The FRONTLINE Interviews
Peter Baker
The New York Times
Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times. He previously spent 20 years reporting for The Washington Post. Baker is the co-author, with Susan Glasser, of The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group's Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on March 26, 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
So one place we’re thinking of starting is when the president of the United States goes to the Justice Department to give a speech in the Great Hall.What do you see when you see that moment?How significant is that for understanding what’s going on, what had been going on and what will be going on?
Right, yeah.The president going to give a speech in the hall of the Justice Department is important on two levels:
One, of course, is just the fact of it, because we don’t normally see a president go to the Justice Department and talk there about the issues of prosecution and so forth.It’s seen as breaking down the wall between the political leadership of the country and the law enforcement leader of the country.So the very symbol of that move, the very act of going there, was sending a really extraordinary message that most presidents wouldn’t do.
The second thing, of course, is the content of the speech, where he’s railing about judges and prosecutors and lawyers.He’s railing about the justice system that he has said was weaponized against him, and his vow there in the halls of the Justice Department is to basically turn the Justice Department into a tool for himself to get revenge on those he believes wronged him, to use it as an instrument of vindication and, what he says, of course, is retribution.
And you have very rarely heard a president give a speech like that and particularly in that kind of setting.He even talked about the media there.I think this gets overlooked.He specifically says that what the media does is biased against him; “They’re working with my opponents, and that is illegal.” That should be, he says, illegal.In other words, an independent free press, in his mind, should be outlawed, and that just passes without even that much notice because he says and does so many things these days that attract attention, that seem out of the norm—radical even—that it didn’t even seem to strike much of a note.But that statement alone is anathema to what an independent free press is all about.
And I guess that he says it with the attorney general and with the head of the FBI there.What’s the implication of saying things like that with them there?
He is flanked by his handpicked attorney general and his handpicked FBI director, both of whom are known as partisan warriors, not as disinterested law enforcement veterans, and the message is clear: that they are going to do his bidding.He doesn’t even have to say to them directly, “Prosecute this person; don’t prosecute that person,” because they already know from all the things he says publicly what his vantage point is, what his viewpoint is.And they’ve made clear in their early days in office that they are part of the team, that they are part of a political team in the conduct of this campaign of retribution.
He talks about lawfare.He talks about the weaponization of the Justice Department against him.Is it that simple that that’s what it is?That was the department that tried to put him in jail.
… It was the department that tried to put him in jail, but of course what he’s trying to do is turn the narrative around.Instead of it being about the things that he did, instead of it being whether he committed crimes, instead of it being a question of accountability for his actions, he’s trying to turn around and say, “It’s their fault for coming after me.It’s not my fault for taking classified documents that I wasn’t entitled to take.It’s not my fault for defying a subpoena to retrieve those documents.It’s not my fault trying to overturn an election that I lost based on lies that I know are lies in order to hold on to power.No, the real crime is trying to come after me for that.”
And that’s—I suppose every criminal defendant would say that the system is biased against them.But with Trump, it’s often a matter of projection.He spent his first four years in office trying again and again to use the Justice Department to go after his opponents.So then, of course, when he’s out of office, that’s what he assumes his opponents are doing to him, or at least that’s what he accuses them of doing.
Now, there’s no evidence of that, by the way, just to be clear.It is true the attorney general of the United States was appointed by President Biden, but there’s no evidence at all that Biden or his staff had anything to do with Attorney General Garland’s decisions or lack of decisions, much less those of Jack Smith, who was appointed as a special counsel in order to try to ensure some political distance between the decisions made on prosecutions and the former president’s political adversaries.
But the fact that they crossed all the t’s and dotted all the i’s and followed the processes that they were supposed to follow, that they went to grand juries and judges, and they got permission for the indictments that they came up with, all of which were found to be worth the system considering them, the fact that they did all these things, that they did go through the process doesn’t stop Trump, of course, from painting it all as a political witch hunt.
You mentioned he talks about the press and says that … it was illegal what they were doing, or should be illegal, but he also mentions individual people, individual lawyers.1We talked to Norm Eisen, [whom Trump] referred to as “scum” said he was “vicious,” “violent.” Help me understand a moment like that, for a president to call out somebody like Norm Eisen.2
Right.To see a president call out people he considers to be adversaries by name in the Justice Department, flanked by the FBI director and the attorney general, is his way of saying, “I’m going to use the power of government.I’m going to use the power of prosecution to go after my enemies.” That’s certainly the implicit message, and it sends a chill, of course, to anybody out there who might oppose this president.The message is clear: Don’t stand against him, or else you risk criminal liability potentially.
Now, we have a system of laws that says that you can’t simply prosecute somebody because you don’t like them.It’s very likely that if they have no evidence, they’re not going to get charges filed, or if they do, a jury wouldn’t necessarily find them meritorious.But you don’t have to actually convict somebody to use the justice system to make their lives miserable, right?If you simply investigate somebody, even if you find nothing, that could be years of a person’s life, not to mention hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of legal bills, and the reputational cost and the career opportunities that are lost and so on and so forth.
And Trump’s adversaries know that.And they’re watching, and they are scared.I’ve never seen people in Washington scared the way they are now.I’ve never seen people in Washington as scared as they are now.They are scared to talk.They are scared to pop their head up.They are scared to be noticed.They don’t want to be on his radar screen because they fear that he will use his power against them.
I’ve covered five presidents; I’ve lived in Washington my whole life.I’ve never seen that before in Washington.It’s never been a situation where adversaries of the president, Democrat or Republican, felt afraid in the same way we’re seeing now across the board to speak their mind.
And they’re afraid of what?
They’re afraid of being prosecuted.They’re afraid of being targeted.They’re afraid of having their lives ruined.They’re afraid of their kids being targeted.They’re afraid of violence on the part of people who support the president, even if the president wouldn’t have anything to do with that himself.They are—when I call people to talk to them and quote them in a story, they say, “Hey, I can’t be on the record.I have a kid who works in the government.I have a brother who has a federal grant.My law firm doesn’t want me to talk.My employer is scared that if I do, I’ll bring down retribution on them.” “I’m scared,” they say.“I don’t want to be prosecuted.”
And these are people who did speak out in the past, people who prolifically and vocally opposed the president, this current president, and spoke their mind and gave their opinions, whether we agreed with them or not, and now won’t do it.
That’s chilling that that’s the moment that we’re in.
That’s the moment we’re in.And it reminds me—you’ve probably said this with Susan [Glasser]—but what it reminds me most is of our time when we were in Moscow during Putin’s early years, and Putin came into power in 2000, at the end of a rollicking ‘90s that was not a pure democracy by any stretch, but that was a pretty open moment in Russian history, where people were speaking their minds and very willing to express opinions.And we got there, and we found that to be the case.
By the time we left four years later, it had completely shut down.People who had talked to us in the beginning wouldn’t talk to us anymore.They were afraid.Putin’s Kremlin, in just a very short amount of time, had managed to consolidate power by neutralizing any competing centers of gravity in the political system, by taking over independent media, by taming the rich oligarchs of the system, by making Parliament basically a rubber stamp, by getting rid of the elections of governors and so on.
And there was a fear in the air when we left Moscow in those early days that now resembles, to me, what it feels like in Washington.That doesn’t mean we’re like Russia.America and Russia are very different places, and we are nowhere near what Russia is like today, 25 years after Putin took power.But in those early days, when Putin was still clamping down, a lot of things we see now in Washington were the things we saw in Moscow at that time.
Trump’s Executive Orders
Thank you.So let’s break down some of the things that happen, because it starts at the very beginning, the very first day, signing executive orders starting in an arena and going on to the White House.And lots of presidents start with signing executive orders for campaign promises.Tell me about his first day and executive action and whether it was different than what you’d seen in the past.
Yeah, we’ve never seen an Inauguration Day like we saw with Trump in January of 2025.We saw a president using his power from the very first moment in very expansive ways to put his fingerprints on all sorts of areas of the government and society.He signed more executive orders on day one than any of his predecessors ever did in their early days, and they stretched the power and the authority of the presidency beyond what any previous president had done.
And what he was saying on that day is, “I’m going to be a man of action”—that’s a phrase he likes, “a man of action”—“and we are going to, in fact, push forward our policies without waiting for Congress, without going through the messy legislative process and trying to win support and convince allies to go along.” He’s going to do it with the stroke of a pen.
Now, some of these things were almost inevitably going to be taken to court.Inevitably he knew a lot of these things he wouldn’t be able to even do because the courts would strike him down.But the theory of the case is, you throw out so many things against the wall, something’s going to stick, and they threw everything they had at the wall on day one.
The phrase that I hear sometimes is “flood the zone”.
“Flood the zone.” “Shock and awe.”
Sometimes it’s associated with Stephen Miller.Was he an architect of that idea?And what is the point of “flood the zone”?
Yeah, absolutely.Stephen Miller is one of the architects of this strategy, this “flood the zone” strategy.You just hit on all different fronts at the same time.Remember, the first time when Trump came into office in 2017, he’d never been in public office before.He was the only president in our history who hadn’t spent a day in either public office or the military, so he didn’t really understand how it worked, and he was trying to figure it out.Remember the first order, one of the first orders he signed was that travel ban, and it was so haphazard, so sloppy, that they were literally scribbling in changes to the order by pen minutes before he actually signed the document because they were still pulling it together.
This time around, he’s had four years in office and four years out of office to make plans, and people like Stephen Miller and [Director of the Office of Management and Budget] Russ Vought and others, who have been his sort of ideologists in a way, spent that time thinking through what was the way to use the power of the presidency to achieve their goals without the obstacles that stopped them the first time around.
And they learn.They learn from what happened in those first four years.They learn how the bureaucracy—the deep state, as they like to call it—would thwart him.They learn how appointees who didn’t necessarily share his points of view would throw sand in the works.That’s what a former aide to Trump told me.He thought his job was, in the first term, was to throw sand in the works, because he thought it was his job to slow things down, to keep the president from doing things that he thought at least were unwise, maybe illegal, sometimes unconstitutional.Well, they weren’t going to have that this time around.
If Donald Trump learned one lesson from his first term, it was that personnel really matters, and this time around he wasn’t going to put people around him who were establishment people, establishment Republicans or four-star generals or people who had long experience in service, who took seriously some of the traditions and the rules and the guidelines and the thinking that have governed Washington for so long.No, he was going to be surrounded by people who agreed with him.Not only agree with him but encourage him to take the most radical, the most far-reaching steps that he could possibly take to reach his goals.
It’s unprecedented.What’s the political context of it?Because it seems like a lot of Americans were frustrated, had been building frustration about the inability of government to get things done and politicians who promise things and don’t deliver.I imagine, from what I’ve seen, that the administration says, “We have a mandate, and we’re delivering for the American people what they voted for.”
Look, it’s easy to deliver things if you believe everything gets done with the stroke of a pen, right?If you don’t believe that you have to ask Congress for permission, if you don’t believe you have to involve independent agencies or follow rules that have been traditional for years, it’s a lot easier to get stuff done.Just ignore the rules, right?
But the courts have said now, dozens of times, that you can’t simply ignore the rules, that just because you put a pen to paper as a president doesn’t necessarily mean that you have the power to do it.
We have a system of separation of powers, and not all power resides in the executive.But Donald Trump is acting as if it does.He said that in his first term, “Article 2 gives me the power to do what I want,” he said at one point.3Well, it gives him a lot of power, absolutely, and we’ve seen that.And he’s shown that if you press the interpretations, you can press power even legitimately beyond what previous presidents had done, but you can also go across that line, and a number of judges so far have said that he did.
3
But you’re right.That is part of the appeal to his supporters.Action, results, right?“Promises made, promises kept” is a phrase he likes to use.It doesn’t matter if it necessarily works out in the end.He is demonstrating action, and I think that that’s invigorating to people who support him, who think that government has been an obstacle, not a facilitator of progress in the country.
One of the promises he made was that he was going to pardon people involved in Jan.6, but I think the way that he did it seems to have surprised even some of his closest advisers.What was the message that was sent?And where were you when that news came down that it was going to be everybody?
It was going to be everybody.Even his own people said, “Oh, well, he’ll never pardon everybody.” His own vice president, JD Vance, in the days leading up to the inauguration, was on TV saying, “Well, of course he won’t pardon the most violent ones.” Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House, his ally, said, “Of course he won’t pardon the most violent ones.” And he did.4
He pardoned everybody with exception to about a dozen people who got commuted instead of pardoned.Fine, they still got out of prison.That includes people who were convicted of seditious conspiracy, people who would just be spending decades in prison, people who beat and clubbed police officers.He didn’t make a distinction between those who went in there peacefully and those who went in there violently.He simply said, “They were all unfairly prosecuted.They’re all hostages, not perpetrators.” Instead of being villains, they’re victims.
And I think he shocked even people around him by being so indiscriminate about it, but he decided that for whatever reason, he wasn’t going to do that.He wasn’t going to take the time to go through the cases individually.He wasn’t going to try to make distinctions between this kind of rioter and that kind of rioter.He decided it was just simple enough to extend clemency to everybody.
And that’s not popular with the American people.Even his own base doesn’t think that’s necessarily the best idea, if you look at polls, but he did say he would extend clemency to people from Jan.6, and so in that sense, it shouldn’t surprise us.What surprised us, I think, was just how far he went.
Did it send a message about the administration that was going to come or to his supporters or people who weren’t his supporters?
It sent a message that he wasn’t going to be bound by the forces that would have normally inhibited a president from doing something like that, that if even though the people might find that outrageous, even if they find it controversial or objectionable, he’s going to plow on forward.And why not?He doesn’t face voters again.He doesn’t have another election coming up.He decided this time he’s going to err on the side of going too far rather than not far enough and that he didn’t get enough done in his first term, as he saw it, because he was too willing to defer to those who said, “Well, you can’t go that far.” And this time, he’s going to go as far as he wants to go and not going to let anybody talk him out of it.
The Unitary Executive Theory
You said that he has this theory of executive power, that “I have Article 2, and I can do what I want.” But there’s a theory of the unitary executive and of executive power that seems to go back before he had ever even [run] for president.How important is that, the legal theories that had been building over decades that he’s tapped in to?
… Trump probably doesn’t know the ins and outs of the legal history of the debate over the unitary theory of executive power, but it is true that you go back years and decades in which people have argued about how far an executive’s power really goes and how far can Congress go to put constraints on it.
And so, putting aside whether it’s Trump or somebody else, there a lot of people out there who say, “Yeah, the president actually should have control over the executive branch beyond what he has traditionally had,” that it doesn’t make any sense for there to be executive agencies that don’t actually answer to the president, that are too independent of the president.That’s the way Congress has set it up.Congress wanted to set up some agencies with a little bit of distance from the president because they didn’t want the president to have too much power.And the advocates of the theory of unitary executive power are like, “No, that’s gone too far.You’re taking away power that does rightfully belong in the executive.”
So Trump doesn’t know much about this in the legal sense, but he’s told by people around him, “Hey, you have more power than you think you do.You have more power than they tell you you do.Let’s use it.” He likes that.That appeals to his sense of action and dominance.
Remember, it’s important to remember that Donald Trump doesn’t believe in separation of powers.That doesn’t match anything he ever experienced in private life as a developer and a real estate tycoon and as a—even a reality television star.He ran the show, right?His business has no board of directors that he has to answer to.It has no shareholders he has to answer to.It’s a family-owned business.If he says it happens, it happens.
That’s the way he thinks government should be as well.If he says it happens, it should happen.Government, of course, isn’t like a family-owned business.We do have three branches of government, but he has demonstrated that he is trying to bring the sensibility that he had as a real estate tycoon from New York to the Oval Office.
There was also the Supreme Court case from the summer, Trump v.United States, where he was at least granted some immunity, and specifically with the Justice Department.5How important do you think that was for the incoming administration’s willingness to exercise this kind of executive power?
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Oyez: Trump v. United States
Yeah, Trump comes into the presidency a second time around with a real boost of momentum from the Supreme Court.Giving him immunity from criminal prosecution for the vast majority of the things he probably wants to do means that he doesn’t feel constrained.He doesn’t feel afraid.He doesn’t feel inhibited in any way.He knows that Congress isn’t going to impeach him again, certainly not going to convict him anyway, even if they were to impeach again in the House.He survived it twice, so that’s not much of a deterrent for him.
And now, what the court said to him, in effect, is that you are immune from criminal liability for anything you can call an official action, in effect.Now, most presidents aren’t worried that their official acts are going to be seen as criminal, but for Trump, I think in the mentality of how he sees things, it was like a permission slip.It was like a permission slip from the Supreme Court: “Go forth and use your power.And don’t worry.You won’t get in trouble for it.”
And he’s not necessarily wrong to assume that, because where are the levers of accountability in Washington today?It’s not the Congress, which his party controls and has made clear it’s going to defer to him.It’s not the agencies, which he is systematically taking over and forcing to answer to him.It’s not even some corners of the media, which have indicated that they are willing to play differently, at least the big media barons, than they did before.And of course the tech billionaires have come in and kissed the ring.
… On top of that, from the minute he came into office, he began methodically eliminating potential places that would hold him accountable.He got rid of the inspectors general at the various agencies that look for illegality and waste and fraud and abuse because they didn’t answer to him.He got rid of a lot of prosecutors and FBI agents who participated in trying to hold him accountable in the past.He installed as the head of the FBI and the head of the Justice Department people who were not going to see themselves as independent actors but would see themselves as political lieutenants to him.
And so, from his point of view, where is there going to be a check on his power?The courts are the only ones right now that are, and when they dared to do that, he began threatening to impeach them.
You talk about, he put loyalists at the Justice Department, and it seems like, in a way, that the Justice Department in his first term was a check—when [former U.S. Attorney General] Jeff Sessions recuses himself, and a special counsel gets appointed; when [former U.S. Attorney General] Bill Barr doesn’t want to go along with him after the election.Did he learn from his first term?
Absolutely.He learned from his first term it’s not enough to put a conservative in as attorney general.It’s not enough to put in a respected Republican as attorney general.You have to put somebody in who is personally loyal to you, and that that’s the first priority, and that’s what he aimed to do, because you did see a special counsel appointed by his Justice Department in the first term.You did see an attorney general say no to him on his effort to overturn the election.That’s not something he wants to have happen again.
From his point of view, the attorney general should be an arm of his presidency and should do what he wants him to do, so the chances that there’s going to be a special counsel appointed by this Justice Department, if anything ever gets raised as an allegation that needs to be looked at, the chances of that happening are exactly zero.He’s not going to allow there to be another Robert Mueller.He is not going to allow there to be another prosecution of people around him.That just will not happen in his second term.
The Eric Adams Case
The case that we’re focusing on because it happened early, and it seems to be symbolic, is the [New York City Mayor] Eric Adams case and the conflict with the Southern District.Tell me about that and why that case matters
The Eric Adams case is a classic.It is the use of prosecution power for political aims, and they say it out loud.They don’t even pretend that it’s otherwise.When Trump’s Justice Department decided to drop the case against Eric Adams, the mayor of New York, for corruption, they didn’t say it’s because there’s no case here; they didn’t say it was because he was wrongly accused; they didn’t say it was because he’s not corrupt.They said it was because they wanted him to cooperate with the president on immigration policy.
Think about the import of that.… “We will drop a criminal case against you if you cooperate with us on policy.” That’s something different than we’ve seen before.That’s not about the independent execution of justice.That’s not about a dispassionate search for the truth and accountability.That’s using the power of prosecution as a political tool, as a chip to trade in this case, and Eric Adams was more than happy to go along with it.
It was, from the very start, a very overt signal about exactly how justice would be applied in this second term.
It also seems like a signal to people who work at the Justice Department, because the acting U.S.attorney, Danielle Sassoon, says, “I don’t think I can legally do this.” And she’s not the only one who’s going to walk out the doors.
Time and time again—this case is a perfect example of it—time and time again, any career official who says, “Wait a second,” any career official who says, “This is not legal; this is not right; this is not proper; this is not appropriate,” either has to quit because they’re not allowed to exercise that judgment, or they’re fired.And the lesson to everybody who remains is very clear: If you step out, if you stand up, if you say something we don’t like, if you oppose our point of view on it, even out of good faith, you’re out.
Again, I’ve covered Washington a long time.Never seen anything like that, never seen it like that.Career prosecutors have always taken their jobs very seriously and taken their independence, the notion that they’re not supposed to be political or partisan when they pursue criminal cases, they’ve always taken that very seriously, at least the vast majority of them that I’ve known.And now the message from above them is, “No, actually, you answer to us.You follow what we want to do, no matter how political you may think it is, no matter how partisan you make think it is, no matter how inappropriate you may think it is.”
… You’ve studied history and know it better than anyone—the Saturday Night Massacre, the [George W.] Bush administration threats to resign, Trump’s administration threats to resign.How different does this—because it seems so dramatic at the moment.How different is this as it plays out, and what does that tell us?
Well, this makes the Saturday Night Massacre during Watergate look like chump change.In that case, you had a couple of officials—the attorney general, deputy attorney general—quit rather than follow what they considered to be an inappropriate, maybe illegal order.Here you have one after the other after the other after another.We’ve had multiple, probably if you add it all up in all the different offices, dozens of people fired or quit rather than pursue or follow policies or orders that they consider to be wrong.
The purge of career people is something that Trump promised, but it’s unparalleled, at least in modern times.Even [former President Richard] Nixon, I think, was afraid of that kind of an uprising because he thought it would look like he was abusing his power, and in fact, that’s the way it was interpreted.
And at the end, is Trump less powerful or more powerful?I guess in the Nixon case and in others, there was a fear of Congress.Where is he in terms of power at the end of the fallout of this?
Clearly, as we see it now in these early days, Trump is the most powerful president of our lifetime.It’s hard to think that there’s anybody close, because he’s willing to use the power that he may already have, and he’s willing to interpret the limits of his power so much further beyond what his predecessors did.
A lot of times, his predecessors might have had the power to do something, but didn’t do it anyway because they thought it would backlash on them.They were afraid of what would happen.They didn’t want there to be hearings on the Hill.They didn’t want there to be lawsuits.They didn’t want to challenge the system or have a big public to-do in the papers.Trump isn’t afraid of any of that.In fact, he likes it; he craves it; he covets it.He covets the controversy.It’s okay to have a backlash because he kind of relishes the fight, and he knows that he has the power and the tools to win most of those fights.And if he doesn’t win them, it’s fine.He’ll go onto the next one.
So it is his willingness to use the power.That itself is a power, right?Think about that.Other presidents might have had the power to do some of these things.They never would have thought to do it, would never have thought to do it because they just wouldn’t want to take the risk.They wouldn’t want the backlash; they wouldn’t want the shame; they wouldn’t want the criticism.None of that scares Trump.None of that deters him.
Elon Musk and DOGE
How unusual a figure is Elon Musk and DOGE [Department of Government Efficiency] in our American constitutional democracy, in the history of the country, somebody who’s empowered to do what he’s been able to do?
Look, plenty of presidents have people outside of government who advise them and really have a great deal of power in a lot of the ways, but we’ve never seen one given an out-front, overt license to make his way through the federal government and have at it as he sees fit.That’s just never happened.
The [FDR confidant and adviser-turned-Department of Commerce secretary] Harry Hopkinses of the world, the kitchen cabinets of past presidents would never have taken that upon themselves.No president would have allowed them to do that.Here you have a president who has been willing to empower an outsider, somebody who was never elected, not even a government employee, not a full-fledged government employee, to literally take his chainsaw, as he showed us at that Conservative Political Action Conference, and whack his way through the federal government without deferring to Cabinet secretaries, agency directors, even Congress which created some of these agencies and departments that he’s busy whacking away.6
The fact that Congress passed laws saying, “This agency or this department shall execute this duty, shall spend this money”—completely ignored.We keep using the word “unprecedented” because we can’t think of a better word, but the truth is, this is unprecedented.
So we’ll do another film someday about Elon Musk and where he fits and how he does with Donald Trump.But for now, it’s enough to understand that he’s a business guy who wants to sort of apply what he can do as a CEO to government.
Well, he’s not just a business guy who wants to apply his tactics to government, which may or may not actually be appropriate or a fit.He’s also a federal contractor who makes billions of dollars off the government, now suddenly making decisions for the government that he is in fact profiting from.That’s also something we’ve never seen before.
… Behind the scenes, Russ Vought, who you mentioned, and this idea of impoundment and these sort of legal theories that go away back before Musk, how important are they?How important is Vought?
Yeah.No, hugely important.The issue of the Impoundment [Control] Act may sound geeky or boring, but the truth is, it is absolutely essential to our division of labor, division of power in government.7The Impoundment Act, the whole point of this is that if Congress, which has the power of the purse under the Constitution, passes spending bills that it’s up to the president, not to decide whether they’re right or wrong once they’ve been signed into law but to execute the decisions of the Congress, to follow the law, to take care that the law is followed.
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U.S. Government Accountability Office: What is the Impoundment Control Act and What is GAO’s Role?
But multiple presidents have wanted to say, “Wait a second.I don’t really want to spend this particular amount of money on this particular thing.I’d like to hold off on that.” And this came to a head during Nixon, when he was trying to hold back on certain spending things, and he got slapped down by the courts, and Congress passed a new law saying, “Wait a second.Just to be clear, just so nobody’s uncertain about this, a president cannot do that.If a president wants to not spend money he thinks shouldn’t be spent, he can come back to us, and we’ll decide whether that’s right or wrong.”
Other presidents wanted to challenge this.Other presidents tried to get around this.Bill Clinton signed into law a line-item veto so he could take out items of a budget bill he thought were unnecessary, and that got overturned by the courts as well, because traditionally, the power of the purse is within the Congress.
But there is a school of thought, led by Russ Vought and others, that the president of the United States should have the power to disregard those spending decisions by the Congress and to decide for himself, “I’m not going to spend this because I don’t think it’s the right thing to do for the government.” That’s going to be tested.That’s going to go to the Supreme Court, and they may sympathize with him on that, because that’s an issue that goes beyond Trump specifically to the conception of how we divide up the powers of government.So it wouldn’t surprise me if he gets upheld on some of this stuff.
But it has a big impact because it’s not just—in the past, it was a president saying, “I don’t like this particular item, a few million dollars here, maybe a billion or two there.” They’re talking here about whole departments and agencies, closing down the entire foreign aid department of the government, the USAID [United States Agency for International Development], closing down the entire Education Department to the extent that they can under law.These are big decisions and the kind that previous presidents worked with the Congress to make, rather than to presume to make by themselves.
Was USAID a test case?
USAID was absolutely a test case because it was a perfect political target from their point of view.Most Americans don’t like the idea of foreign aid.Most Americans think we spend way too much on foreign aid.Why are we spending money on people in Latin America or Africa or Asia when we should be spending it on people here at home?Now, there’s a big misconception.If you ask Americans in polls how much we spend on foreign aid, they may say something like 20, 25% of our budget.It’s less than 1%, a tiny fraction.8
8
The Brookings Institution: What every American should know about US foreign aid
And advocates of foreign aid would say, “Look, we get a whole lot more out of this tiny amount of money that we spend than the cost for us.” We buy goodwill around the world.These countries become our friends.They help us with things that are priorities for us, and we keep them in our orbit, not in China’s orbit, let’s say.And not to mention the fact that millions of people have benefited around the world because they didn’t die from disease, they didn’t die from hunger or what have you, because America was a generous country.
But Trump knew that if he went after that first, there probably wouldn’t be much of a hue and cry among, at least among his supporters, and among a lot of Americans who think we spend too much overseas.And so, while his adversaries cry and scream about abuse of power, a lot of Americans don’t feel all that aggrieved by that.
And so yeah, it was a test case.He wanted to see how far he could go.We’re still not sure.The courts haven’t said he can do what he has done.9In fact, the opposite.But we haven’t gotten a final verdict yet from the Supreme Court.
… What was it like here, the feeling in Washington among people who work in government, to see something like that happen and the letters come off of the building?
… It’s hard to describe.It really had a huge impact in Washington, where, of course, much of the population works for the government or is married to somebody or kids of somebody who does.The government is big here, and to suddenly have somebody come along and say, “You’re out of a job, and not only are you out of a job, you have 15 minutes to get out of the building, after working, let’s say, 20, 30, 40 years.Your building is closed.We’re taking the letters off of it, from your agency.We’re destroying and demolishing everything that you’ve worked for without any kind of debate, without any kind of conversation about what makes sense or didn’t make sense, without any kind of thoughtful, rational plan.” Just a guy shows up at your door one day, maybe a 20-something-year-old guy who has no experience in government and says, “That’s it.You’re done.Tomorrow, you’re closed.”
The city was just upended.People’s lives were actually transformed overnight.Thousands and thousands of people, even those who didn’t get fired, suddenly found themselves on leave.Maybe they were assigned to work in a DEI office, and therefore they were then told, “You’re out of work.” It may not have been their choice to work in a DEI office.All they were doing was the job they were told to do, and suddenly they’re cast off as if they were somehow evil for doing this job.
So in Washington, a company town, it was as if you were in a Midwest town, and all the car factories closed on the same day.
It’s another example of fear.
It’s about fear.It’s about intimidation.It’s about panic.People didn’t know if they were going to have a job the next day.They didn’t know if they would have a pension.You may decide that maybe the government shouldn’t have this agency or that agency, but the people who worked there didn’t do anything wrong other than show up for their jobs, and they were not being targeted because they didn’t do their jobs.Nobody spent nearly enough time to decide who was actually a good worker versus a bad worker.It was simply the chainsaw approach.That’s what Elon Musk wanted people to realize.That’s why he shows up at the conservative conference with a chainsaw.
The point is, it’s not a scalpel.It’s not being done thoughtfully.It’s not being done according to a strategic plan.It’s being done with a chainsaw—boom!Very appealing to many Americans who say, “Hey, government ought to have a chainsaw taken to it.It’s gotten out of control.It’s inefficient.It’s too big.It’s taking too much of my tax money.” So they are excited about the idea of somebody taking a chainsaw to it.
But for the people who work in Washington, of course, it’s not esoteric; it’s not abstract.It’s their lives, and suddenly people were showing up at dinner and telling their kids, “I’m out of work.”
DOGE is saying that they’re cutting waste, fraud and abuse, but when we talk to the inspector generals [sic], they say, “That’s what we were doing,” and they’re fired en masse, as you mentioned.And the USAID inspector general is fired after publishing a report.What is going on with the firings of the inspector generals [sic]?
Well, the inspectors general are independent, and that’s not what Trump wants.He wants them to answer to him because if an inspector general says, “Wait a second.This administration policy or that one, this action or that one, isn’t what it’s supposed to be; it’s violating this law or that procedure, or what have you,” that angers him, and in the first term, inspectors general, time and time again, issued reports that criticized actions by the Trump administration, and it just angered the president.He tried firing them during the first term.This time, he knew when he came in, he wasn’t going to let them stand.One of the very first things he does is to get rid of the inspectors general.
So it’s like playing a basketball game and getting to fire the refs in the first quarter.Nobody’s going to be there to tell you you’re doing it wrong.
We talked to one of the inspector generals [sic] who said that they expected more of a response from Congress, from Chuck Grassley in particular, who had sort of been a defender of inspector generals [sic].10What happened with Congress?
Congress is no longer an independent branch of government. At least that’s not the way they’re acting, right?It used to be that Congress, even if it was the same party as the president, defended its prerogatives, defended its right to legislate, to create inspectors general offices within these Cabinet departments, to decide how spending would go.And that’s just not the case anymore.Now, the goal is simply to stay with your party, right?
So the Republicans control both houses—not by very much, narrow majority—but enough to be in charge, and they are going to defer to Trump on almost everything.Why?Because those who don’t defer to Trump pay a price.They’ve seen it.What happened to Liz Cheney?What happened to Adam Kinzinger?What happened to Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, any number of Republicans who dared to say, “Wait a second.I don’t agree with what’s going on here”?They all paid a price.
He controls the party because he controls the base.The base will punish those who are seen as disloyal, or at least those he decides are disloyal.And standing over his shoulder just to make sure that message gets through is the world’s richest man, who is willing to write a check for untold millions of dollars for a primary candidate against you if you vote against the president.
So Congress, at this point, rather than defending its prerogatives, rather than standing up for the inspectors general, which it created in order to be a check on executive overreach, is instead sublimating itself, subordinating itself to the president in the interest of party unity and the interest of political survival.
And what does that do to a constitutional system?Because Congress appropriated the money; Congress created the USAID agency.If they don’t say anything, what does that do to our system?
Congress is increasingly irrelevant in Trump’s Washington.Think about it.We judge a president by their first 100 days, right?Because of FDR during the Great Depression.Why?Because FDR passed … really big bills in those first 100 days in order to try to bring the country out of the Depression.He did big things with Congress in creating jobs programs and new ways of regulating the banks and so on and so forth.
In Trump’s first 100 days, he will pass no legislation.He’s not even trying.What legislation did he pass in the past?Nothing.He wants to keep his tax cuts that he passed in the first term.He wants to renew them.But beyond that, he hasn’t gone to Congress saying, “Hey, let’s rethink the ‘government’s too big.’ Let’s get rid of the USAID.Let’s get rid of the Education Department.Let’s do big things.” No, he’s doing it on his own with his own pen in the Oval Office, without Congress, even though it’s his party in charge.
And so Congress is just sitting there watching.They’re basically a bystander.The only thing they’ve done is pass a spending bill that keeps things going at exactly the way they were before without making any changes either to help Trump or to stop Trump.Either way, they’re basically bystanders.
I can’t think of a president who was as completely unconcerned with Congress as this one.He decided clearly in his second term he was not going to hitch his presidency to whether Congress would pass what he wanted or not.He was going to basically act as a unilateral force, and in doing so, he’s rewritten the old separation of powers as we used to understand them.
Trump Takes on the Courts and Law Firms
And that leaves everything in the hands of the courts, as you’ve already described, all of these lawsuits.Is that the check with Congress sort of by the side, is these over 100, I don’t even know how many, lawsuits?
Yeah.Without a functioning Congress, without an independent Justice Department, without inspectors general watching things, literally the only real check on a president’s power at this point would be the courts, and they’re not really built, I think, for the volume and the scale and the scope of what we’re seeing.They’re being asked to decide things in real time, because real lives are being affected, that they normally would take weeks, months, maybe even years to litigate and contemplate before making a considered judgment.
Now, they’re being forced to be real-time actors because these judges are the only ones who are reviewing anything this president is doing to decide whether or not it’s legal, whether or not it’s following procedures, whether or not it’s fair and constitutional.And then, the question becomes, even if they can keep up with the volume, even if they can address these big important issues in an efficient and effective way, how do they enforce their decisions if they go against the president?They don’t have an army.They don’t have a police force.They don’t have an enforcement mechanism.
The courts have always relied on this idea that we believe in a judiciary, that we believe in an independent judiciary, and they’ve relied on the idea that a president or a Congress or individual actors in the system would respect their judgments and follow them, because otherwise, we don’t know what will happen.
And then with all of this in the face of the courts, it’s at this moment that the president announces executive orders, starting with Perkins Coie, targeting individual law firms with pretty dramatic actions.Help me understand that moment and what he’s doing.Does it relate to the battle in the courts that we’re talking about?
Absolutely, absolutely.Trump has gone even further, I think, than some of his skeptics would have imagined.He’s not only going after people using regulatory agencies and potentially the Justice Department and so forth, by attacking the law firms themselves, by cutting off their access to federal buildings and contracts and security clearances.He is emasculating the legal system in a way that anybody who might stand against him, anybody he might go after, has effective representation to fight back.
He is making it hard, if not impossible, for people to disagree with him and to fight back in the courts.If you can’t find a lawyer to take your case, then what is your chance of defending your rights if you think that they’ve been abridged?
And the reasons he has given for attacking these law firms—Perkins Coie and Paul, Weiss [Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison] and Jenner & Block, and so forth—are openly about his own personal grievances.The most recent one he went after individually is Jenner & Block.Why did he go after them?Because they once employed Andrew Weissmann, who worked for Robert Mueller.11That was it.That’s what he said justified the use of government power to punish them, that they employed a lawyer who dared to work for a special counsel, duly appointed by his own administration by the way, to investigate him.No allegation that Andrew Weissmann violated any laws, violated any ethics rules.They just don’t like him because he investigated the president, and therefore his law firm, his former law firm, should be punished.
That’s also something we’ve never seen before, and it’s clever in its way because he’s undercutting the ability of anybody to resist his desires and orders and decisions.
When you read about Paul Weiss and the internal discussion about it, it also seems like they don’t believe it’s legal.12They think that they could win in court, but it’s something that the court can’t stop, the consequences for the firm and the clients.
12
The New York Times: How a Major Democratic Law Firm Ended Up Bowing to Trump
The consequences go beyond even the immediate order itself, because what the president’s done by naming these firms is he’s made them radioactive so that now clients are going to ask questions and maybe take their business elsewhere if they don’t like what this law firm is doing.And so he’s creating a market force now that will also shift the nature of business for these law firms and determine whether or not they take cases that they believe will get them in trouble with people who otherwise might support the president.
And law firms that used to take cases for and against or from all different points of view, now will worry that they will be targeted or labeled an anti-Trump firm, even if they take cases that wouldn’t be anti-Trump, and that’s a pretty stark choice that you’re asking these businesses to make in effect.
And that’s why the Paul Weiss thing was so important, because it had to make a judgment as to what was in its own best business interests, not about principle necessarily or not about some esoteric right and wrong.It’s about “What will this do to our business?” And they came to a conclusion that stirred a lot of controversy and a lot of criticism for obvious reasons, and that’s exactly what Trump wanted.
… You were in Moscow in the early 2000s, so maybe you’re not surprised.But are you surprised that it didn’t cause a giant uproar?
In the end, law firms are businesses, right?They are about profits and losses.They are about making money.They are about the bottom line.And they are making a cold business decision as to what makes most sense for them.It’s different than an advocacy group, an ACLU or Human Rights Watch or whatever, which exists for a purpose, to take ideological points of view, or even conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation or what have you.These are businesses, and I suppose it probably shouldn’t surprise us that they’re trying to make decisions based on what they think is best for their bottom line.
And I guess it’s in that environment that you talked about at the beginning, that it’s not just will your law firm be targeted; it’s a generalized fear of not wanting to go on the record, not wanting to get your company on the wrong side of this administration.
Absolutely, absolutely.I don’t remember people being afraid of retaliation from [former Presidents] Bill Clinton or George W. Bushor [Ronald] Reagan or [Barack] Obama.I just don’t remember that.And maybe there were instances of that, but certainly not on the scale and scope that we’re seeing now.
Deportation of Venezuelan Migrants
The issue where he’s going to really get into a conflict with the courts is on immigration, which is something that president after president has struggled with, and Congress after Congress has failed to address, and a lot of his supporters feel strongly about that and even people who didn’t vote for him.Help me understand immigration and how the administration views it, because they’re going to claim some pretty dramatic powers when it comes to that.
Yeah.In a lot of ways, Trump believes he won on two issues: immigration and inflation.He really can’t do anything about inflation.When he came back into power, inflation was already pretty low, and you can’t make prices go back down after they’ve gone up.You simply have to stop them from continuing to rise.If you make them go down, it means you have a recession, which no president would want.
So the one thing he can do something about is immigration, and it really goes to the heart of his political identity.Going back to 2016, those rallies were—he talked about building the wall, build the wall.It resonated so strongly with his audience.It really became a signature issue for him unlike any other.He always got a good reaction from it.He always found it an appealing cause, and it also appealed his own personal sense that the country has too many people in it who are immigrants.
And it worked in the 2024 race because it gave a sense that Biden wasn’t in control, that he was presiding over a government that couldn’t work, that wouldn’t even be able to defend the borders and so on.And Trump sees immigration as a way to establish his own dominance and to show that he is the man of action that we’ve been talking about, and he can do a lot of it because there’s a great deal of power vested in a president on immigration that doesn’t require Congress or any other agency, so it is something where he can do something, as he has shown.
It’s important to remember, though, that the implication at times is that he is going after illegal immigration.That appeals to a lot of people, including immigrants who came here and said, “I waited in line.I did it the right way.I’m not in favor of people just crossing the border without permission.” So his appeal about illegal immigration often did cross a lot of lines and went to the heart of what a lot of Americans feel about the rule of law.
But what we’ve also seen, and he doesn’t really advertise quite as much, is he’s actually out to crack down on legal immigration as well.He, in fact, is trying to take away the legal right to be here from people who did follow the rules, who didn’t do anything wrong, who are here on green cards, who are here for temporary protected status, who actually came here as the relative of somebody who was already here.He wants to change the rules to make legal immigration harder as well.
And then he’s using the immigration system also to go after people who are perceived to have opinions that he doesn’t like: Pro-Palestinian, maybe even pro-Hamas protesters from the last year and a half, because of the Gaza war and the terrorist attack of Oct.7; people who have otherwise expressed opinions that he is now calling anti-American.And suddenly people who are here legally are being told they have to leave the country.They’re either being targeted for deportation or not allowed back into the country if they happen to travel.
So you hear a lot of people, I know a lot of people who are saying, “I’m not going to leave the country because I’m afraid I won’t be let back in,” not because they’ve done anything wrong, but they don’t know for sure where that line is anymore, because they don’t have the same rights as U.S.citizens do when it comes to traveling across the border.
I’ve even heard—there’s plenty of U.S.citizens who are worried now, too, about traveling across the border because customs people have the right to look at your phones and your laptops without a warrant, and they can go through it and decide they don’t like something they see on it, and that could cause problems. …
We’ve been focused on the Venezuelan story, but I hadn’t thought, too, about when you were talking about it, seizing people who are on green cards for statements that they made and other things.It’s all part of the same atmosphere, too.It’s not just—
It’s all about fear.It’s creating a level of fear in so many different parts of society right now.People who didn’t used to think that they had to worry about being in the United States suddenly now are worried.
On the flights with the Venezuelans, … he invokes the Alien Enemies Act, which requires war or an invasion.13What is he doing in claiming those powers and in choosing not to go to Congress, but he’s going to use this law from the 1700s?
13
Right.Well, first of all, it shows how much research these guys have done in the time they’ve had.They have been very methodical about looking for legal tools that they can use or stretch or even overinterpret, depending on your point of view, to accomplish what they want to accomplish.They’re trying to use the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which has only been cited during time of war, three wars—1812, World War I and World War II—to argue that gang members from Venezuela constitute an invasion force during a time of war.
Now, we’ll see whether the Supreme Court ultimately accepts that interpretation, but it’s a pretty novel interpretation.And what’s happened here, of course, is they’ve rounded up people that they’re saying are Venezuelan gang members who are here illegally or shouldn’t be allowed here because they are threats and simply put them on a plane and sending them to be locked up in prison in El Salvador without a single hearing, without any due process, without anybody saying, “Yeah, they actually are gang members who’ve done things illegally,” or, “No, maybe they’re not.”14
And it is true that non-U.S.citizens don’t have the same rights as U.S.citizens to due process, but they do have some rights to due process.And what’s happening now in the courts is a fight over how much right to due process do they have.Can they be simply swept up under a 227-year-old law, declared to be an enemy combatant, if you will, in the middle of a war, and thrown into prison in a foreign country without anybody presenting any evidence whatsoever that they are a gang member or in any way pose a threat to the country?
In the midst of this, a judge issues an injunction apparently while the flights are in progress.What is the response to that, and what does that tell you?
The fight over this particular flight that the judge tried to stop is actually really important and really interesting.Now, it’s interesting on two levels.One, of course, is, are they defying the judge who says, “If you have a flight going now, turn it around and bring it back”?And what the administration is saying is, “You don’t have the authority to do that.That plane has left American airspace.” We think that’s their argument at least, because they haven’t been 100% clear about the details and timing and so forth.But that’s the argument.
And the judge’s point is, “No, I have jurisdiction over the people who are in charge of that flight, who are sitting here in the United States, in my jurisdiction, within my reach,” in effect.That’s a big, important issue, right?Now, it’s kind of technical.
But then there’s the larger question that he’s trying to get at.He’s not saying the president can’t use this law to send people away who shouldn’t be here.He’s trying to say, “Give me enough time to decide whether the process has been followed appropriately or not,” right?“You haven’t told me who these people are.You haven’t told me what evidence you’ve used to decide that they really are who you say they are or that they pose a threat that you say they pose.” And in our system, he’s saying there has to be a right of review, and the president is saying, in effect, “You have no right to judge.I get to decide without anybody else intervening.”
This could be the big test case of what we’ve been talking about.This could be the big test case for what happens if the judiciary says no to the president and he doesn’t take no for an answer.
This is what’s happening inside the courtroom.Outside the courtroom, the president of El Salvador sending a tweet that says, “Oopsie” which is being retweeted by administration officials, and rhetoric is ramping up about the judge.
… What’s happening outside the courtroom is almost as important as what’s happening inside the courtroom, right?You have Trump’s own border czar saying, “I don’t care what the judges say.I don’t care what the judges say.” You have the vice president of the United States, and then the president of the United States, as well as Elon Musk saying, “We should impeach this judge.” You don’t get to impeach a judge under the Constitution because you don’t like his ruling.Impeachment is for cases of high crimes and misdemeanors.
What is Judge [James] Boasberg’s high crime and misdemeanor?He disagreed with the president of the United States.He thinks what the president has done may not be legal.That, if he followed through on this impeachment threat, would be a radical change in the balance of power.And it was so extraordinary that they were making these threats that even Chief Justice John Roberts, who doesn’t enter the political fray very often, felt compelled within hours to put out his own statement saying, “No, wait a second.15Impeachment is not for rulings that you don’t agree with.That’s what appeals courts are for.You don’t agree with this ruling, you go to the appeals court.You don’t like the appeals court, you come to me,” in effect, he’s saying, “the Supreme Court, and we’ll deal with it.We’ll decide.” But you don’t impeach judges, he’s saying, because you don’t like their rulings.
And what he did there was lay down a marker, and it was important, I think, because what he said is this isn’t about Judge Boasberg.It’s not about a rogue judge the way the president would like it to be.It’s about the whole system, and Roberts took that arrow for himself.He was saying, “You can’t just go after Boasberg.It’s not about him.It’s about us.It’s about the system, and do you respect the system?” It’s an open question.We’ll see.
He calls for him to be impeached.he calls him a “radical left lunatic” judge.And I understand Donald Trump has been attacking judges for many years.But does it feel like that they, especially on this issue, when you read the statements from the White House or maybe you’ve talked to them, that there’s sort of a “Bring it on.If you want to put your legitimacy on the line as the judicial branch on this issue, let’s go”?
Absolutely.This is absolutely a “bring it on” issue for them.They love this issue, particularly because it’s about gangbangers from Venezuela.Who’s going to be sympathetic to them?The public isn’t going to be up in arms about that.Instead, it’s easy to direct anger at this judge that the president calls a “radical left lunatic.”
Now, Judge Boasberg, by the way, has been around Washington much of his life.Anybody who has been here in Washington may know him—I know him.He’s not, by anybody’s stretch, known as a radical left lunatic.He was originally appointed to the Superior Court bench byGeorge W. Bush.He was law school roommates with [Supreme Court Justice] Brett Kavanaugh.He was then put on the federal court by Barack Obama.16He’s known in the legal community as somebody of a very measured, temperate demeanor.He ruled for Donald Trump in one of the cases trying to get Donald Trump’s tax returns made public.It’s not like he is seen as a partisan.
But that doesn’t matter to Trump or his allies.… It’s their desire to turn him into a partisan, to call him a partisan, whether he is or not.You’ve seen that with Trump with any judge who ever goes against him, whether it be the judge in New York in his hush-money case, where he was convicted of 34 felonies; whether it was the judge in his civil suit on the Trump University fraud case, where he had to pay $25 million to people who said he defrauded them.17Every judge who ever got in his way, he has used the same language, the same kind of vilification.18
The impeachment, that takes it the next step, though.It’s a way of saying, “We will take you out.” Now, the judges are smart.They understand they’re not going to be impeached.It may be even that the House under the Republicans would actually vote to impeach, possibly, possibly, because they do have a majority, but it’s not a big majority.I think a number of Republican House members would feel a little leery of impeaching judges over rulings they don’t like, because the same thing could happen to conservative judges, by the way, if a Democratic Congress ever comes back.
But even if a judge is impeached by the House, they’ll never be convicted under the Senate because it wouldn’t get to the two-thirds vote, which is 67 votes.The Republicans don’t have them, even if they got every single Republican to go along.So the judges know that.
But it still adds this atmosphere of intimidation, a chilling atmosphere, and it’s added to a fear of physical harm.The judges are afraid of untethered supporters of the president out there who might do something to them.There has been a rash of threats and so forth, and that’s been true on the other side, too.Brett Kavanaugh, the Supreme Court justice appointed by Trump, had a gunman show up outside his door.It’s not limited just to judges who rule against Trump.
But this is what’s happening when the judiciary has been made into a political actor rather than the judicial actor that they have traditionally been.
We’ve been talking about how he’s approached potential independents inside the Republican Party, inside Congress, lawyers.Some of the people he can just fire, like the IGs, and get rid of.But here, there’s this attack.There seems to be also an implied “Maybe we won’t go along with this.” And maybe it’s not implied with the comment from Homan and some of the vice president’s prior statements.
Yeah, Vance has said they don’t have the power.In effect, he’s saying, “We don’t have to listen to them.” Now, they haven’t done that.They haven’t actually overtly said, “We are not following this judge’s orders,” but they have, in more subtle ways, seemingly defied orders.When the judges said, “You can’t cut the spending by this order,” they said, “OK, we’re going to abide by that.” But then they cut it using some other order, some other justification.
And I think we’re very close to the line as to seeing how far they’ll go on this Venezuela case in terms of defying the judge.The president has said, “No, I won’t defy a court.” That’s important that he says that because he’s sending a signal to his supporters.But it’s a test as to whether he’ll follow through on that or whether they’ll find some way to defy without explicitly defying.
Chief Justice Roberts and the Supreme Court
I guess what I’m wondering is, if you signal that you might, and you signal that you’re going to try to delegitimize them, that’s pretty powerful pressure when it comes to the Supreme Court, when it comes to them having to decide, “How hard are we going to push back on these things?”
Absolutely.It is a signal to the Supreme Court, and there’s no question that people think John Roberts, who cares about the Supreme Court as an institution, is conscious of issuing rulings that aren’t followed, which would then diminish the court’s power.This is a big hinge point in history for the Supreme Court.If the Supreme Court were ever to issue a ruling that a president openly flouts and openly refuses to follow, for the first time in many generations, suddenly the Supreme Court no longer has the authority that it once had.
And so, many people believe that he is cognizant of that and wants to avoid that scenario because it’s not good for the courts.Having said that, he also presumably doesn’t want to simply roll over for a president if he goes beyond the boundaries.And it’s going to be interesting to see where the Supreme Court decides to draw that line, and then what happens if they do.
That’s a huge moment in our history.That’s a huge moment.And I think Roberts was trying to send a signal by saying, “We are not your toadies.We are an independent branch of government.We will agree with you sometimes and disagree with you sometimes, but our judgments are independent, and you need to recognize their legitimacy.”
I guess I wonder at this moment where we are how much the courts can hold everything together with what we’ve been talking about, with law firms, even if the executive order is found to be illegal.Can you conceive of how the court would put USAID back together again like it was before?Can the courts hold together this constitutional order?
It’s hard to see how the courts proceed in some of these cases, right?Some of them are pretty easy, like the birthright citizenship case.19You’re going to rule one way or the other, and then that’s sort of the end of it.But putting back together a bureaucracy that’s already been dismantled, the letters have been taken off the building, the people have been told to go home, the aid has been cut off to charities or philanthropies around the world, people have been cut off from their medicine and their food, suddenly saying, “I, as a judge, now order you to put that back together again,” is Donald Trump going to follow that?Is he going to follow it as vigorously as another president would?Or would he—even if he followed it, would he do it halfheartedly?We don’t know.And it’s, again, the judges don’t have an enforcement mechanism, as we said.So it’s going to be a challenge.
It’s a lot we’re putting on the court.
A lot we’re putting on the courts that were not really built for it.They were not sort of built for this kind of 24/7, instantaneous, WrestleMania style of political combat and to kind of come in and judge that.These are—you’re asking the guy from Paper Chase to suddenly get into the ring between two men in loincloths and try to control the match.It’s just—it’s not what they were built for.
… You’ve been personally singled out by the president on a couple of occasions.What is it like?And what message do you think he’s sending to you?But what is it like for you to get a message that he’s written about you?
Yeah.Look, he does it—he did that in his first term.He attacked me and my colleagues in his first term as well.It’s not something anybody enjoys, I suppose, but at some point, you end up getting used to it.
I’m more worried about the tangible things.I’m more worried about kicking the Associated Press out of the press pool and then taking the press pool over himself.20I’m more worried about lawsuits that force big media companies to pay large amounts of money for doing their jobs, for doing things that would have normally been considered to be perfectly normal and ordinary journalism.That worries me a whole lot more than a tweet or a social media post.
20
But it’s all part of this atmosphere of intimidation.It’s meant to get in your head.It’s meant to direct anger toward you.It’s meant to shape the coverage.
Now, the good thing is, I don’t know reporters who are going to respond to that.The reporters I know who cover him are absolutely dedicated and resolved to do their jobs the way we always do our jobs, and we’re going to report vigorously, fairly, aggressively, fully, regardless of what obstacles he puts in our way and regardless of what attacks he or his people want to lodge against us.It’s our job to ignore it and to plow forward.That’s what we’re going to do. …
Trump’s Power
[Director Michael Kirk] … Why is he doing it, Peter?What’s the point?
Why is he doing it?Look, Trump got elected on the theory that the government was broken, and he’s singularly able to fix it by basically tearing it up and putting it back together again in his image.But broadly speaking, I think he has a grievance that really underlies his second term even more than the first, that he feels a desire for retribution—again, that’s his word, not ours—and that he is planning to take his revenge.
He believes he was wronged.He has convinced many people in the country that he was wronged, and so that has given him opportunity to get back at the people that he blames.Probably a lot of politicians might like to do that.They were constrained by whatever forces constrain them.This is a guy who’s not constrained.He’s not constrained.He is unleashed, and there are not clear paths forward for accountability other than the courts, and that’s not 100% clear either, as we talked about.
So here’s this guy.He’s breaking it.He’s winning.Maybe he’ll get away with it.Probably 15 months from now we’ll know what’s happening with midterms or something.But if he’s broken it and if it can’t be put back together again, does he even know that it could be something that he doesn’t want to own after he’s done breaking it? …
Well, he wants to tame it.He wants to have everybody defer to him, and it’s not just on politics.What’s striking is how much he wants to impose his point of view on different aspects of society, right?It’s not just whether USAID should be an agency or not.It’s what should be played at the Kennedy Center.It’s what we should call a body of water off our southern shores.It’s what the Associated Press can put in its style guide.It’s what is taught in the classrooms at Columbia or Penn.
He is extending his reach really far, much further than most presidents have, not just about here in Washington.It’s really—he is trying to reshape the country in a way, and he is winning.He is accomplishing a lot, and a lot of his people are very happy about that.And we’ll see how long it lasts.
But to your point about the midterms, I’m increasingly convinced that that doesn’t matter to him, because he’s not reliant on Congress anymore.Now, if Democrats win, they’ll make his life miserable, but they’re not even a Democratic Congress, really.It would be limited in how much they would be able to do against him, and he is not dependent on Congress to achieve the things he wants to achieve.
So the midterms will matter.It would be an embarrassment if he loses one or both houses.A Democratic House or Senate could use subpoena power to have hearings, things that we’re not seeing now.There will be accountability.He definitely would not enjoy a Democratic-controlled Congress.
But he’s not relying on Congress the way every other president has been, and it’s fascinating to see, actually. … Think about it.Bush and Obama, they all wanted to get stuff done through Congress, right?Whether you’re conservative or liberal, it didn’t really matter.You wanted to use—partly because it would last beyond you, right?The problem for an executive order presidency is the next guy comes along, and with his own swipe of the pen, he undoes everything you just did.
But it’s hard to undo it, right?… It’s hard to rebuild stuff once it’s been dismantled, so it wouldn’t be as easy as all that.But without Congress, it is temporary, and it’s not necessarily going to last beyond his term, and he doesn’t seem to be thinking about that.
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