’ll move on to the next thing.And maybe he was right.If you had told me before Jan.20, he could just pardon all of them, and two months later we’d barely be talking about it or thinking about it, I would have thought, boy, this is—surely he is going to pay more of a price politically.
Now, it has a big effect.Don’t get me wrong.It really sends the signal that people can engage in violence on his behalf, and he’s got that pardon power there for them.So that part I think he knew what he was doing.He wants people who are on his side to think, what if I go a little bit too far, beat up a few of the protesters I don’t like, do some things against the left-wing interest groups that I don’t like, you’ve got a president there who is kind of watching out for you.
There was a little bit of that in the first term obviously, too, with the pardons.But I think the degree to which he understands the combination of a weaponized Justice Department, so the legal system is going after his enemies, and the pardon power to help take care of people on his side who maybe go a little bit too far, whether they’re in government or outside government, kind of vigilantes, that is a very powerful one-two punch, and it really puts us on a road that goes pretty far from the neutral rule of law and pretty far, unfortunately, towards a kind of personalized use of government to go after your enemies and to forgive those on your side who break the law.
The Unitary Executive Theory
As I was saying before, President Trump doesn’t seem to be too in the weeds on the legality of things and what the laws are on sort of theories, but there are people around him who talk about the unitary executive theory.That must have been something that you heard when you were in government and a frustration about the executive being held back.What is it tapping into?What’s the world and the theory that those around him have?
The modern conservative movement has had a prejudice towards the strong executive.The older conservative movement didn’t, incidentally.It didn’t like Franklin Roosevelt and [former President] Lyndon Johnson being such strong executives.But that changed.So they wanted a strong executive and a unitary executive in the sense that they thought there were liberal agencies, especially some of the regulatory agencies that had multi boards of six people, let’s say, that were somewhat independent of the president.The president didn’t appoint all of them.Sometimes there would be a situation where the president would appoint two, and the majority leader in the Senate would appoint two, and the speaker would appoint two, whatever.There are complicated ways these things are set up.And they had some, the president couldn’t fire them or at least needed to fire them for cause; they had terms of office.So that limited the power of the president within the executive branch.
The unitary executive theory originally wasn’t crazy in the sense that they thought some of these limits went too far.Just if you think about how you want your government to work, the president should have the power to change environmental policy within the limits of the law, but there shouldn’t necessarily be a whole—there shouldn’t be regulations that make it extremely hard for him to ever move things in his direction.There shouldn’t be these independent agencies that are somewhat autonomous, you might almost say.And where to draw that line became a debate among lawyers and judges.And I think it wasn’t ridiculous to think you could move the line a little bit.
But that’s very different.Unitary—that’s kind of what unitary executive theory really was, but … there wasn’t much talk about the president being able to pick up the phone and order the attorney general to bring criminal cases against lawyers he didn’t like, and there wasn’t much talk about full-scale presidential immunity or pardoning 1,500 people who had stormed the Capitol.That’s a personalized executive, not just a unitary executive.
You could have a pretty strong presidency within the context of the rule of law, but he’s not interested simply in a strong presidency; he’s interested in a strong president.And he’s not interested simply in a strong president; he’s interested in a strong President Donald J.Trump.So the personalization of it, combined with the broader legal theory, is what gives it real power and really is a big change from where we’ve been.
Do you think that that case, Trump v.United States, and the immunity decision changed the landscape as he was coming in?5
5
Oyez: Trump v. United States
It’s a little hard for me to tell because so many things are happening at once.I would say the practical effects of that case are not that great.Presidents—I don’t know that he needed the immunity to do what he wanted to do anyway as president.… He was president for four years and did a ton of things and wasn’t charged criminally for any of those things, right?He was impeached, but that’s an appropriate constitutional remedy.
So I don’t know that he needed the immunity decision, but I think psychologically, it was a big stamp of approval for the sense that the president is kind of above the law, I mean literally above the law.That’s what the immunity decision found.You can’t find—He’s immune from a normal legal challenge, and I do think it percolates down then to his Cabinet secretaries and to others who feel that they are above the law.They are not literally, by the terms of the decision, I don’t think, above the law.But again, if you have a president who is going to pardon you and you’re executing his orders and he’s above the law, you’ve got a pretty powerful combination there of feeling that you are kind of unconstrained. …
So at the Justice Department, you talked a little bit about what it was like and what his relationship was with the attorney general.How much of that approach do you think was shaped by his experience in the past of his first term?Jeff Sessions recuses himself.Bill Barr doesn’t want to go along with the attempts to challenge the election.Do you think he learned from his first term?
Yeah, I think he learned a lot from his first term.Whether what he learned was good for American democracy is another question.But he learned that he didn’t want to be constrained, and he learned that simply putting in people who were kind of Republican or even conservative or even people who were his early supporters—I think Jeff Sessions was his first supporter in the Senate—wouldn’t guarantee that they would go along when you really ran up against what these people thought were real legal barriers, things they should not do.
It’s really striking how different the first is from the second term, I think.We’re speaking about a week after the Signal text chain story broke, and what struck me about the coverage of it, there’s talk, will Secretary [Pete] Hegseth have to resign?6What about the national security adviser, Michael Waltz?What no one is saying, and I think they’re right not to be saying it, is, “Is there going to be a serious Justice Department investigation?Is the FBI going to look into this?Will there be a counterintelligence investigation, led by maybe the CIA, working with the FBI?Will there be accountability?”
Almost every administration has some scandal.In modern times, since Watergate, those administrations investigate those scandals.They usually appoint a special counsel to do so because they want to show that it’s not political; they’re not controlling it.… So that’s the way the system has worked.It had its flaws and problems, but it was considered to be very important that you have this ability to an independent investigation of things that are happening within the administration.
Now we have the most senior officials talking on unsecured apps on their personal cell phones apparently, and this could be no investigation, and because the Republican Party controls Congress, Congress isn’t going to do very much either.7… The collapse of Congress or the control of Congress by the Republican Party, which is in turn controlled by Trump, has weakened that check on the executive, too.
7
So you have an executive that’s empowering, that’s exerting power in places within the executive that it used to be restrained somewhat—Justice Department, FBI—and an executive that’s relatively unconstrained, at least as of now, by Congress.That leaves the courts.And the courts are, in the first couple of months of the administration, have been a check on the president to some degree.We’ll see how long they can sustain that and what happens as things move up to the Supreme Court.There is a limit to what the courts can do.They get cases that come to them.They can’t act affirmatively.
Yes, we have a president who is kind of unconstrained within the executive branch and whose party is totally beholden to him and that controls Congress.That’s a very powerful one-two punch.
What signal does it send to everybody around—you talked a little bit about the power of the FBI—for him to have Kash Patel there, for him to have the U.S.attorney in D.C.to be such a strong supporter, the deputy attorney general to be a former lawyer for him?What sort of signal, and as you see them sort of operating, how is it seen here in Washington by people who might want to come up against the administration?
It’s amazing.I move in Never Trump circles, you know, and we were against Trump and thought the second term would be worse than the first, honestly, more dangerous.Having said that, if you had told any of us, I think, on Election Day or the day after Election Day, after Trump had won, that we were going to have Pam Bondi as attorney general, Kash Patel as FBI director, Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence, Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, we would have said, “Oh, come on.That’s really a fever dream.It’s not going to be that bad.”
The other point—he won’t quite appoint [former Secretary of Defense] Jim Mattis types; he won’t appoint Jeff Sessions types; he may not even appoint Bill Barr types, but it’s still going to be people who are recognizably in the ballpark of having qualifications for these jobs and having some independent stature.And it hasn’t been.
… I think this point about not having independent stature is important.I think you see this.Hegseth came in, and what was the first thing, basically, he did?He fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.He has no evidence that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff would have resisted particularly Trump’s policies.There is no evidence that he wouldn’t have been open to rethinking various military arrangements.He is actually something of an innovator, Gen.Brown.
But they did not want someone who had his own standing.I think that is the one lesson that Trump learned from the first term,especially when he dealt with Gen. [Mark] Milley when he was chairman [of the Joint Chiefs of Staff].Milley—Trump liked Milley.Trump picked Milley, and he picked Milley over someone who was probably preferred, the Air Force general who was preferred by the military establishment a bit.He wanted somebody—he thought Milley would be a little more on his side.
But there were things Milley wouldn’t do in 2020, and Trump doesn’t want people in the senior positions in the Justice Department, in the Defense Department, in the key agencies, maybe in any agency but particularly those key power agencies, he doesn’t want people who won’t do what he wants to do.And people who have some independent standing are more likely to decide they are not going to just go along things.They’ll argue back.They may even talk to colleagues and say, “Hey, you could make this argument as well.”
There is a lot of evidence that—we know that, for example, Gen.Milley would talk to his own boss, the Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, but also to Mike Pompeo over in the State Department, and they would sort of confer about what they thought the right thing to do was and sometimes present a united front against Trump and the White House operatives who wanted to do something.They wouldn’t resist, but they would make an argument, and they would explain why things weren’t a good idea.
And they had standing.Milley was a four-star general.He’d been chief of the Army.Then he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs.He has colleagues.At the height of the November/December 2020 confrontations about, when Trump was trying to stay in power, Milley did threaten to resign if Trump tried to use the military to overturn the election, and I believe he had the support of all his fellow chiefs, who also would have left with him.And that would have been a shocking thing.
Trump does not want people who have any independent standing, who have their own, not following—Milley doesn’t have a political following—but their own kind of mini power base, you might say, in other parts of the establishment.So it’s very much in Trump’s interest to have Pete Hegseth, someone who’s never had a senior position in government or any position in government, I guess, except when he served in the military as a junior officer, as secretary of defense.It’s to his interest to have Pam Bondi and Kash Patel at Justice and FBI and Tulsi Gabbard.He doesn’t want people who have independent standing and who will, therefore, stand up to him.
The Eric Adams Case
One of the cases that we’re looking at is the [New York City Mayor] Eric Adams case because that is what happens.There is an acting U.S.attorney in the Southern District of New York, sometimes called the “Sovereign District,” and they sort of view themselves as independent and having their own standing.And they are directed to dismiss the charges, or at least hold them in abeyance, against the mayor, and they don’t go along.What do you make of that moment?
What’s so interesting about the Eric Adams case is there were ways in which it would have been appropriate, I think, for Trump or the attorney general certainly—maybe not Trump personally.This is a criminal case. … in the old days, the president would have stayed out of that.If the attorney general thinks this was an inappropriate investigation, inappropriate prosecution, he or she can certainly ask them, people to reconsider.They can pause it.They could have a couple of people come in and take a fresh look.They usually try not to do that too much, but you could imagine that.
In this case, though, there is no pretense that this was really based on a careful legal consideration.Where was the memo, the 32-page memo, from an independent person in the Justice Department saying, “You know what?I think we went too far in this case.I don’t know that Mayor Adams really should be charged with A, B or C”?And no, Adams spent a fair amount of political capital being nice to Donald Trump.He flew down to Mar-a-Lago.Trump decided it could be useful to have the mayor of the nation’s largest city and a Democrat, or maybe a former Democrat, on his side.And basically, they dropped the case.
That’s why the attorneys in the Southern District of New York resigned.They don’t always get their way in terms of recommendations of prosecutions.I don’t think they would have resigned if they thought there was a good-faith argument not to prosecute in his case.They thought it was pure politics that was overriding the legal decision to prosecute a corrupt public official.
… [Two] resigned in the Southern District.It’s a number more who resigned at the Justice Department from the Criminal Division, from the public integrity division.And the Trump administration sort of says, “We’re glad to see you go.You have been insubordinate in not doing what we asked.” How different is that from prior administrations?
There is always turnover at the beginning of a new administration.Obviously the political appointees of the old administration leave, the huge majority of them, and some career people have been sort of very closely involved in policy initiatives and priorities in the old administration will sometimes leave.We’ve never seen this kind of mass exodus from places like the Justice Department, I would say from the Defense Department on the civilian side, maybe from the military as well.8The FBI, obviously, they fired a whole bunch of very senior career officials.The FBI only has one, I think.You still need one, maybe two political appointees at the top.
People are pretty careful not to give any impression of purging a place like the FBI.You really don’t want a country where a new administration comes in, and you wipe out the whole top slate of investigators and agents and bring in your own loyalists.In the short term, it’s sort of bad press for Trump to have these people resign, and it’s a bit of an administrative inconvenience.But of course in the medium term, it’s good for Trump, right?And I’m not criticizing anyone who resigned.People have to resign if they feel they can’t in good conscience carry out these orders.But Trump, of course, is happy to put his own loyalists in.And guess what?Some of them will be from within the ranks.He’ll find people who he thinks are friendly to him.Some of them are coming from outside as, of course, Patel was, and others.And I think the degree to which they kind of welcome these resignations—the liberal media, my friends in the liberal media, think, oh, these resignations.It looks bad for Trump.But from a certain point of view, it helps Trump centralize and personalize his power over key agencies at the executive branch.
And I do think Justice—the Justice Department and the Defense Department, I’d say, in particular, are kind of special agencies.Environmental Protection Agency, very important.I don’t mean to minimize that.You get a big turnover, you move it in one direction.But it’s a policy change still, mostly, and therefore, it can be moved back.Politicizing the military, politicizing law enforcement and politicizing the FBI, that’s a whole different story.That’s hard to undo once it’s done, and that can really have major consequences for our democracy, not just for public policy.
Especially the Justice Department, where lawyers had exercised a certain amount of power by threatening to resign during the George W.Bush administration, during Trump’s first administration in the run-up to Jan.6.And here, does it send a message, “That’s not going to—that doesn’t work anymore”?
I’m old enough to remember Watergate.I was in college.And famously, Elliot Richardson and Archibald Cox resigned because they had committed to Congress that they would not take [former President Richard] Nixon’s orders and fire the special counsel.9They would follow the investigation where it went.Nixon wanted the special counsel, Archibald Cox, fired.Elliot Richardson said, “No,” and resigned, and Cox obviously resigned—was fired, I guess, as well.
9
CBS News: What was the Saturday Night Massacre?
But what happened after that?What happened after?The system was strong enough that, in fact, they appointed another special counsel, and in fact … Nixon didn’t succeed in stopping the investigation, obviously.It went on, and we had court cases, and Nixon ultimately was forced to resign.So Watergate was sort of testing the proposition of whether you could get away with this, and Nixon didn’t.… He got closer than we would have liked, which is one reason we constructed—the country constructed a whole bunch of barriers to going through Watergate again.
That’s why the White House wasn’t supposed to call the Justice Department and tell them who to investigate.That’s why there was this kind of 10-year term for the FBI director, all these different things.And those barriers worked pretty well, I would say, for about half a century.Now they are being systematically done in.They’re being systematically removed.
… In terms of the kind of direct control over the Justice Department, over the FBI, that’s one of the charges in the impeachment of Nixon, that he tried to get the FBI to act for his own political purposes.And Trump and Kash Patel are pretty unabashed that that’s how they are going to use the FBI.
That is sort of one of the allegations of a quid pro quo, a political quid pro quo in the Eric Adams case.The other thing is, is part of what has changed Congress that when you have a moment like this, that there is not congressional hearings … the acting U.S.attorney is not going to be called to testify and tell her story?
Right.Or the D.C.attorney, Ed Martin, is an unbelievable political character, and maybe even the Republican Senate wouldn’t confirm him.But he’s acting.Trump’s discovered, also, you can put a lot of people in as acting U.S.attorneys, acting Cabinet secretaries, acting this, acting that.The laws are somewhat murky on how long they can be there in some cases.The Trump people pushed the edges of that.They did already in the first term, and they are certainly going to do it now in terms of giving them authority.
So the Senate’s role has been much reduced, and Congress’ role has been much reduced.That’s been happening for a while.It’s really accelerated, though, by the fact that the Republicans control Congress, obviously, and also by the fact that the Republican Party is so loyal to Trump.That’s a big change.As recently as, I don’t know, the George W.Bush administration, to take the previous Republican president since Trump, he had these—he was pushing the boundary of the law maybe on some of the interpretations of the counterterrorism activities, torture at Guantanamo and so forth and in fact was challenged by Democrats but also by members of this own party, [Sen.] John McCain and others.And that had a big effect, right?They had to pull back on a bunch of things, and they had to bring in people who reversed course on some of those things at least.If your party controls Congress and you control your party, where’s the check?
Obviously, some of the people who are in Congress are full-blown supporters of Donald Trump.Are you in touch—do you talk to other Republicans who might want to stand up but feel like they can’t?
I don’t talk to that many Republicans anymore.I’m so annoyed at them, and we’ve been on such different paths for the last several years.There are plenty who say they want to stand up to Donald Trump, and I think if you gave them a totally cost-free opportunity to do so, where it was equal benefits and costs from standing up to him or going with him, they might stand up to him.They don’t love him, and they think some of what he is doing is foolish, but the moment you start imposing costs, they shy away.The degree of political cowardice is really astonishing, I’ve got to say, among some of the Republicans in Congress.
A lot of them are near the end of their careers.A lot of them have done a lot in their lives.They’re not even running for reelection in some cases, especially in the Senate.In the Senate, they have six-year terms, for God’s sake.Even in the House a lot of them are in safe seats, and they really wouldn’t lose a primary.But even if they did, so what?The idea that that’s an excuse—I kind of dislike the fact that it is used for an excuse for these people that, “Oh, my God.Trump is so powerful in the Republican Party.”
Would we accept that argument in other walks of life, that you don’t stand up for what you think is right because, I don’t know, you’re intimidated, because you want that next promotion?Of course that happens in life, right?But I don’t know.For the most senior politicians in the United States, the people who are in the highest offices, it’s one thing if that happens in some town, and there’s a lot of backscratching, and you don’t get very good governance because this person gets promoted by turning a blind eye to that other person’s semi-corrupt scheme to develop something somewhere.That’s not good, but it doesn’t endanger the democracy in a fundamental way.
Congress is really important.It is the main check on the executive, and if you think as a Republican senator that your main job is to get along with Donald Trump and bow to his wishes and not defend the prerogatives of Congress when defending the prerogatives of Congress is defending the rule of law itself, then we have a big problem.
Elon Musk and DOGE
How unusual, having been in the executive branch, is Elon Musk and DOGE and what they represent?
Yeah.I think for those of us who worried about a Trump second term a lot, the one thing we didn’t quite factor in was Elon Musk and DOGE.And that’s really hypercharged a lot of what Trump wanted to do anyway.They had the plan, basically, in the Project 2025 document from Heritage and Russell Vought, who is the OMB [Office of Management and Budget] director, has worked a lot on that.And they had a pretty systematic way of going about changing a lot of government rules, increasing the number of political appointees, getting much more authority over the civil servants, doing a lot of things that would strengthen Trump as president in ways that some—a few of which were defensible, actually, but most of which were dangerous, in my opinion.
Then Musk comes in, and it’s all just on hyperdrive.We’ll see how that all ends up.But the amount of damage that he’s done is remarkable, and I think it is damage.I’ll be biased on this.I know a lot of people in some of these agencies and people who work with people in these agencies, and the degree to which it’s—we’re doing kind of pointless damage to the Social Security Administration, to take something that is not a very sexy agency and one that we take for granted, and 75 million or something Americans get their Social Security checks, many of them, most of them senior citizens, some of them on disability.
And it works pretty well.It’s annoying at times.You have to wait an hour if you have to call in and change your address or something went wrong in the system.But basically, people are getting the checks they paid in for and that the law requires, and no one thinks you are not getting a check because it’s politicized or someone doesn’t like you.It’s pretty good government, you might say.The same with Medicare, right?So these big agencies that are dispersing a lot of money, maybe not always with super modern technology, maybe they could use some reforms and some trims, Musk has really done a degree of damage to them that people I know who study this stuff really think will be noticeable, actually, pretty soon and really, really serious.And obviously, that is much more evident with the smaller agencies they’ve gone after—[US]AID obviously.And again, the way they’ve done it, for me, is very striking.You could decide that AID should be cut by 35%.You could decide that the U.S.government shouldn’t be in the business of worrying too much about maternal health in Africa.“America first.Why are we worrying about all these other people?” I don’t agree with that, but OK.
You go to Congress.You could propose cutting the AID budget, propose ending a lot of the programs.Some of them you have some discretion.You tell them, “OK, look, in six months, we’re winding this one down because we don’t think it’s worked very well.” That would be the normal way you would do it.[former President Ronald] Reagan was a little like this.He wanted to cut government.When he came in, he tried to, but it was also done in a somewhat systematic way, by making proposals to Congress or by instituting administrative changes that acted the way you would act in any organization, incidentally, unless it was literally going bankrupt the next day, which is to say, you’d say, “Look, we want to review this.I’m giving you notice that we may wind down this part of the business in three months or six months, and we’re going to have a review, and we’re going to try to help you.If you leave, we’ll try to make an orderly—do it in an orderly manner.”
Musk did the opposite, and you’ve got to ask why.There was no great urgency.We have a national debt, but we’ve had it for a long time.It wasn’t spinning out of control in the last few months.The markets didn’t care much about it.There was no great popular demand for—they weren’t marching in the streets saying, “Shut down AID this week,” right?But he wanted to.They wanted to send the signal that they could get away with it, and they wanted to intimidate everyone.I think they wanted a lot of people to resign from throughout the federal government.
They wanted to really convey the sense that if they didn’t like something, you could be fired tomorrow, and obviously, that could be effective in getting people to really hop to it when you want something done.It can also do a heck of a lot of damage to the way government actually works in terms of the outcomes, the products.
So I think the kind of—brutality maybe is too strong, but the severity, the suddenness with which they wanted to act, total lack of consideration for the employees’ well-being, their families, but also the people who were receiving, the recipients of these grants, it’s really striking, and I think purposeful, though.
You think it was part of—it was part of what they were trying to do.It wasn’t a side effect.Was it to spread fear?
I think in part it was a side effect.Obviously, some of these things they didn’t quite realize maybe what they were doing.Yes, it was to spread fear.It was to act fast before people could rally against them, so if you go to Congress and say, “We want to cut AID by 35% next year, maybe another 30% the year after.Heck, we want to phase it out over four years,” well, AID has friends and people who benefitted from it and people who believe in it and members of Congress who have been backers of it, and if you give them that kind of notice, they could rally their allies, and they could get some political pressure maybe the other way, and maybe some of these things would get defended.
They wanted to cut through all that normal workings of democratic politics and interest-group politics and move fast.So part of it was to kind of—to get this done as efficiently and as broadly and dramatically as you want to get it done, we have to move fast.
But there is a reason we tend to want things to get done in a more gradual way and with more consultation because A, it’s a democracy, and we want Congress to weigh in.I think the degree to which Congress has not rebelled against this is astonishing.People from outside of government may not fully appreciate just how amazing it is that they get away with closing agencies, closing maybe the Department of Education, firing people, stopping programs, and again, not saying, “We want to do this over the next six months;” not saying, “We want to go to Congress to figure out how to reform and also reduce the size of some of these programs,” but “We’re just doing it, and tough.”
And they don’t even pretend that they’ve got some study showing that this part of AID didn’t work.If you were being driven by studies, by evidence, right, you’d be closing programs A, C and G at AID, but program B, which works, you’d be leaving alone.But that was not the attitude.It’s they’re all gone.This one might be helping a lot of people live in Africa.This one may be not very well designed and not working very well in Asia.And they didn’t close the Asia one and keep the Africa one going, right?They just said, “We’re getting rid of it all.” So that’s very striking to me.
But the Education Department, which they seem to want to close—I came to Washington in 1985 to work at the Education Department, and I became chief of staff after a few months.10We submitted budgets to cut the Education Department budget by quite a lot, 30, 35%.President Reagan wanted to reduce the size of government.Education was a new department.There were questions about whether all the programs were necessary and so forth.We submitted the budget.We went up and testified.My boss, Bill Bennett, went up and testified on the Hill before it.
Congress mostly didn’t agree with us.They sent back a budget that was kind of the same, similar to the previous year’s spending, and of course we implemented it.I honestly can say it didn’t even occur to me that we didn’t have to spend the money that Congress appropriated, or that we could simply move it around as we wished.There were times when we would go back to Congress and say, “Hey, you appropriated this much money for this program.It really isn’t necessary, and it’s not working very well.We’d like to move some of it to this other program that we think works better.” If Congress and the appropriators said, “That seems reasonable; show us in 90 days how it’s working,” then we would do it.
So there was some negotiation.Congress appropriates $8,172,434 for this one program, and every cent has to be spent that way.But we didn’t think we could simply not spend on massive programs that Congress had clearly intended that they be kept going or that we could start things that Congress didn’t want to have happen.
And as I say, we didn’t even consider that that was something to think about because it was so beyond the scope of how government is supposed to work with our separation of powers.And the Trump people are doing things, as I say, that we didn’t—we Reaganites thought we were bold, but it didn’t even occur to us to do the things the Trump administration is doing.
They talk about a mandate for what they’re doing.And can you understand part of it, in the sense that a feeling of, among Americans, government is broken, it can’t address the problems, the Congress is broken?And the Trump administration is sort of coming in and saying, “Yeah, it’s broken, and we’re going to do it without Congress.We’re going—the only way to deliver on our democratic mandate is to push them to the side and send in Elon Musk with a chainsaw and to deliver on our promise.”
Congress is elected by the people, as is the president, so for one thing, the mandate also goes to Congress.Now, they did happen to win Congress, the Republicans, so they had a pretty good chance to make real changes.But they didn’t wait on Congress, and they didn’t go to Congress for approval, and they didn’t want to risk that on some issues, some members of Congress might finally depart from their guidance.And so they just wanted to do it all themselves.So they’re busy making massive changes, very hard to reverse those changes, many in programs that had been enacted on a bipartisan basis and the American people have shown no evidence of not liking.
It’s one thing if they had run on, I don’t know, getting rid of AID.“All this money is being spent on stopping AIDS in Africa.It’s an outrage.It’s a disgrace.” They didn’t run on that.So then they come in, and Congress says—looked at these programs over the years.It’s not like they’re out of control.Money is appropriated for them.It’s spent.Congress has decided it’s probably being spent pretty well in most of these cases, and that’s true in many of these instances.So yeah, I’m not very sympathetic to the notion that they had a mandate to carry out these kinds of changes.
Even in immigration.Let’s take an issue they did run on, to be fair, so they can say they have a mandate there.And presidents have a lot of flexibility, a lot of discretion, or they should probably, on immigration policy.Congress has given it to them.The courts have also decided that it’s kind of adjacent to foreign policy, right, in terms of the borders and stuff, so presidents happen to have a fair amount of power there.Even there, they are doing so much beyond what I think they campaigned on and what people would have expected.And they’re doing it to send a message, right?
It’s one thing to deport people and to deport violent criminals.No one is too offended by that.Even so, you’d like to prove the people you are deporting are actually criminals.But mass deportations to El Salvador?I don’t remember them talking that much about that, including doing it in the middle of the night, so to speak, and throwing in people who turn out not to be violent criminals—that seems pretty clear at this point; picking up people who are on student visas, who are here legally on student visas, because you didn’t like a speech they gave a year ago, who have been charged with literally no crime, who are here as legal immigrants.They’ve not broken a single law.You may not like their political views, some op-ed they wrote in a student paper.They’re being deposed [sic], get no legal process.
… And so, again, I think the failure of U.S.government at this moment is partly a failure of Congress to stand up for its authority and to stand up really for the rule of law against an executive that’s pushing at every opportunity to simply override established laws.
As we talk to law professors, the theory is that there’s the different branches, and the Congress will vigorously protect its prerogatives and the power of the purse.It seems like that’s not happening at all.
If you want to put it simply, you could say party loyalty has overridden institutional loyalty.And the Republican members of Congress are more loyal to the Republican Party than they are to Congress, so they don’t defend Congress if defending Congress would mean taking on the Republican Party, which really would mean taking on the Republican president.So it’s the party loyalty to a president of your party that overrides a lot of the normal congressional defense of their own prerogatives.Ambition doesn’t counteract ambition.
Having said that, we’ve had parties for a long time in this country.We’ve had pretty powerful presidents.Even so, we’ve never had anything like this degree of subservience.Franklin Roosevelt won actual mandates, 20% margin or something in 1936—a lot bigger than Trump’s margin—and he couldn’t get the court packing through the Democratic Congress.He couldn’t get—parts of his New Deal were challenged both in the courts and by Congress.He had to put together coalitions in Congress.And it was better.It was a healthier system.
He was a strong president.He changed a lot about America, but he did so by passing the Social Security Act through Congress, not by bringing in the Elon Musk of his day to just unilaterally implement things.
Do you think Elon Musk is part of his power, that when somebody—he’s tweeted about particular senators, “I’ll fund a primary challenge to you.” It’s the world’s richest man.
Yeah.So Musk is a powerful character and obviously has a lot of money that he’s willing to spend on politics.I’m slightly unsympathetic to the argument, on the other hand, that how could they be expected to stand up to Elon Musk?I don’t know.Most of these senators have been elected more than once.Members of the House, too.They can raise money.Elon Musk can’t just snap his fingers and defeat them, and so there is a little bit of excuse making, I think.
Now, you don’t want Musk and all of his minions on [the social platform] X and all the MAGA types going after you.I do think there is a powerful movement there.Some of it’s the very wealthy people.Some of it is the mass support.Some of it is talk radio in the old days, now much more social media, and that’s—you put it all together, it’s pretty unified.It’s not like the Democrats and the liberals who have 9,000 different voices going in different directions, and they don’t want to talk to members of Congress.It’s not fun when MAGA comes after you.But you know what?Tough.It’s not fun, but maybe you should do the right thing, even if you get attacked a lot on social media, and you get yelled at back home by people, and you go to your country club.This is a problem with Republicans who like country clubs.I’ve been struck how many of them tell me, “It’s tough when I go to my country club with my wife or my spouse, and a lot of them are annoyed that I’m standing up to Trump.” And it’s like, “Really?Is this the worst thing that could happen to you?”
Trump Takes on the Courts and Law Firms
… So with Congress not in the game, a lot of it ends up in the courts, and it’s in that context that the president issues an executive order on the law firms.What do you think he’s doing there?
He’s trying to intimidate the legal establishment and get as many of them as possible not to take or to help with cases against him, pro bono cases against him, also not to represent people that he’s going after.Same thing when they talk about impeaching judges.I don’t think that’s likely to happen.The Republican House isn’t going to do it.The Senate, they couldn’t get two-thirds of the votes, but maybe there is some intimidation there.Certainly in the public arena you can raise doubts, “Are these judges really impartial?This judge was appointed by Obama.How can you expect him to be impartial?” Ignore the fact that a lot of Bush- and Trump-appointed judges have found against him.11
So no, I think it’s a big intimidations effort, and it’s had some success.One way to think about it is this: We think of authoritarianism, if you want to use that term, or autocracy.It’s an autocratic government.And a lot of it is getting control of the executive branch and making that a personal control and wiping out the guardrails in the executive: the fact that you’re not supposed to tell the Justice Department who to prosecute; you’re not supposed to intervene in military promotions and so forth.
So one part of autocracy is the centralizing and personalizing of power within the executive.Another part of it is weakening Congress.And they are busy running roughshod over Congress, and maybe Congress should stand up for itself.It’s not so far.But a third part is also extending your power out into the country, out beyond government.That’s what autocracies do, right?And that’s what [Prime Minister Viktor] Orbán has done in Hungary, right, to take an instance they like a lot.The media is subservient to him, and universities, in the case of Hungary, are mostly made subservient to him.Businesses profit if they get along with Orbán, and they suffer if they are in any way hostile to or even try to be independent of Orbán.
And I think we’re seeing that attempt in the United States.We’re a much bigger country.We have much better established traditions, not so easy to intimidate law schools and universities and law firms and businesses and all the many, many institutions in the United States, the media.But the degree to which he is trying to do it and the degree to which to some degree he has succeeded in doing it is pretty remarkable.I don’t think—again, it wouldn’t even have occurred, honestly, to a previous administration that you should target law firms for, I don’t know, taking on pro bono clients that you don’t like.You might grumble about it.Friends of yours on the outside—it’s a free country—might choose not to hire those law firms because they’re dominated by liberals.That’s fine.
But as president of the United States, you sort of go after these firms and try to really damage them with these executive orders?That’s pretty unprecedented, I’ve got to say.
Is it different?We talked to a reporter who said people who he would call up in the past who would give a quote don’t want to go on the record anymore.
Interesting.
And it seems like some corporations that might not like some of these policies aren’t aggressively or publicly sort of lobbying against them.Has the mood changed?Is he effective in this term at spreading a kind of fear?
Yeah, he’s been effective so far.I think those of us who are anti-Trump shouldn’t kid ourselves that “Well, because we don’t like it, it can’t work.” You can say bullying doesn’t work in the long term.Eventually the people who are being bullied, they’re going to pay a price because the bully eventually turns on you as well.And it’s also, people don’t like bullying, but bullying can work in the short term.I think we know that from life, right?And maybe eventually it backfires, but that “eventually” can go a long way out. …
Have you seen it personally with people you know?
Well, I’ve seen—that’s hard to say.I don’t know.I’ve seen—the people I know now are kind of anti-Trump. …They’re being threatened.I think for now, people are standing—in this world they’re standing up pretty well, but there is that whole in-between world where there has been major capitulation to Trump.You can’t just look at the tech guys who were all anti-Trump four years ago.Trump won, they thought, you know what?We’ve got huge issues with Washington.We need the goodwill of the government.And a lot of businesses think that.They’re not crazy to think that.You can’t run a massive corporation in America and think you’ll be in good shape, given how much interaction there is with the government in a million different regulatory areas and tax policies and so forth.
… In the past, when I was in the government, you’d fight at one level, but it didn’t occur to us that because we were in a policy disagreement on taxes, let’s say, with some set of corporate America that someone from the White House would then call up the Interior Department and say, “Hey, when there is this lease-bidding process that’s supposed to be non-political and judged on the merits and auction or whatever, you should discriminate against this company.Make sure they don’t get the lease.” That happened occasionally.We know stories like that.Sometimes people were prosecuted for that behavior; sometimes they got away with it.They got away with it, especially I would say, at maybe some state and local level.That’s kind of the classic corruption of local government, right?
Federal government the last, I don’t know what, five, six, seven decades, has not had much of that actually.I think most people, most corporations dealing with the federal government felt, “If I have an issue before this regulatory agency, they may be more liberal than I’d like, they may be more conservative than I’d like as a policy matter, but they’re not going to pick on me because my personal views as CEO are different from the personal views of the guy who is running the company that I’m competing against.”
But now, with Trump, I think all bets are off in terms of the willingness of the executive branch to really pick winners and losers based on whether they are supporters of Donald Trump or not.
Deportation of Venezuelan Migrants
We’ve talked about the Congress.We’ve talked about the Justice Department.We’ve talked about the lawyers.The last thing, and you’ve already talked about it.So I’ve already talked about two big questions on it, is the judiciary, and especially in the world of immigration, which you also talked about, it seems like where they are picking a fight with the judges, in particular the judge over the flights to El Salvador, calling him a “radical left lunatic” judge and calling for impeachment, is it part of a strategy to go after the judiciary on that, to fight on that issue, do you think?
They think immigration is a good issue for them to fight on, so if they’re going to have to choose to defy the courts at some point, they would probably like to do it on that issue.It’s also an issue which traditionally the president has had a fair amount of leeway on.The courts have been a little reluctant to get involved in micromanaging immigration policy, which is very complicated.And there are different rules and regulations for non-citizens as opposed to citizens, for those who are here and undocumented versus those who are here legally and the different statuses.So if you were thinking of where can I really push the hardest and most effectively, it probably would be something like immigration, and plus, it’s an issue Trump has campaigned on, and people who work for him care an awful lot about.
So for all those reasons it’s become, I think, the focus of the courts.People have gone to court, as is their right, and said, “Wait a second.This deportation was not legal.There was no due process,” and all the obvious arguments.And they run into some obstacles.I think bullying has worked for Trump.Whether it will work to bully judges quite in that way, I don’t know.I’d like to think it won’t work.I also was in an argument with some lawyers two years ago when Judge [Aileen] Cannon started to delay the trial down in Florida for the Mar-a-Lago, the documents, the classified documents Trump took to Mar-a-Lago.12
And the conventional wisdom among these very successful and smart lawyers who had distinguished careers was, “Well, that can’t work.She can’t get away with that.He or she tries to do that, the pressure, the peer pressure from the other judges, the pressure from her superiors in the 11th Circuit, they are not going to let her just run out the clock for 18 months on something which is pretty serious charges and pretty good evidence that he knew what he was doing when he took those documents and kept them and hid them and refused to give them back.” And she got away with it.
I think that’s been very important for Trump.The amount of stuff he got away with.He learned two lessons from the first term and from being out of office: that there were a lot of barriers he hadn’t quite realized that he didn’t want to have to face in the second term, but also that bullying can often work and that having friends and people who are loyal to you in key places makes just a huge amount of difference.
Now the courts, he’s inheriting a judiciary [in which] he did make a lot of appointments in his four years, but obviously the bulk of the judges were appointed by Clinton or Bush or Obama or Biden, or some by Trump in his first term.Trump at that point was just appointing standard and conservative judges to some degree.I think he learned that lesson.It frustrates him.He can’t change the judiciary as fast as he can change the executive branch.He can’t intimidate the judges quite as well as he can intimidate, nor nearly as well, as he can intimidate Republican members of Congress.So there are these independent judges standing up to him, so he lashes out.Maybe he hopes to intimidate them personally.Maybe it’s more about intimidating the next judge coming along.
And some of it is laying the groundwork for convincing his supporters that it’ll be legitimate.It will be the right thing to do when he doesn’t obey these judges.
Chief Justice John Roberts and the Supreme Court
That’s what’s laying there as you get to the ultimate court and to Justice Roberts having to decide how directly he wants to decide.There is the law, and then there is politics, and there is power.And that threat seems to be on the table.What is the Supreme Court facing at this moment?
On the one hand, if you are a chief justice of the Supreme Court, you don’t want to be succumbing to political threats.That’s not very good for your—probably don’t want to do it, A, and B, it’s not good for your reputation as a chief justice, and it’s not why you became justice of the Supreme Court, to get bullied.On the other hand, you also do have to think, “I want to preserve the strength of the court.Maybe I should give in on this little thing to preserve credibility for a bigger thing.I can’t pick 18 fights at once with the president of the United States.”
I don’t know.I really don’t know what happens there.I think the courts have been strong, maybe partly we’re judging by a low—this is a low bar compared to Congress or compared to the Republican Party or compared, honestly, to the business establishment or some of the other aspects of American life.The courts have more—they just have such a reputation; the courts have such a self-image in America, independence, and of not being bullied, and I think these judges, to their credit, have really internalized that.
You watch some of these judges in these hearings.They really, thank God—maybe sometimes makes them a little self-important.They overdo it sometimes, but really, it’s a good thing that they think, “I’m here to enforce the law.I’m not here to think about how many votes, whether this policy is more popular than that policy, or this person is wealthier than that person, or this person is more powerful than that person.If some immigrant is being unjustly deprived of due process, we should insist on that.” And there is a long tradition in America, obviously, especially the last 50, 60 years, of the courts being proud that they have stood up for sometimes unpopular people and unpopular causes.
I think that will be put under pressure over these next four years.
So after everything we’ve talked about, how much stress is the system under, is American democracy under at this moment?
I think the system and American democracy are under as much stress as they have been in my lifetime.I think more than Watergate.But anyway, we got through Watergate, and since then, I don’t think there’s been—there has been this level of threats.There are other things that have happened gradually—polarization, the weakening of Congress—that have contributed to where we are, but we have a president who is purposefully trying to not to stress the system but really break parts of it, I’m going to say.And we haven’t really had that in modern times.
And I’m not sure we’ve had it almost ever in American history.We’ve been pretty lucky.We’ve had presidents who weren’t very good.We’ve had presidents who cut corners.We’ve had presidents who personally were a little bit corrupt.We’ve had presidents who had particular issues where they wanted to go after someone.But the breadth of the Trump effort to really overcome the barriers, to overcome the guardrails within the government and outside the government, I think that’s pretty unprecedented.
Latest Interviews
Latest Interviews
Policies
Teacher Center
Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation
Koo and Patricia Yuen
FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
Funding for FRONTLINE is provided through the support of PBS viewers and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding is provided by the Abrams Foundation; Park Foundation; the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation; and the FRONTLINE Journalism Fund with major support from Jon and Jo Ann Hagler on behalf of the Jon L. Hagler Foundation, and additional support from Koo and Patricia Yuen. FRONTLINE is a registered trademark of WGBH Educational Foundation. Web Site Copyright ©1995-2025 WGBH Educational Foundation. PBS is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization.
