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Jane Mayer
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The FRONTLINE Interviews
Jane Mayer
The New Yorker
Jane Mayer is the chief Washington correspondent for The New Yorker and is the author of Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group's Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on March 24, 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.
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Trump’s Speech at the DOJ
We're thinking of starting the film with the moment that Donald Trump goes to the Justice Department and delivers that speech.Can you help me understand that moment, what you saw there, what he was doing?
Well, it was a moment that pretty much broke all the norms of how other modern presidents have behaved in the Justice Department.President Trump walked into the Great Hall, which is this amazingly august place, with a statue of Majesty and a statue of Justice, and standing in front of the logo for the United States Department of Justice in this really just high-minded place, he started talking about taking retribution against his enemies who he referred to as “scum” and “thugs.”And I don't think that any president has ever used language like that in the Department of Justice before.It's a rare thing for a president even to go over to the Department of Justice.Usually when they do, they're announcing some kind of important policy change or initiative.Instead, basically, what he was saying is, “I'm going to use this department, with all of its power, to get my enemies.”
What do you think, as you listened to him that day, was motivating him? Does it come from—He had been prosecuted by the Justice Department, but he'd also been president before that, and he had his own approach to the law before that.What do you think was driving that approach in that moment?
The thing that occurred to me was, and that I hadn't really taken into account fully before, is that during the period, the previous couple years, while Trump was being prosecuted for, and convicted in a couple instances, for crimes, he must have been sitting there and seething and just waiting until he could take his revenge, because that's basically what he announced he was going to do when he walked in to that Justice Department that day.1
So it's a campaign of retribution.It's also an effort to undermine.I think he was trying to undermine the credibility of the prosecutions against him and say that they were just political and that they were illegitimate, and by doing that he was minimizing the criminal record he came into office with, which nobody else has ever had in the history of the presidency, and basically saying, “And I'm going to do the same; I'm going to be as political as my persecutors were.I did nothing wrong, and I'm going after people, too.”
He has two terms that he uses; one is “weaponization” of the Justice Department, and the other is “lawfare.”What does he mean by those terms?
What he means by weaponization is taking the power of the legal system and using it as a weapon against—for political purposes, politicizing it, basically, in a very sort of personal way.And what he means by lawfare is “I'm going to wage war.” It's a play on law—It's a play on “warfare,” using the law.“I'm going to wage war using the law.”
These are both terms that have been around before Trump, but what he's doing is he's saying, “The United States Department of Justice is going to be for my use to go after my enemies.”
He thinks that's what they did to him, so it's sort of a turnaround.
He says that's what he—I mean, who knows?It's very hard to say what Trump really thinks, but certainly that's what he's saying.He's projecting.He's saying that what happened to him was just lawfare, illegitimate; it was a weaponized use of law to try to bring him down for political purposes.And he's convinced an awful lot of his backers of the same thing, that that's all it was about; he did nothing wrong.
The thing is, I think it's worth saying that that is just absolutely not borne out by the facts.He was convicted by juries, juries of his own peers, in courts that are not corrupt or not particularly political.And he had the same amount of access to justice that any other person in America would have, if not an awful lot more.
So he has really no, as far as I'm concerned, he has no case here.But what he's doing is trying to denigrate the justice system that got him and saying, “I'm going to use it the same.I'm going to go get my enemies.”
And he names them by name.And you said he used the word “scum.”He talks about Norm Eisen and others.2What is he doing when he's listing people's names at the Justice Department?
Well, this is—another thing that Trump did was, he talked about himself as the chief law enforcement officer of the country.He's acting like an old-time sheriff who's come to town to clean it up, OK, and he's naming who the bad guys are that he's going to go after.It just so happens that they are Democrats who opposed him politically and who have no records of wrongdoing whatsoever, and he's painting them as if they're criminals.
Can you tell me who Norm Eisen is?
… So Norm Eisen, for instance, if you take Norm Eisen—and he'd be familiar to many people who watch the news on TV—he's a very outspoken former U.S. ambassador to the Czech Republic, and he is a lawyer himself, and he was an adviser to President Obama on ethics issues, legal ethics issues.He's someone who has basically blown the whistle on Trump on any number of ethical violations, and so it is tempting to say that Trump wants to take him down because he doesn't agree with the criticism he's gotten from Norm Eisen.
Trump’s Executive Orders
So let's go back to the very first day.A lot of presidents start the first day or two in office by signing executive orders.When you watch that first day and the executive orders that he's signing as he's sitting at the desk, is there something different about what's going on?
What Trump did in the way he signed executive orders to begin with, he also—he signed them not just at the Oval Office, but he also began signing them … in an auditorium in front of his campaign supporters as part of the inauguration festivities.He turned it into sort of a theatrical performance that showed that “I've got power.All I have to do is put my little—my Sharpie on the page, and I can make law a reality.”It was like as if he was sending thunderbolts out to the country, and he wanted an audience for that.And he did one after the next after the next, and what he was trying to do was this campaign of what he'd called “shock and awe” that announced, “I'm in charge now.”
And some of the executive orders that were signed on that first day were really shocking in their extremism.One in particular that took, I think, a lot of people by surprise was an executive order saying that he was going to overturn what's called birthright citizenship; that people who were born in America to parents who were not legal citizens would no longer be allowed to be called citizens themselves under the law.And the thing is, it's enshrined in the Constitution, in the 14th Amendment, that anyone born in the United States is considered a citizen of the United States.So he was basically, in this one executive order, saying, “The Constitution means nothing; from here on out, I am changing it with the stroke of my pen.”
You said shock and awe.The other phrase that I hear sometimes is “flood the zone,” or “muzzle velocity” is another one.Was this an intentional strategy?Was this something that was—
Evidently, some of the top Trump advisers had been scheming and planning and plotting and waiting for this moment for a very long time, and they had all of these initiatives lined up and ready to go, which is more power to them.It's actually a very smart move.They also had so many of these executive orders ready to go at once that the public could barely absorb it; the press could barely absorb it.
There were so many things happening at once that it was very hard to focus on any single one thing.And that was what Steve Bannon used to call the sort of “flood the zone” approach to politics: Just drown them in it, and that way, people can barely—they're just dizzy from all of the change at once.
Sometimes people talk about Stephen Miller as an architect of that.Do you have a sense of his role?
… Stephen Miller is definitely one of the architects of these policy changes, particularly in the area of immigration.He's also one of the most powerful people in the country, an adviser to the president.He is the deputy chief of staff.He's the Homeland Security adviser.And most of the initiatives that came out of the White House having to do with immigration were evidently cooked up by him.
That first day, there's one other thing that's not an executive order, which is the pardons of the Jan. 6 people who were convicted, which is a moment where—there had been expectation he would do something, it was a campaign promise, but it goes beyond what a lot of people expected.Tell me about that and about the signal that it was sending.
So probably the single thing—it's hard to say because so much happened on the first day, but probably the most memorable thing that happened on the first day of Trump being in office … was his pardon of the Jan. 6 insurrectionists.There had been a lot of guessing about how he would approach this.People assumed that he would pardon some of them, but probably not all of them, because there were some that were such serious criminals with such serious sentences.And Pam Bondi, during her confirmation hearings to become attorney general, had said to Congress that she would go through each of the files one by one, and she didn't expect a wholesale pardon of all of them.And many Republicans in Congress said the same thing.They expected and wanted it to be a kind of a careful, deliberative process.
Instead, Trump pardoned all of them.3And it was really a shocking message to the country, which basically said that the sacking of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, was not a crime.Basically, I think the message that many people took from it was, if you break the law on behalf of Trump, in service of Trump, you will be pardoned; there will be no price to pay.And that message was alarming to many people because it seemed to send out a message to the militias, to people who might commit violence, to people who might break the law in various ways on behalf of Trump that they would have a “Get out of jail free” card if they ever crossed the line.
3
It seems like it was a shocking moment in Washington and for a lot of people watching.But if you had paid attention to the campaign, to what they had promised, would they say, “We were just delivering on our campaign promises.”
Maybe. … Certainly Trump had made clear that he didn't regard Jan. 6 as a criminal event, and he had called the people who had been convicted political prisoners.So he was basically referring to them as if they were Mandela or Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in that category of principled people who have been unfairly imprisoned.And there was a choir of them singing that was being made a big deal of by the sort of MAGA world, as if they were sort of a choir of angels.So yeah, there was reason to think he was going to try to free them and exonerate them.
But I think there were some members who were involved in the Jan. 6 insurrection—I think of people like Stewart Rhodes, the head of the Oath Keepers—who really had … serious charges against them.And of course, anyone who's watched the film of that day knows that there was tremendous damage, and people hurt and killed, and awful, awful kind of treatment of the Capitol Hill police, who were just trying to protect Congress and the elected officials.
So it was an incredibly jarring moment.
The Unitary Executive Theory
… Let's talk a little bit about the background of the legal theories that they’re coming in with, this idea of the unitary executive, of a powerful president who’s at the charge.How far back do those ideas go?Does this go to Donald Trump?Have those been around the conservative legal world?
So there has been, for many years, a kind of a growing theory in conservative legal circles that—it's called the unitary executive theory, which sounds incredibly abstract and abstruse.And basically, it's an idea that started getting hold after Watergate.Basically, if you think back to Richard Nixon's period, people called Richard Nixon an imperial president.And when he violated the laws and his administration was corrupt, there was an effort to reform the presidency and to put some constraints on it, and to keep an administration, the executive branch, from being politicized and used just for the personal power of the president.
So a lot of ethics laws were passed.Independent agencies were safeguarded.Civil servants were sort of turned into people who were supposed to be apolitical.And the whole effort was to fight corruption, to fight tyranny, to make sure that a president didn't become a tyrant.
And anyway, that process took place after Watergate, and there were people, particularly on the right, who disagreed. …
There was an early case that was a test case where it was about an independent prosecutor and whether there can be someone who might look into crimes that a president himself could commit who is not under the president's own authority, because the executive branch is under the president.And there was a case about it, and it went up to the Supreme Court, and the idea of the unitary executive lost.
But it got a little support.And over the years, this theory grew and grew.There was test case after test case, and the presidential powers were expanded, and the conservative legal movement embraced the idea that independent agencies are illegitimate and they should all be under the power of the president. …
So Donald Trump, who wants to walk in and be a vigorous president, walks in and has people around him who have a theory for how he’s going to operate.
Yeah, Donald Trump is not a lawyer.He's not been involved in the conservative legal movement, but he's surrounded by people who are, who have been waiting years for this moment where they can actualize their extremist ideas of the executive branch.They have wanted to have a president who is supremely powerful, and Trump, for his own reasons, has been very enamored of that theory because it gives him so much more power than earlier presidents have had. …
So justice by justice, the conservatives were taking over the Supreme Court, and the theory of the unitary executive was becoming more widespread as the conservative justices took their seats on the bench.
And finally, this came to a head, really, in the summer of 2024, in the final session of the 2024 Supreme Court, with a ruling that gave just unprecedented immunity to the president.4And it said that basically, a president who breaks the law in the course of carrying out his official duties cannot be prosecuted as a criminal.And this basically—it was an incredibly controversial ruling.It put the president above the criminal justice system in many ways.And it was that interpretation of the presidency that Trump walked into when he was elected.He's got powers that we've never seen really tested before in the United States, and he seems to be pushing them to the max.
4
Oyez: Trump v. United States
… What kind of people does he choose to be at the top of the Justice Department, of the FBI?Why does he choose the people that he chooses?
When you look at some of the qualifications for the people who President Trump has chosen to be at the top rungs of the Justice Department, it's hard to see that he was looking for anything beyond loyalty to himself.These are not people with deep credentials and experience and impressive résumés.They are people who are impressively loyal to Donald Trump, including actually his own—several of his own lawyers, people who have defended him in various legal cases before.
Now, I think it's only fair to say, he's not the only president who wanted to have an attorney general who was loyal to him.If we look back in history to John F. Kennedy, he put his own brother, Bobby Kennedy, in as his attorney general.So this is not the first time something like this has happened.But Trump has basically surrounded himself with people who are just plain loyal to him above and beyond everything else.
It is, I can say it's, I think, it is a departure from recent choices of attorney generals [sic], and it's a departure from the way several recent presidents have looked at the Justice Department.So if you look back and say, take for instance, Eric Holder, who was Barack Obama's attorney general, Holder and Obama were very close friends; they became really close friends.Their wives were very close friends; they socialized together.But Obama and Holder had a rule, which was they would not talk about law cases that were in front of the Justice Department because they didn't want the decisions that the Justice Department made and that the attorney general made to be polluted by politics, by the president's personal point of view.There was a separation basically, and the Justice Department was supposed to be above politics.It was supposed to do right by whoever was before it, regardless of their political party without fear or favor.
So Obama made sure to not even have conversations with Holder about cases.And that's so different from the model that we're seeing with Trump.I think also of when, more recently, when Joe Biden was president, his attorney general, Merrick Garland, was someone he barely knew.And I remember I spoke a couple of times to Merrick Garland and asked him, "So have you heard from Biden recently?"And he said, "I never talk to him."There was a kind of a wall.It was supposed to be—the Justice Department was supposed to be hermetically sealed from politics, and they thought that was the ideal. …
It's not unusual for an attorney general to bring in top people around them who they trust and who they're politically aligned with.But a huge part of the Justice Department, in recent times, has been apolitical, bipartisan, not subject to the president's whims.They follow the law.That's their pride and joy, that they follow the law without caring if it hurts a Democrat or a Republican; it's unimportant to them.
And so the message coming through this administration was if you're not on board with our politics, you're not welcome.
It's interesting, because it seemed, in his first term, he appointed people who you would think would be a loyalist to him—Jeff Sessions, who helped him politically, but then appoints a special prosecutor; Bill Barr, who comes in after that and was sort of critical of that decision, but then doesn't go along with him after the election.Did Trump learn something from the first term?
Honestly, the second Trump term is so different from the first Trump term.In the first Trump term, he didn't really understand where the levers of power were so much, and he was much more guided by people who accepted the norms in Washington.He's breaking those norms now, and he's surrounded by radicals who are egging him on.Some of them are people who have waited years for this opportunity.
The Eric Adams Case
We may spend a little bit of time, but not a lot, on the Eric Adams case.… Was that a test case?What do you make of that?
Honestly, the situation surrounding Eric Adams seemed shockingly corrupt.If you boil it down, it seemed to be that the Justice Department was telling the mayor of New York, “If you help us out, if you do what the president wants you to do in New York City, we'll help you out.We'll just sweep away these criminal charges against you.”And they'll bury an investigation that was serious into wrongdoing by the mayor of New York to get a favor back that was a political favor for the president.I've never seen anything quite like that.
And the reaction.So the Justice Department orders the U.S. attorney to dismiss the charges, and she writes back with this letter, among other things alleging an apparent quid pro quo and saying that there isn't a legal justification to make that motion.What do you make of that confrontation?
What was interesting was, the acting U.S. attorney in New York, Danielle Sassoon, was not the kind of person who you would have thought was going to stand up to Donald Trump, at least not politically.5She was a member of the conservative Federalist Society.She had clerked for a conservative Supreme Court justice.She was a conservative, but she believed in the rule of law, and she saw this as a corruption, and she said, “I want no part of it,” and she resigned.
5
And she's not the only one who ends up resigning.There's other prosecutors at Main Justice, the, I think, acting head of the criminal division.The leaders of the public integrity office or office that handles corruption also resigned.
Many people have resigned.An awful lot of really good people have resigned.It's kind of the only way you can send out a message, I think.And they don't want—it's a difficult dilemma for people because they might want to stay in their jobs and try to make things better, but at the same time, they don't want to be complicit in something that they see as truly wrong.
It seems like in another era, it might have had a different effect.
We're kind of in an era right now—it's been building up for a long time, but we're in an era where scandals are sort of frozen.There is no accountability afterwards.There will be an allegation made, a really good person will point a finger, the evidence will be there, but nothing gets cleaned up afterwards.
And the reason really is because of Congress.All of this is happening against a backdrop of a Republican majority in both the House and the Senate where they won't hold hearings; they won't demand changes; they won't legislate.They're so afraid of Donald Trump that they are paralyzed.
… So these lawyers are trying to send a message in a way by resigning, by sending these very powerful letters.And it seems like the administration is sending their own message to those lawyers and to anyone else who might be considering standing on what they believe as principle.
… What you might have expected is when the acting U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which is actually, among the U.S. attorneys, the most powerful of them.They call it the “Sovereign District of New York.”I mean, this is a very powerful, respected post.
When she resigned, you might have expected to see the Justice Department reeling from it.Instead, what you saw was that she got fired; she got fired by the deputy attorney general, …who happened to have been Trump's own personal lawyer.6
So you see the top end of the Justice Department is all in with Trump.They're standing up for him, and, some might say in this case, they're not standing up for the rule of law.
That's a good point.If they want to make an example to send a message, the Southern District, the Sovereign District as you say, is probably—
Yeah, it's the one.
Probably that message is delivered.
Right, yeah. Message received.
Elon Musk and DOGE
We won't go into the details of everything that involves Elon Musk and—
Oh, good, because I don't know everything.
But he represents, when he's standing next to Donald Trump, a sort of very dramatic break with the way things are done.When you see Elon Musk given that authority that Trump gives him, how unusual is the role that he took on in the administration?
Basically the reason Musk is getting sued over and over again, or his DOGE is getting sued over and over again, is because it violates the whole idea of the Constitution, which is that there's supposed to be accountability to the voters.The whole government governs with the consent of the voters.Elon Musk never ran for office, and he is not even accountable to the president in any normal way.He's outside of the system.According to the way they've described him, he's not a special adviser who has to, for instance, show his financial records so that you can see if he has conflicts of interest.7He's not accountable.He's not in the chain of command.He is outside of the government, but wielding incredible power over the government.
And so it just violates the basic idea of the fact that our government only exists because we voted for it.
And part of what's interesting to us is obviously Elon Musk is not a lawyer and wasn't even involved in politics for a long time, but behind the scenes there's people in Trumpworld—Russell Vought—who have this idea of impoundment, of the power of the presidency.Can you help me with any of that? …
So when Trump came into power, he was surrounded by ideologues from the far right who had been nursing these theories for quite sometime that are really quite extreme, and one of them is that the president should be able to override Congress when it comes to deciding what money to spend….
So as everybody knows from their elementary school civics classes, there are three branches of government, and they were designed by the founders to put checks and balances on each other.The whole idea was to make sure we didn't end up with a monarchy or a tyrant who was going to control everything like a king.
And so each branch is able to check each other.And what Trump is really doing is trying to crush some of those checks and just run right over the barriers.And specifically what he's trying to do with Congress right now is say that, even though it has the powers of the purse, he's going to countermand that; he's going to cancel programs that Congress has set up and appropriated the funds for because he doesn't like them.
So if it's USAID and he doesn't approve of that, he's going to have Elon Musk come in and say it's a waste of money, and they're going to just take away the appropriation, not spend the money, and fire the people who work there.
It's an incredible challenge to the Constitution and to our system of government to have a president doing these things.
Do you have a sense—and if it's not your territory, that's OK—but about Project 2025 and about the extent to which it was a plan for exactly for what's happening.
Yeah. If you go back and you look at Project 2025, which was the project prepared by the Heritage Foundation with the help of many, many other sort of right-wing groups, this has been something that the conservative, far-right conservative moment has been planning, plotting, scheming, hungering for, for years.And it's all laid out as a blueprint there.
And you might remember during the campaign, Trump said, “I don't know what Project 2025 is.I don't have anything to do with it.”Well, he may not have then, but he's basically implementing it now.
And do you know Russ Vought—
Yeah.
—and his involvement in all this and who he is?
The truth is that there are other people who are not the president who are really architects of a lot of what we're watching right now, and one of the principal ones is a man named Russell Vought. …
So Russell Vought, he is someone who is a self-described Christian nationalist who has been around Washington for a long time.He worked in Congress for a long time.He's seen how government works, and he's something of an ideological extremist and has an idea of really kind of radical changes he wants to implement.And he's someone who knows how to do it.
… Do you think that USAID was a test case, that they chose it on purpose to be the first?
Well, the thing about USAID is, if you look at polls, for years Americans have questioned whether it's worth spending on foreign aid to other countries.They don't really support it in the way they support many other things.So it was kind of easy pickings.It was a—if you're going to make some kind of hugely dramatic cut, it was one where they weren't going to get a whole lot of pushback.So I imagine they chose it for that reason.
What was it like in Washington when suddenly the agency—the word went out that the agency was going to be shut down by the president, that people were receiving notices, that tape was going up over the outside of the building?
People think outside of Washington of it is the “swamp” or some kind of, you know, I don't know, a place with corrupt bureaucrats.That's really not my experience.It was terrible.These are, from my experience, really good people, really dedicated.They're public servants.They're experts in areas that are really useful to the functioning of the government.And the people who I've met at USAID are people like Atul Gawande, who is also a writer at The New Yorker; he's a surgeon.He's so dedicated to trying to mitigate the terrible health problems in the other parts of the world.
And it's really a fallacy to think that these issues and problems that happen on other sides of the world are not going to come back to haunt us here, whether it's Ebola—I mean, diseases spread.Terrible poverty.People migrate.We're all interconnected, and that's what the people at USAID understand, so they feel they're helping America when they help the rest of the world.
Anyway, it was really—it was really terrible.These are real people being laid off with real, ordinary lives like everyone else.They don't tend to be rich because you don't go into government to get rich.I have an exercise class teacher who was in the middle of trying to get pregnant with IVF.Her husband works for USAID as a contractor.Suddenly their insurance was cut off.They were in the middle of a cycle of trying to get pregnant.Their previous child died of brain cancer.And it was a tragedy.It's a personal disaster for so many people.
But it's, you know, people, I can see online that a lot of critics don't care about the people who work for the government.They think, too bad for you.But it's also really terrible for the country, because it's going to hurt our soft power …
Vought was quoted as saying that he wanted the bureaucrats traumatized.8And I imagine that the fallout was not just at USAID, because everybody who worked at the Department of Education or wherever must have—who thought they had a government job and stability—
It's strange. You've got somebody like Russell Vought, who's basically been in Washington for most of his adult professional career, just trashing it.And there's a level of antagonism, a level of animus that I just don't understand.It's really interesting.They seem to not just be opposed to waste, fraud and abuse.They seem to hate government and hate the people who run it.
It's interesting because the other people, DOGE is supposed to be about waste, fraud and abuse, but they're also going after the IGs.When the USAID IG writes a report, he's fired the next day.
You have to question, are they really just—is this really about trying to go after waste, fraud and abuse, or are they carrying out some kind of radical ideological vendetta?And in a way, there's been, on the right, there's been kind of an anti-government movement for 40 years, and this has kind of come to a head right now under Trump.
Why would they go after the IGs?
The IGs are the watchdogs, and they've gotten rid of the watchdogs …You have to wonder, so why are they going after—if they really are interested in waste, fraud and abuse, why would you fire the inspector generals [sic] in all of these different federal departments?And I think what we're really seeing, if you step back, is an effort by Trump and his top people to get rid of any kind of independent pushback against them.This is a power grab.You're watching the presidency turned into something much more imperial than we've seen for a very long time, and maybe ever, and they don't want watchdogs telling them what not to do; they don't want Congress telling them what not to do; and they don't want the courts telling them what not to do.
So let's talk about Congress at that moment, which has funded USAID, which had created USAID.What is the response of the Republican Congress?
The Republican Congress is basically going from what's supposed to be a check on the executive branch to a rubber stamp.Everyone waited for a while to see if it would push back on Trump as he was undercutting programs that Congress has authorized, and they haven't pushed back.They've barely spoken up.
Do you have a sense of why?
Well, we're in a really unusual time, where the man standing next to Donald Trump in the Oval Office is Elon Musk, who's the richest man in the world.And on several occasions, he's basically vowed to fund campaigns to knock out anyone in the Republican Party who doesn't go along with Trump.So you've got an awful lot of lawmakers who are just afraid.They're afraid for their jobs; they want to keep their jobs.
But in that, you were saying the traditional, like what you learned in school about the different branches bumping up against each other, if you have one of them that you're saying is afraid to push back, that check suddenly doesn't work.
Right. That's what we're seeing.… Trump and the people around him are trying to intimidate Congress.And we've seen this, for instance, in the confirmation hearings of Cabinet nominees of Trump.So if you take one, Pete Hegseth, who Trump nominated to run the Pentagon.In order to make sure that no Republican voted against Hegseth, Elon Musk and Trump basically intimidated the Republican senators who had doubts about Hegseth and warned them that they would be knocked out of office if they didn't vote for Hegseth.So they're really basically bullying the Republicans in the Senate and the House into going along with them.
… Are you surprised that somebody like Chuck Grassley, who for years talked about the importance of the inspector generals [sic] and that he was going to be the —
… I think people were more surprised by Joni Ernst.The other thing is that, really, by now, an awful lot of the people who are in Congress, particularly in the House, have been—they've been elected as MAGA representatives; they actually agree with Trump.…Trump has taken over the Republican Party.It's his party now, and so he rules in it, and he is using his power to make Congress go along with him.
Trump Takes on the Courts and Law Firms
That imagery that he sends out, of being a king where he makes references to being a king, he said, "He who saves his country does not violate any law," what do you make of the messages that are coming explicitly from the president's Truth Social account?
… Trump seems to be enamored of the idea of being a king.He is quoting a quote that was supposed to have been from Napoleon about how any one who is breaking the law, any leader who's breaking the law on behalf of his country can't be prosecuted.He's showing pictures of himself in crowns.To some extent, you have to wonder if he's just trolling the libs, as they like to sort of “own the libs," and to some extent he seems to really be attracted to this idea of absolute power, which, as we know, was exactly what the American Revolution was fought to overturn.
Help me understand the legal resistance to something like USAID, to all of the things that are happening as they're taking these actions.… There's certainly dozens of lawsuits at this moment when we're talking about it.What's the lay of the land?How much of it is being, without Congress taking charge, how much of it is ending up in the courts?
… The courts are really, in many ways, the only part of the government that's really standing up to Trump at this point.And there are so many different cases working their way through the courts.So if you take a look at maybe one case of the gutting of USAID, where basically the whole agency has been taken apart by Trump, even though it's authorized by Congress.A judge in Rhode Island has said that it's illegal for Trump to be doing it that way and has tried to uphold a temporary restraining order stopping Trump from laying all these people off and gutting the whole agency, because Congress has authorized these funds.So the judge is saying it's not the role of a president to do this; it's the role of Congress.
We'll see how that goes.9So far, none of these cases have—the substance of these cases haven't really reached the Supreme Court.We've seen procedural matters reach the Supreme Court, but not really the substance of these cases. …
And by the time this airs, we don't know.But they're fighting this battle in the courts.And it's under this backdrop that he starts issuing executive orders about Perkins Coie.
Yeah. OK, shall we talk about that?
Yeah.Because it seems like these two things are related.
… So far, the courts have, in many cases, pushed back against Trump, and there are various cases that are moving through different phases.But the courts have, in many ways, ruled against him so far.And Trump has reacted in a kind of extraordinary way that we really haven't seen a president react in before.He has smeared the courts.He's gone after the judges personally.He's called for them to be removed from their posts or maybe impeached.And he's also gone after some of the lawyers personally.He's gone after law firms, big law firms in America that are litigating because they, too, are not buckling under to him or have not in the past.
And so he's basically trying to undercut the whole legal system, which usually has two sides.
Have you talked to anybody in that world, in corporate law or have a sense of the fear?
… There are there are three major firms that Trump has gone after so far, and all of them are really major businesses.I mean, these are powerful firms, and even so, they are terrified.They're terrified of being put out of business.Trump issued an executive order like nobody's ever seen before that basically said he was first taking away the security clearances for these lawyers, so that makes it very hard for them to represent clients on matters involving the government, particularly anything with national security, defense contractors, things like that.He also has forbidden several of the firms from being able to set foot on federal property.Well, the federal courts are federal property.He's basically saying these lawyers can't try cases in federal courts.That's their bread and butter.
It's just a retaliatory move against law firms and lawyers who have represented clients that were Democrats that were his opponents, that challenged him, and he's using the power of the government to basically try to wipe them out.
… It's hard to think of something like that that another president has done that is so personal and sends—he uses the power of the entire federal government—
No, no, no other president has ever done anything like this.The closest you might have gotten was, there were some very vindictive moves made by Richard Nixon, but we've never seen a president do anything like this with the powers of the government, just for such petty personal payback.
… So Perkins Coie fights it, but Paul Weiss settles.10What did you make of that?
10
The New York Times: How a Major Democratic Law Firm Ended Up Bowing to Trump
Well, we have someone reporting on it, so I don't know if we have the entire story yet, but basically you've got—the interesting thing is that when Trump issued an executive order going after Perkins Coie, Perkins Coie wanted to fight it, and so they tried to get a number of different law firms to defend them, and a number of law firms were afraid to.You're seeing these really powerful law firms say, “No thanks.Sorry, we can't help you.It might alienate the clients that we represent and hurt our business.”And so they're basically ducking.
But in the case of Perkins Coie, eventually they found a law firm, Williams & Connolly, which is a really also powerful firm known for its kind of brass-knuckles litigation, that went to court on behalf of Perkins Coie.11And the judge upheld the law firm so far, Perkins Coie, and said in fact that the executive order that Trump had issued put, she said, put a chill down her spine, it was so unlike what happens in a democratic country with the rule of law and a strong justice system.
But despite that, and I think that her point of view, and Judge Beryl Howell's point of view in that case, represented a point of view that pretty much the whole legal community has.I mean, this is extraordinary.It's intimidation like we've not seen before.But instead of standing up to it, we've seen that some firms have just decided to fold.
… And that was the case of Paul Weiss, a huge New York law firm, known also with a history of representing sort of Democratic causes to some extent.And rather than fighting Trump, they immediately flipped, decided to negotiate with him and cut a deal with him, in which case they agreed to do $40 million worth of pro bono work on causes that Trump wanted in exchange for him backing off.
And I guess the question is, why does it matter if, especially in the context we've been talking about, which is that Congress is not being super vigorous, that the courts are the one place—
People might ask, “What's it to me?Big law firms are buckling.”What does it mean?The thing is, in this country, going back to [Alexis] de Tocqueville, a strong civil sector is partly what defends our democracy, that we have a strong legal system also, and the law is supposed to rule here rather than, as Thomas Paine said, in this country, the law is king; in a dictatorship, the king is law.12
12
Online Library of Liberty: Presidents, Kings, Tyrants, & Despots
What you're seeing is a lot of concern that Trump wants to make the king the law.
Deportation of Venezuelan Migrants
The last area that he goes into, and we'll head towards what he's doing with the judiciary, and the way that that's come to a head recently has been in immigration and the powers that he's been claiming.It starts with grabbing green card holders and others in the academic world, and then it's going to become the case of the Venezuelans being sent to El Salvador.What is the administration doing in that realm?What sort of powers are they claiming, and how are they operating?
So what we've seen is that the Trump administration is invoking executive powers that really have almost never been used in the United States in the past to expel immigrants that they don't want in this country without any kind of due process.
And so most recently what we've seen is that they have invoked something called the Alien Enemies Act, which was from 1797 and has only been used three times in American history, to try to basically expel something like 261 immigrants from Venezuela.13The Trump administration claims that they're gang members, and for that reason they say that they fall under this act, which is a way of expelling people who are enemies during a time of war.And they're saying that these gangs are basically declaring war on the United States, and that they're working with Venezuela to wage war on the United States. …
13
It seems like they're doing that in order to avoid judicial review.They're trying to find a way out of due process.
So the closest thing we've really seen to it in some ways is what happened during the Bush years with something called extraordinary rendition, when terrorists who were connected to 9/11, to the bombings then, were just snatched off streets and put in gulags.Basically what they've done is snatched these alleged gang members, taken the suspects without any kind of judicial review, and flown them to another country—in this case, to El Salvador—to put them into the equivalent of a gulag, some kind of maximum security prison, without any process, any kind of legal process.
So, because this violates so many principles in the United States about due process, a judge tried to stop the Trump administration midflight taking these suspects out of the country, and it's turned into an extraordinary standoff.
We talked about USAID.As you said, it was something that people might not have polled that high.Are they picking a fight on this issue, which is about immigration, with alleged gang members?Do they believe this is a strong political stand for them to make?
Many people think that the Trump administration wants this fight.It's one where they're on probably pretty good—kind of a popular political spot.It's not as if anyone really wants murderous foreign gangs to be wandering through the United States and terrorizing people, so it's easy for them to make this argument. …
But really, that's not the issue, and that's what the U.S. courts are trying to say and what the judge who's been standing up to it is trying to say, is, sure, if these are gang members, and if we are at war with Venezuela, then you're on strong ground legally and you can deport these people.But first, let's find out, are they gang members?Let's give them some kind of judicial review.And then let's take a look at this law that you're invoking, the Alien Enemies Act of 1797.It requires the United States is at war with the country from which these immigrants have come.14Are we at war with Venezuela?It hasn't been declared by Congress.
14
So the judges are trying to make sure that the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed and that this is legal, and the Trump administration is basically saying, literally, in the case of Tom Homan, who is the immigration czar, he was saying, “I don't care what the judges say.I don't care.”
When Judge Boasberg issues that order, and I guess there's questions about whether they got the message or whether it was written or not, we don't need to go into the details of everything that happened, but it seems like the tension hasn't gone away.What is the tension between the White House and the judge, and why are so many people looking at that as a potential test case?
For quite some time, people who were watching the new Trump administration have had the fear that they would come to a moment where they're going to out and out just defy the courts, at which point we're going to be in a real constitutional crisis.So people are watching this particular fight having to do with the Venezuelan suspects as potentially that case, where this just comes to a head and is a constitutional crisis.
And the reason is that it appears that the Trump administration defied an order from the judge in the case—his name is James; he calls himself Jeb Boasberg—to turn the planes around that were carrying these immigrants, bring them back and give them some judicial review so that they could make sure that this policy is legal.
And there's a little murkiness, a little bit of game-playing about whether or not the Trump administration got the judge's order on paper in time to turn those planes around.So far, the Trump administration has refused to divulge the details in a way that would allow the judge to really understand whether the administration out and out defied his order.He's asked for the details.The administration hasn't really given them to him.It's an ongoing fight.15
But it's very close to just the kind of clash that everybody's fearing between the executive branch and the judicial branch, in which case it seems possible that for the first time in the United States history, a president might just say he's not going to listen to the courts.
It is amazing, too, that it's playing out in that way, but it's also playing out in public, as you said.Homan is saying that he doesn’t want the judges, and the president of El Salvador sends this sort of—
“Oopsie.”We should say that, so far, when Trump has been directly confronted by the press and asked is he going to defy the courts, he has said no.He said he's going to abide by the court.But the people who are working for him seem to be gaslighting the court.They're sort of saying, “We're not really disobeying you, but at the same time, we're not complying with you.We're not defying you, but we're not complying with you.”Jack Goldsmith, who's a Harvard Law professor, a very conservative Harvard Law professor, says that basically what Trump's doing is playing games with the court, and that's what we're watching right now.
It's not only that, because it's also the rhetoric about this particular judge.
OK, … so while this is happening inside the courthouse, this kind of teasing dance going on by the Trump administration, not really complying with the judge's order, kind of flouting it, at the same time, outside the courtroom, Trump is attacking the judge.He's saying he should be impeached.He's calling him a “radical left lunatic,” trying to undercut his authority.
Jeb Boasberg, the judge in this case, is someone who was appointed by George W. Bush to the bench, who's, as we know, a Republican president.16He was elevated by President Obama to the position he's in now.He's an incredibly respected judge.He is somebody who's from kind of the heart of the establishment in Washington.He went to a famous private school here, St. Albans.He went to Yale and Yale Law School, where he roomed with Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice, and they're very close.This is someone who has ruled in a bipartisan way and who has friendships across partisan divides.
I think in some ways, it seems to me, that Trump's picked the wrong judge to try to take down over this.But again, a little bit like the law firms, it seems that Trump doesn't care; he wants to make an example out of these people.
Trump and the Judges
It does seem like that.When he goes back to that DOJ speech, one of things he says there, he accuses the Democrats of doing with Judge Cannon, he's “playing the ref,” yelling at the ref, trying to influence him, writing negative articles about him, trying to scare him.
… Honestly, the truest things Trump ever says are the accusations he makes about the other side.It's usually exactly what he's planning to do himself.And here he's working the refs just the way that he said people—that the Democrats did against Judge Aileen Cannon.17
But it's worse than that, really.Honestly, it's one thing to criticize a judge, and there's really, in this, in our system, that's fine.You can say what you want.You can scream about judges; you can criticize them.We have free speech.You don't have to agree with their rulings on anything, or the Supreme Court's rulings on anything.But the thing that's different here is that the president was calling for this judge to be impeached, and not for anything other than the president not liking the decision that this judge is making.And that has not happened.And that is why Chief Justice John Roberts stepped into this and basically slapped back at President Trump and said that … for 200 years in this country, nobody has tried to impeach a judge on the basis of disliking their decision.18There have been judges impeached, but it's for immoral and gross misconduct, not for their decisions.We don't impeach judges because we don't like their decisions, but that's what President Trump is calling for against Judge Boasberg.
It would be hard to imagine that he could get him removed.So what is he doing with this rhetoric?
Partly what I think—and this is not the only attack by Trump and his followers on judges.There's so many attacks now online against the federal judiciary that you can't even keep track of them, and some of them are vicious. …It's creating an intimidating environment.It's certainly got to be scary for the judges.19Some of the things that are happening are really crossing lines.Two of these judges … have had their family members attacked online.Their daughters have been doxxed and exposed and misportrayed and smeared as political activists and opponents of Trump.
19
The New York Times: Judges Fear for Their Safety Amid a Wave of Threats
It's vicious what's going on.And it obviously raises the pressure on these judges terribly.It's frightening for anyone to go under these kinds of attacks.Just even physically, it's a scary place for anyone to be.
And I guess what a lot of Republicans will say, that threats have been certainly made very publicly against Republican judges.Is there something different about this?
We have seen in recent times that this is not just an issue of Democratic judges being attacked.We had, just after the Roe decision on abortion was overturned and we had the Dobbs decision in 2022, Justice Kavanaugh was really terrorized in his own home by a would-be assassin who had to be arrested outside of his house and had guns with him.So we have seen the torqueing up of violence against judges in this country in a way that certainly has not been true for many years.
But the difference here—what's the difference right now?We have a president who's egging it on.
I think about that, too, going back to that Justice Department speech where he's talking about a particular lawyer, Norm Eisen.He says he's “scum”; he says he's “vicious”; he says he's “violent.”Those are pretty strong words in the context of what we're talking about.
Terrible. Yeah, no, you have to think that it's a knowing effort on the part of Trump to delegitimize the power of the judiciary.What he's basically also saying is that there is no such thing as neutral law or principled law.It's all just politics.And that's basically Trump's view of judges.And he gets it.He's had it for years.I mean, his mentor was Roy Cohn, who said to him early on, you know, “Don't tell me the case; tell me the judge.”Now, what was he saying with that?He's saying judges, it's all about the personality and the politics of the judges; there is no such thing as principle.And that seems very much to reflect Trump's point of view about judges.
What's the position now of Roberts in particular as these things are starting to come up to the Supreme Court?And how massive a challenge or dilemma does he face?
The thing is, all of these cases, all the big cases are going to end up in front of the Supreme Court eventually, and so Chief Justice Roberts is on the hot seat, and so are the other justices who Trump appointed, because Trump is going to want them to rule his way.That's why he calls them "my judges," and he expects them to do him the favor, return the favor that he gave them by putting them on the bench, and so they're going to need to try to tread a careful line up there.
The other thing is that—the thing about the courts is that, to keep in mind historically, is, as Alexander Hamilton said about the courts, they're the least dangerous branch, he said, Hamilton said.And why did he say that?Because the judiciary doesn't have the powers of the purse, and it doesn't have an army.So the only thing it has is its own legitimacy and the willingness of the public to follow its decisions.
And so what Chief Justice Roberts and the other justices need to worry about is having their legitimacy undercut by a popular president who's attacking them.They don't want to be in a position where they make a decision and he defies it, because then it makes them look like a paper tiger.So it's a tight spot, and we should all hope they do the right thing.
Can we as Americans rely on the courts to contain this situation, to handle it?Is it built for this?
… I'm not a lawyer, so there's debate within the legal and the political community about whether the courts can really stand up to this and whether they can defend democracy.Most of the commentators seem to think that, on their own, it's hard for the courts to do this on their own.It really takes the public speaking out and making a lot of noise and standing up also for the rule of law.
I guess we were only just—we're only, whatever it is—
Nine weeks in or whatever.
Weeks in—How many more tests, how much pressure is going to be put on this system—
Ugh, so much.
—if there's already over 100 lawsuits, and there's—
The thing is, when you look at—looking back, if you look back at Trump's first term, when he tried to overturn the election after 2020, the courts did hold up to Trump.They basically ruled against him almost unanimously, dozens and dozens and dozens of them.So he has had the book thrown at him before, but it did not stop him from running for reelection or from winning.So it's a kind of a mixed picture if you look at the past.
And it didn't stop him from talking to the crowd on Jan. 6 in that context.
No. I don't think he cares.But I thought the public would care.But that's the thing that's been, I think, most shocking to people.You knew what he would do, but did you think that voters would mind? I did.
All of these things put together that we've been talking about since the beginning, just in a historical perspective, are people afraid of a constitutional crisis?You don't have to use that phrase, but where are we in the history of America?How unusual a moment is this?
… If you talk to people who are really experts on how democracies die, they are very alarmed, really alarmed right now.They've seen this happen in other countries, and they are warning us that we need to take it really seriously.If you talk to somebody like Larry Diamond, who is a professor at Stanford at the Hoover Center, he'll say people need to react and push back fast because we're moving towards an autocracy.20… These are very bad warning signs.
One thing I missed, which was their perspective, which is the perspective of the administration, who says, when they go to do something like USAID, Congress doesn't work, our government hasn't worked, the administrative state has taken things over, the American people want action, they want things to happen, and we're sort of clearing out a broken system.Can you help me understand what their perspective is on what they're doing or what they would say?
Basically, Trump's justifying this with a theory that has been growing on the far right for years, which is the idea that America is being strangled by an administrative state and that bureaucracies have grown too big, too expensive; there are too many regulations.That's why you see Elon Musk out there with his chainsaw, pretending to cut right through it.That's been their view.
… And what does that signal, really?Basically what they're trying to do is turn back the clock to a much earlier era in America, before the New Deal, before the progressive era, really, from before the federal government really was a power that tried to provide services to people who need them in this country.They seem to be wanting to basically do what Grover Norquist, a sort of a Republican activist, said a number of years ago: He wanted to shrink the United States government down to the size where it could be drowned in the bathtub.21
21
The Conversation: The shutdown: Drowning government in the bathtub
So this has got a history.They're acting on it now and running as far with it as they possibly can.
I guess that's part of it, right.Like Grover Norquist didn't succeed in those efforts, going through Congress, cutting budgets.There's all of those political constituencies.
But of course, the reason the far right hasn't succeeded in doing this in the past is, when it really comes down to making these cuts, most of these programs are really popular with people.People actually want health care.They want Social Security to work.They want clean air.They want clean water.They want to do something about climate change.They want sensible controls on guns.All of these things are obvious if you take a look at public opinion polls.
And so this agenda of Project 2025 could never be enacted piece by piece if Congress tried to put it up for a vote, so they're trying to do an end run.
… You said that this is how democracies die, but isn't this democracy in action?They all heard Donald Trump promise for four years what he was going to do.People knew who they were electing, and they knew, didn’t they, what they were going to get?
The thing is…the radicalism of Trump's actions have surprised even some of his own supporters.They may be delighted, but he didn't really run on all of these issues.There was no talk during—he talked about vengeance, maybe; he said, “I will be your vengeance,” in the campaign, but he didn't say that he was going to strip law firms of their ability to fight in federal court.He didn't say that he was going to starve babies in Africa by completely gutting USAID.The dirty details were not available to people in the campaign.
… How close are we to the abyss?
How close are we to the abyss?I guess, I think what everybody's trying to figure out is like, where is the redline that, when we cross it, we'll know we're really—what's the third rail here?I think everyone's trying to figure out what's the third rail here.I think the third rail is likely if the Supreme Court issues an opinion and the Trump administration defies it, we're no longer in America as we knew it.
… As a reporter, trying to get people to talk to you—lawyers, whoever—is there more fear now?
There's kind of shock and fear.But the thing that's—the thing that is, I think, really—one of the things that's really shaking people up, they may not be surprised at what Trump is doing because we had Trump in the first term, so we saw Trump.But I think what's surprising is how fast all of the guardrails and people you expected to push back are folding.So whether it's the big media companies, huge New York law firm, the quiet from former outspoken Democrats, that's what's freaking people out.
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