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Susan Davis
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Susan Davis
Political Correspondent, NPR
Susan Davis is a political correspondent for NPR and co-host of the NPR Politics Podcast. She is also a contributor to PBS' Washington Week. Davis previously covered politics for The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and National Journal.
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
When the president of the United States goes to the Justice Department and gives a speech, can you help me understand that moment and what is going on?
I think that was one of the least surprising moments that happened after Donald Trump won.If there was one thing that he campaigned very clearly about, it was his interest in overtaking and running the Justice Department, not only for deciding how it gets run but also wanting to seek retribution for his political enemies.So I don't think it was an unanticipated event.I think it was very expected, but I'm not sure even people that were ready for shake-up were ready for the extent to which [President] Donald Trump would take the changes at the Justice Department, which, just weeks into his administration, feels like it has been completely remade under his ideology and his demands.
You said that it wasn't unexpected.Why wasn't it?What had he promised?What did he say in that speech?What was it that was motivating that?
I think you'd have to go back and look at the campaign and how Donald Trump ran his campaign.He ran as someone who wanted to be a strongman.He spoke very flatteringly of other authoritarian leaders around the world, and one of the key pillars of that is the justice system, that you have to believe that the executive has sort of broad-reaching powers over the rule of law.And I think that extends to sort of the broader MAGA [Make America Great Again]-Trumpian worldview of the rule of law in this moment is that the government hasn't been accountable enough to the president of the United States, and he is trying to sort of remake executive power in a way that probably the last time it was fundamentally changed was after the Watergate scandals.But in that era, power was restricted from the presidency.
It was a moment of great scandal in Washington, where Congress, under the control of Democrats at the time, passed a series of laws to sort of tighten and restrain the executive, and there has long been a movement on the right, which I think has become much more mainstreamed, that says none of that stuff should have ever happened, that the constitutional intent for the president is to be an all-powerful executive, that the entirety of the executive branch should report up to him, and I think Donald Trump is executing that.I think it's being challenged in real time.But they were very clear in the campaign that this was the type of presidency that he was going to try to execute.
And I guess it's not just a theory about power in the presidency.For him, when he's at the Justice Department, it's personal.He had been a defendant, charged with crimes by that very Justice Department.
Right. And even in his first acts, it was almost to undo everything the Justice Department did.Look at the pardoning of all of the Jan. 6 defendants, even the extent of the violent offenders.1I think there were supporters of the president that didn't think he would go that far.Firing all the career attorneys that had anything to do with the cases against him, even the retribution against the law firms that were associated with some of those lawyers—it goes deep, and it's personal.
1
And I think that there has been, certainly by government watchdogs, by transparency advocates, say, “This is not good.This is not the intent of the Justice Department.”But I have to say that I think that Donald Trump is someone who campaigned on saying he would test American institutions, and it seems like that's a bargain that a lot of voters, at least in the short term, have been willing to wager, that he said he was going to do these things, and I think, for a lot of Americans, it just looks like change.It looks like Donald Trump is delivering on these promises to upend Washington, to drain the swamp, to do it completely differently.
I'm not sure if people can really understand the extent to which it could change the presidency long after Donald Trump leaves office, if he is ultimately successful in expanding executive power in the way that he would like to.
He also has an indictment of the way the Justice Department had been run, and he uses two words.He says “lawfare”; he says “weaponization” against him.What is he saying when he's standing there?What is he criticizing?How does he view what had happened to him?
Oh, I think that he believes that it was a complete miscarriage of justice.I think that Donald Trump sees himself as a victim in all of this.He would argue, I would think, and his supporters would argue, that they thought the Justice Department was already politicized, that it was targeted against him and that powers that be misused their power to investigate him.I think the public record in the investigations would show otherwise.
But I think that this was the most intense focus of Donald Trump.I think it was one of the greatest motivations for which he wanted to run for reelection in 2024, was not only to be able to change the department but in some ways, rewrite history, right?A lot of what they're trying to do is recast the narrative of what happened to him during his impeachments, to recast the narrative of what happened on Jan. 6, to suggest it was a day of peaceful protests and not a violent attack on democracy.
I think that that has been a very powerful motivator to him, and something that I think is something that all Americans should think about is the ability to rewrite these narratives, right?And I think that the perception of how people see the Justice Department, I think has—and all American institutions, has been degraded in recent years.There isn't much about the American government that the average voter has a ton of faith in these days.If you look at surveys, it's oftentimes the military ranks the highest, and after that, it's a pretty severe drop-off.But I think he is able to take advantage of that moment, where I don't think people have a lot of faith in the system.So someone coming in to upend the system, I think there's some optimism that he could make it better, but I also think that you have to be clear-eyed with the things he's taken so far.The actions he's taken so far do not align with the rule of law in the way that the Justice Department has operated for basically our entire lives.
Let me ask you one other thing about that moment, which is that he calls out individual people who he sees them as having wronged him.Norm Eisen is one of them that we're talking to.2How unusual is it for him to go to the Justice Department, refer to an individual person as “scum,” as he says?He says that Eisen had done “violence” toward him and was “vicious.”3Help me understand that moment.
I don't even know what to say about that.Trump is just so known for making things personal and pejorative, right?He attacks people.He brings them down.I don't think that Jack Smith, the prosecutor in the Jan. 6 federal case against him, is another one that he has made a point to sort of target and try to undermine, even after leaving the Justice Department.He doesn't just want to beat his political enemies; he wants to sort of humiliate them, to make them subservient, to make them say that they're wrong.It's not enough to just win; it's like you have to embarrass; you have to punish.And that's a big part of Trump and the retribution and the grievance.
He talked about this.He's talked about this for years now.He thinks that all of these people were a constellation of actors out to get him, and in turn, he is now sitting in the most powerful office in the world, using that power to seek retribution against these people, almost one by one.
Do you know why somebody like Eisen, do you know why he would—
I would think with him, he's just someone who was a very regular, common face on television, and those were people that often were more antagonistic to the president because he watches television all the time.So the more public the critique, the more likely Donald Trump would go after them.I would point to Adam Schiff, the then-congressman from California and now the senator, as someone that the president has been relentless in attacking, but also, Schiff had been one of the most public critics and led the first impeachment effort against Trump, so that should come as no surprise, either.
Trump’s Executive Orders
So let's go back to the day of the inauguration.Every president signs a raft of executive orders on their first day.Trump does it in a different way, at the Capital One Arena.But people also said there might be something different in what he does, which is the types of orders that he signs.What is going on with executive orders as he comes in on his first day?
I think it's also important to take a little bit of a step back when you talk about executive orders because this is a power that presidents have increasingly used in Washington, going back to George W. Bush.And again, Trump just sort of takes everything and then takes it to an extreme.[Former Presidents] Barack Obama, Joe Biden all used executive orders to achieve a policy goal that Congress couldn't complete.For instance, Joe Biden tried to do it with canceling student loans.
So Donald Trump sort of takes this existing power and just does it bigger and more aggressive than I think any of his predecessors.I would point to another executive order that he signed in mid-February, basically announcing that he was taking full control of the executive branch and that all agencies and employees of the executive branch will report directly to the president.4These kinds of actions, again, are about consolidating power, and I also think that Donald Trump doesn't like checks on his power.He doesn't really want to go to Congress and say, “Can you pass a law?Can you negotiate?Do we have to compromise?”He wants to do as much as he can by himself.He wants to be able to use the power of the presidency to exact policy goals that he doesn't want to have to work with Democrats for, and frankly, he doesn't want to always have to work with a lot of members of his own party in Congress.
4
The White House: Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies
So as much as he can do on his own—and I would also say this.I think that they are very aware of the fact that a lot of these executive orders will be challenged in the court.There's over 100 federal cases already challenging Trump's actions in these early weeks of his presidency, and I think that's by design.They want to get a lot of these challenges into the courts because they believe that the court and ultimately the Supreme Court, with a conservative 6-3 makeup, is a more friendly place to wager some of these fights over executive power.
And I think that a lot of the people around the president have for years wanted to try to get these cases to the court, to test the limits of executive power, with a higher degree of confidence now that the Supreme Court will rule in their favor and ultimately codify the expansive presidential power.
He does a lot, fast, and one of the phrases that comes up a lot is “flood the zone,” and there's talk that maybe with Stephen Miller, who was sort of the architect of that in the early days.What was the strategy?Was he involved in organizing that?
… I think, from the beginning, the Trump team knew that they wanted to make 2025 a big year.They knew that presidents, in their first year—he's going to have the highest amount of public support, and they really wanted a “shock and awe” campaign, and I think that the executive orders speak to that, but also the pressure that he's putting on Congress to pass his tax cuts, more extensive energy policy, they want a lot of wins this year.
I think they also politically know historically, midterms are not great to the party in power in the White House.There's a chance that there could be a Democratic check on that power within 23 months of taking office, and they want to get a lot done now, so I think that the velocity was by design.And I also think it's hard to make the public understand deeply how much could be potentially fundamentally changing in their government, and I think that, especially a lot of this is so far it's legal arguments; it's academic arguments; it's “what kind of democracy do you want?” arguments.But they are really fundamental to the nature and design of America and the balance of power and how this government works.
There was an architecture to this.There was Project 2025 during the campaign, which was the conservative blueprint drafted by the Heritage Foundation, or Heritage Action, and during the campaign, Trump tried to distance himself from this document even though it was written by his allies, many of whom now work inside his administration.
But it's all laid out, almost exactly what he's doing, in the blueprint, and particularly these executive orders and how much you have to do comes from a conservative viewpoint that the president has been shackled, and Donald Trump doesn't want to be shackled.And there's a lot of lawyers around him who say, “You could be on the legal right side of this.The laws and the restrictions on the presidency should never have been put there to begin with, and we're going to try to remove them.”
If you think about that first signing ceremony, where he's signing and he's throwing pens to the audience, and as you said, there's some element of it which is delivering on a campaign promise.
Absolutely.Look, Donald Trump is disruption, and he is change, right?He was the change candidate in 2024 even though he was a sort of incumbent candidate, and I do think he resonates with a lot of Americans who I think just look at things and think, nothing's working; the system just doesn't work; the government's inefficient.There is a perception that there's way more waste and fraud in the federal government than there actually is.
But I think he's able to tap into that.There's almost a resentment towards government and the way it's been run, so I think he is really seizing on that.What I think is so interesting about it, though, is that I think there's a lot of conservatives that might take issue, more traditional conservatives that would take issue with what Trump is doing, this sort of idea of the all-powerful executive with no checks on presidential power.
Think about it this way: Will those same conservatives feel comfortable if this power is expanded and Democrats win the White House in 2028, right?Once you expand these powers, once you change the rules of the game, it's not like you can go back and redo it all the way it was before.These could be for the rest-of-the-country's-existence-type changes.It could put America on a completely different trajectory.
And so sometimes it is surprising to me that there aren't more people maybe a little concerned about what Trump is doing, even from within his own party, because if he's able to do this expansion of power, it could ultimately be a gift to a future Democratic president.
The other thing that he does that you mentioned is back at the Oval Office, he signs the pardons for Jan. 6, which is something he had campaigned on, but it still seems like a surprise, even to people in his own party.
Yeah, I think even JD Vance, his vice president, had suggested that he wouldn't pardon the violent offenders.I think that was one of the first moments where it was very clear that Donald Trump was going to push the envelope as far as possible.And also I think another important thing is that public opinion doesn't seem to move him as much this time around.I think being a second-term president, obviously he is not going to—cannot run for reelection, although he's joked about changing the Constitution to make himself capable of running for a third term.But that was a moment where it was like, OK, he's clearly not paying attention to public opinion. Because public opinion did not support pardons for these people and certainly not the violent offenders, people who had attacked police officers.
But also all of his surrogates on the campaign had talked down, had tamped down that talk, like, “Oh, he's not going to go that far.He's not going to do that.”And he did.And it's another reminder that truly no one speaks for Donald Trump but Donald Trump.Anybody who suggests that they know what he's going to do or are confident that what he says is what he means, he proves that wrong time and time again.And so I think that that was a very early moment in the administration, where it was like, “OK, Trump is going to go as far as he can for as long as he can.”
What signal did that send, whether he intended it—I don't know if we know what signal he intended, but how was it received?
Well, I think you have to look at it—look, one of the things that was surprising about it is how little pushback there was, and I think it also speaks to how much power he has within his own party.There was virtually no pushback from Capitol Hill, where Republicans now control the House and the Senate.Lawmakers are almost uniformly aligned behind the president right now, and they also see that there's almost no upside to being publicly critical of the president, not only because he's popular with a lot of their constituents.But the powerful megaphones that surround the president now, people like Elon Musk, who control X, who can amplify a message, who can single out—and he has targeted individual members of Congress—that can bring all sorts of political headaches.
One of the benefits that Trump has right now is there really is no dissent, certainly within the Republican Party, which is what controls Washington right now.It has, of course, had the opposite effect on the Democratic Party, which is completely opposed to everything this president is doing, even had a debate over whether they should shut down the government just to send a message to the country about how much they oppose what he's doing.
But if the check on Donald Trump, if the check on any president is supposed to be the legislative branch, I think at least for the short term, he benefits greatly from having a party on Capitol Hill that has no interest in putting a check on his power, and I think one thing you can point to is the ongoing cutting of funds or cutting down programs, or cutting programs or things funded by Congress, legally funded by Congress, and Trump is just putting a stop to it, and Congress isn't doing anything to stop him.
This is a small point, but I guess, in that moment, too, Biden has just done his pardons for his family, and I guess that's part of that, the context of that moment as well.
Yeah.I think there's also this sense that presidents are going to push the extremes.And I think the thing that's different about Donald Trump is I think presidents in the past had had sort of an agreement of what the 50-yard line was in politics, like you could move to the left, you could move to the right, but there was sort of a central force of which they operated by, and I don't think he operates that way.He really does operate from a much more base, partisan viewpoint.I don't think he's really done anything to try to appeal to the left or to appeal to a broader tent of Americans.It's really like, “Get onboard or get out.”
The Unitary Executive Theory
As you said, there was people around him who had different visions of presidential power, that had been a project for a while, and the phrase that often comes up is the unitary executive theory.Does that predate Donald Trump?Where does that—
If you go all the way back, it dates back to Alexander Hamilton.This is an argument, in the legal theory, that it goes back to The Federalist Papers, in which he argued that America needed a really strong executive.I think the phrase is “energy in the executive” was very key to the health of a nation.5And this is something that, certainly among conservative legal scholars, has existed for a very long time, but I think under Trump has become completely mainstreamed, and it is this idea that there shouldn't be the ability to fire anyone who works in the executive branch—they're testing that boundary right now; the ability to overtake what we had seen as independent agencies, things like the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees Wall Street, or the Federal Election Commission, which oversees campaign finance and election laws, and say: You all report to me.And there is a legal argument that all of these people should report to the president because the president is ultimately held accountable for the actions of the executive branch.The idea of an independent check on the president is incompatible with Alexander Hamilton's vision of the presidency.
5
Bill of Rights Institute: Federalist Paper no.70
That said, Americans tend to like checks and balances.The idea of an all-powerful president isn't necessarily something that is hugely popular in the country.If you ask people that question specifically—I always remember there was a data point during the 2024 campaign where Vanderbilt University asked, in their polling, said, “Do you want to expand presidential power?”6And only 6% of respondents said they wanted to expand power—6%.This isn't something that I think Americans are clamoring for out there when you put it to them that way.
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Vanderbilt University Research News: Vanderbilt Unity Poll reveals a Trump conviction could significantly impact centrist voters
Most people like the status quo.They like the perception that there is three separate but equal branches of government.The Congress can be a check on the president.I think, for example, the Federal Elections Commission [sic] is a great example.Trump has attempted to fire the chairwoman of that commission.7It's been one of the many lawsuits being fought in the courts.8But think about this: How could a president both oversee an agency that oversees his own campaign but also have public trust that this is a fair and neutral arbiter of the law?
The conflicts of interest that arise, when you really start to put unitary executive theory to paper in practice, what does that mean?It means that there's basically no accountability for the president.There is no ability.There is no inspectors general within these departments to say, “Hey, this shouldn't be happening.”The independence of agencies is—they've become politicized and just arms of the White House.
And transparency, it just gets a lot darker.There's a lot less sunshine in this world.It requires a lot of public trust to believe that the president is doing the right thing and not a whole lot of checks to be able to verify it.
Do you think that the Trump v. United States decision, which came down in the summer before he comes in, gives him some immunity for actions—9
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Oyez: Trump v. United States
Is this the immunity case?
This is the immunity case.
Yeah.
That gives him some immunity for actions that are within the realm of being president, changes the context of where he comes in, or at least does in the eyes of the people around him?
Yeah, absolutely.And I also think Trump himself—and you see it in the things he says, where he who saves the country can break no law—basically embracing this idea that he is above the law, that he is not held accountable to the law the way that you and I are.And the Supreme Court has validated that in many ways.They did say, in that decision, that he has almost unfettered control of the Justice Department, that he can do what he wants there and that he is basically immune from any types of crimes while president.
So he's already operating from a base that prior presidents hadn't enjoyed.That Supreme Court decision absolutely creates a new era in terms of the idea of what kind of legal accountability a president could ever be held to.
So let's talk about the Justice Department.When you look at the leadership that he puts in at the top of the Justice Department, the top of the FBI, what is he looking for?Or who are the people that he appoints?
I think the decision to nominate Kash Patel to be FBI director, when it was first announced, there was a sense on Capitol Hill that there's no way that this could get through, that he was too provocative, that he might not be able to pass a background check, that enough Republican senators would not be comfortable with someone like him leading the FBI.And I think that his nomination was another one of those moments along the way where it told you that the Republican Party was going to be fully in line behind Donald Trump.There was no opposition within the party, or very little opposition within the party to his nomination.
And there was also a sense, I think, in Capitol Hill, that look, a lot of these people are provocative, but Trump won an election saying he was going to put people like this in government.Again, no surprises here.Nothing Trump is doing is surprising.He campaigned saying Kash Patel was going to run and clean out the FBI.
So I think that there was this sense in Congress of like, who were they to tell Trump that he can't have his FBI director when the country just said they're perfectly comfortable having these people serve in Trump's Cabinet?So a lot of Republican senators, who I think privately are not entirely comfortable or confident in his ability to run the department, are willing to at least give him a chance.I think when it comes to Dan Bongino, there's always a celebrity component to Trump.He likes and values loyalty.I think there's something like 20 people who have worked for Fox now work within the administration.10He picked up a Fox News host to run the Pentagon.
10
These are people that—he values loyalty, right?That is the number one thing, where all of these people, they testified that they would be loyal to the president.One of the questions many nominees were pressed on was, “Would you quit if the president asked you to break the law?”There was a lot of verbal gymnastics that went around these questions, but I don't think that there is anyone in the Cabinet that got that job because the president wasn't confident that, when push comes to shove, that they would side with the president.
Is that a lesson that he learned from his first term, where he saw [former U.S. Attorney General] Jeff Sessions appoint a special counsel?He saw [former U.S. Attorney General] Bill Barr not back him up after the election?
The difference between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0, I think, is really profound, and it goes back to the first time Trump won, he really didn't think he was going to win.This was a shock victory for him and a lot of people around him, and I think he heeded the advice of a lot of people that were establishment figures in the party.There's the famous picture of him dining with Mitt Romney at one point, thinking he was considering him for a job in the Cabinet.
And I think he took a lot of outside advice and from a lot of the traditional voices within the Republican Party.And as Trump systematically changed the Republican Party, the second time around, not only did he have a plan, but he knew who exactly he wanted to have serving in his government.And I think the Republican Party and his allies on the outside were really strategic, both in building up staffer rosters, people who could fill these jobs throughout the executive branch, people that were very loyal to Trump, who would be willing to serve in any capacity in the government.They had a plan; they had an agenda. …
There was no moments of, “Oh, what do we do now?How do we put this together? What's the transition?”They were ready to go, and so I think that he is much more capable this time around.He understands the job in a way that he maybe did not in the beginning of his first term, and he has a much clearer personal goal of what he wants to do with it this time around.It doesn't feel like anyone else is speaking for Trump anymore.It feels like Trump is very much in charge, and everyone else is executing what he wants them to do, versus any sense of team of rivals sitting around the table, debating what the answer should be.The answer is, do what the president wants you to do.
… Usually you think about somebody being screened for what do they believe, their ideology.Were they more being screened for loyalty in the second term?
This part is challenging because we don't always know the exact extent to which background checks and all of these things happened for these nominees, but I do think, this time around, certainly Democratic senators would tell you, that even those norms and precedents were eroded in terms of getting more fulsome financial information, for instance, for people that were going to serve in the Cabinet, to have a bigger, better picture of who these people were, what their financial conflicts of interest would be, things like that.
It does create—There is nothing to indicate that there's anything wrong with any of these nominees, but there is an ethical climate around this White House that I think is worth also considering all these other decisions they're making, in that unlike past presidents that typically put out an executive order outlining the ethical guidelines for how they want their administration to run and the standards by which people who will serve in their administration have to abide by—Barack Obama, for instance, did not want lobbyists, registered lobbyists, working in his administration—Trump hasn't done that. …
Can you help me understand the attorney general and why Pam Bondi would be chosen, where she fits into this?
I think part of this with Trump, yes, it is loyalty, and part of it is personal.They were friends.They've known each other a long time.It predated his time in office.She has served as his personal lawyer, another unusual arrangement to then make someone the attorney general.I think with Trump, with Bondi in particular, I think he just really likes her.They have a warm relationship.She seems to have a lot of personal affection and professional respect for the president, and I think that she handled herself very well in that confirmation hearing.I think she was one where, if there was any doubts among Republican senators, I thought they were very impressed by how she conducted herself, and I think that she would probably be in the orbit of who's advising Trump, certainly within his inner circle.
The Eric Adams Case
… For us, one of the first moments that really stands out is the conflict inside the Southern District of New York and the Department of Justice over whether to drop or suspend the charges against Mayor [Eric] Adams.Can you help understand why that moment feels like an important one and what happened?
Part of what I think is so interesting about what's happening is that it is actually all happening out in the open.This sense that we have to pull back the curtain and figure it out, it's almost like the Trump administration is saying very clearly what they're doing, and the pardon for the—the direction to the Southern District to drop the case against Eric Adams was an exchange for a commitment for tougher enforcement of immigration laws.They basically—they cut a deal.
And that's not normally how things work.It was to get in the way of career prosecutors in a corruption case, and I think it also did send a message that Trump's Justice Department is going to play these public corruption cases very differently.It's been very notable and interesting to me that you see people like former Sen.
Bob Menendez, who's been convicted in another trial, very publicly thanking the president and saying he's doing a good job to get corruption out of the Justice Department.11Officials who have been under scrutiny from the Justice Department, who would potentially like that to go away, have been very publicly solicitous of the president, sort of saying, “Hey, what about me over here?”
And it does erode trust in the system, right?If the president can pick and choose who gets investigated, that is a tremendous amount of power and one that could so easily be abused.It almost defies needing to explain it, right?If the president picks and chooses who's corrupt in the country, then confidence, the public interest and confidence in the law, I think, can erode pretty quickly.
They direct the acting attorney general of the Southern District to drop the charges, Danielle Sassoon, and she writes this letter back explaining why she doesn't feel that she ethically or legally can.12What is the view that she's representing in that letter?What's the conflict that's going on inside?
12
I think she represented the view of the Justice Department for the past 50 years, that there should be independence in these investigations, that the president should never play a role in publicly or in any way putting a finger on the scale for any case, particularly in a public corruption case, and she was sort of standing up for the career establishment Main Justice lawyers there.
I think one of the things that did surprise people is sort of how quickly it all folds, how many lawyers have either resigned, fired, quit; the idea that there could be more of a resistance to the president inside the system.As someone commented to me, I didn't realize how fragile the system was, right?If the president is really intentional in what he's doing, there isn't much people like her can do to stop him other than resign.
Tell me about that, because she is not the only person—she gets fired.And tell me that first.She gets fired, and that's [Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil] Bove writing to her.What is the message that is coming when they say, “OK, that's your view, but that's not the policy of this administration”?
Yeah. “You work for the president.You work for the president,” is the message that that sends.I also think that it is notable that, for lawyers that have not left, who have stayed, many of them have been reassigned.They have taken lawyers who were career experts in things like environmental law and reassigned them to immigration cases, really, one, you could argue, would make some people miserable and make them want to quit, even if they weren't being fired, and two, that it's also dramatically redirecting the priorities of the Justice Department, which the president certainly is within his rights to do.All presidents have priorities, but taking off people that were known for doing one type of law and putting them into something else, it was sort of punitive, right?There's no really good reason to do that other than to punish someone or make them want to quit their job.
As you said, a lot of people end up leaving.A number at the Southern District, but then also at Main Justice, senior leadership ends up departing.Tell me about that and the signal that that—
I think that it is not atypical, certainly not atypical when parties change, particularly in the White House, that there's going to be a level of turnover at the top.I think that it happens sometimes at a slower pace over the course of a term of a president that these changes would happen.I think it was the message, and I think a lot of people got the message.And look, there was a lot of people within the Justice Department that didn't want any part of this, that would rather quit than have to countenance trying to play ball with a president who was going to lead the department in a way that they believed was fundamentally not the case.
So I think that a lot of people had hard choices to make.I don't think there's any regret, at least as we sit here today, from the Trump administration yet about what he's doing to the Justice Department, and frankly, you don't see much public reaction to it yet either.Again, I think these are the types of very important internal government actions that are happening, but people aren't really feeling in their day-to-day lives, so it's hard to make that connection between what's happening in Washington and why it matters.
Yeah.You think about the Saturday Night Massacre or other moments where the threat, even in the last 20 years, where the threat of mass resignations would be enough to deter a president to change a policy, in the [George W.] Bush administration or even the first Trump administration.13And you're sort of suggesting he senses power differently now.
13
CBS News: What was the Saturday Night Massacre?
I think that—I do.I think it's true.I think he looks at his party in Congress and thinks, they're not going to do anything to push back against me.I think you're seeing it happening with fights in the courts, where he wants to get things to the Supreme Court, because I think he has a level of confidence that the 6-3 court that he largely shaped is going to rule more favorably in his favor.
I think that the conservative media ecosystem, I don't think we can undercount here, has created a really vibrant media space for Donald Trump to be able to promote his own messages now.And there are way more influencers or people who are creating conservative news shows that amplify the Trump message, so I think that he feels more powerful not having to deal with more mainstream media.You can talk to all sorts of media and never talk to mainstream media, and he is very media-accessible.
But I think Trump specifically and the Republican Party more broadly feel like they have their own amplification media system now, and that has also, I think, been very empowering to him, that not only can he reach more people with his message, but he's in control of it, too.
The attorney general sends a memo early on, where she says, “If you don't agree with the policy, you don't want to put your name on a brief, you should leave,” and refers to the attorneys in the Department of Justice as his attorneys, as the president's attorneys.14How different a view is that from the way the Justice Department had been seen?What was the message she was sending in that memo?
14
Department of Justice: Office of the Attorney General Memorandum
… I think the quote from one Trump administration official, at one point, was they want “trauma”; they want to inflict trauma into the executive branch.15I think this is part of the point that it's not just about reducing the size of the government, but it's about employing people into the government that are much more loyal to the president's agenda.I think there has been a sense that yes, the president is a political figure, but much of the executive branch exists to serve the public interest, so having those independent checks or having people that operate not under direct control of the White House was inherently a good thing, even if they were serving ultimately the president's goals, or if the president wants to prioritize something like immigration, of course the Justice Department would prioritize that.That is not unusual.
15
But there is a level of loyalty demand, a sense of retribution for anybody that dare speak up or defy him, and I think a willingness to fight people in a way that I'm not sure people were anticipating.For instance, the attack on big law firms, right?The ability to say, “If you do any business with people I don't like, I'm not going to do business with you,” this sort of tough-guy deal making, I'm not sure people were prepared for the extent to which Trump would take it.
I think that people knew he was going to be more partisan.People knew he was going to put more political demands on the executive branch, on these agencies, but they really seem to be going pedal to the floor, as much as they can possibly do, I think because they also know that they're not going to win all these fights.It's just not possible.Nobody bats 1,000 in politics.You know you're going to lose, so do as much as you can because maybe you win 40% or 50% or 70% or whatever you do, but you need to do as much as you possibly can, knowing that there will ultimately probably be some constraints put back on that power.
Elon Musk and DOGE
How unusual a figure—and we're thinking about this in terms of the law and the way that the government is organized—how unusual a figure is Elon Musk?
I can't think of anyone you could even equate him to in American political history.There's just no one else like him, and it happened relatively quickly, right?He was not someone who was long a figure in Republican politics.It really happened largely during the 2024 campaign, in which he aligned so closely with Donald Trump and quite literally was living at Mar-a-Lago for a time.He has unfettered access to the president.He has been given more power over the federal government than any other private citizen has ever been given.He has untold financial conflicts of interest because he does so much business in his private enterprises with the federal government.He is now in some ways overseeing agencies that were investigating some of his companies or seeking to regulate it or give them lucrative contracts, and he also owns a social media company in which anything he says can be amplified out to 300-plus million users around the globe.So he has unparalleled access, he has unparalleled money, and he has unparalleled ability to get a message out.
And I think you saw an early test case of that after the election, but before Donald Trump was sworn in, where they were supposed to pass a somewhat not interesting bill to keep the government open, a funding bill on the Hill, and Elon Musk tweeted out that he didn't like it, and the whole thing nearly collapsed.So he also has real-time power in that when he says something, people are really responsive to it.
I think he also has the ear of every Republican on Capitol Hill because he can single-handedly finance a primary campaign against you.He can single-handedly have social media campaigns run against you.I can't think of a single check on Elon Musk in America today.Do we think Donald Trump's Justice Department would ever investigate Elon Musk?That seems almost comical of a consideration to think about.So he operates sort of above the law.He's not been elected.He's not gone through a Senate confirmation process.He is in this Trump-created role that has already given him more ability to shake up the federal bureaucracy than basically anything in modern history.
I guess he does embody that promise of Trump, that the government is broken, that he's going to, and in the case of Musk, come in with a chainsaw, visually literally.There's something that Musk represents.
I think so.And look, he's an amazing innovator.He's one of these businesspeople—it's like he is the future, right?You think of Elon Musk, and he's trying to build a better world, and he's going to space, and he's building futuristic cars.And I think probably prior to the election, he had a much higher view from the public.He really was one of the icons of American business.He's an extraordinary figure.
But I think that the demand of business and the demand of government are fundamentally different, right?The demand of business is to make money and to grow, and the demand of government is to protect your people, whether that is to keep them safe through a national security lens, make sure that they have health care or jobs, food.And so I think applying that sort of lean-and-mean idea of business to federal government isn't always going to work because yes, there is inefficiencies in government, but sometimes those inefficiencies exist because it might be inefficient, but it's helping the maximum amount of people.
If you think of how they were wrong about it but how they looked at Social Security and they thought that these checks were being paid to people that were 130 years old, and they're not; that's not happening.But the idea that you could just have one person go into something as sensitive as the Social Security system and start tinkering with it, I think should give a lot of Americans pause.That is not power that has ever been given to people.
And it's unclear, again, with the conflicts of interest, giving access to the Treasury Department databases, to the Pentagon, to Social Security, it is not as if—there's nothing known that's nefarious about that, but that's the kind of power that, typically speaking, there's a lot more scrutiny when you give people like this these kind of roles in government, and again, with Trump, it's like, “He's with me, he's cool, and that that's all you need to know.”And for most Republicans, that's all they need to know right now.
Another thing that we've been thinking about, another way to think about Musk, is when it comes to cutting spending on things, which is traditionally where you would go to Congress, and a lot of people thought he'd create a commission, and they'd give recommendations to Congress.But it turns out, as I understand it, that there was a theory inside the Trumpworld.Russ Vought sort of is identified as having built it or advocated for this idea of impoundment, of not spending, that the power is not in Congress; it's in the White House.Can you help me understand Vought and what the theory is and why that would potentially empower somebody like Musk?
The spending fight, or the spending debate, does tie back a bit to the unitary executive theory because there is also a theory that, yes, Congress has the constitutional power to appropriate and spend the money but that the president has some power if he thinks that the money that Congress is spending is not good for national security or has some other objection to it, and there are anecdotal examples throughout history of presidents putting a stop on funding for a military program or sort of individual ways that the president has done it.And that power does exist.
But again, it's one of those powers that I think that Russ Vought, who's a former [and current Office of Management and Budget] OMB director, is someone who thinks that the president should have much more authority over how these dollars are being spent, particularly within the agencies, that Congress appropriates the money to the executive branch, to these agencies, but the president doesn't have zero role in this.
And frankly, Congress seems to be OK with that.Congress just recently passed a stopgap funding bill to go through September, and that was an opportunity to either codify the cuts that Donald Trump is making or at least try to restrain the president and say, “Hey, you can't cut USAID funding, or you can't do this,” and there was nothing in there to that effect.
And part of what Democrats were trying to fight for in that was they were trying to get policy language inserted into that stopgap, to try to put some handcuffs on the president's ability to just stop funding that's already been approved by Congress.And they didn't want to do it.So again, does the president typically have the power to stop funding that Congress says, “We want to spend money on this”?No.But if the president does it and Congress doesn't say anything, then what happens?Then the cut happens.
If the co-equal branch is not exerting its power, then the power that's been taken is power that's been ceded.
Do you think that USAID was a test case?Did they choose that to be first?
Yes.I think the USAID was both a test case for how you could close an agency, but also one that had been a frequent target for conservatives in the past, for a lot of the activities and programs around the world that it funded.I think closing it also spoke to Donald Trump's more America First isolationist view.It is very easy to prey on American sentiment that feels like we spend too much money abroad, so a lot of this spending, I think, looked like smart financial decisions.Why are we sending money to Africa?Why are we sending money to China?This money should be being spent here, even though it's a small fraction of what the U.S. government actually spends.But yes, it was absolutely a test case.
I would also put into the test cases the shuttering of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, another agency that had long been the bane of conservatives, that they fought the creation of it.They didn't like its existence.There was court cases making it easier for the president to fire the head of the CFPB.And just showing up and saying, “Stop work on everything you're doing,” and effectually stopping that organization, was another example of, like, “How far can we push this?”
Another one I would point to is the recent shuttering of the U.S. Institute of Peace, which is a nonprofit corporation chartered by Congress, funded by Congress, that again, the White House showed up—DOGE showed up at the door and said, “We're going to shut this down, and we're going to reduce it to its minimal need.”And so all of these are sort of pushing the boundaries.And again, Congress is saying nothing. Congress is saying nothing.
Again, these are being pushed to the courts.But I think that there is a decent level of confidence that some of this, especially for a court that seems to have a pretty expansive view of what presidential power should look like, will ultimately side with the Trump administration and say, “Yeah, he can do it.”The counter to this, too, when you talk to Democrats, the concern is, even if they say, “Hey, you couldn't have done that,” if three years from now, it works its way through the courts, and they say, “That whole thing you did with USAID you shouldn't have done,” it's so much harder to build it back.
So taking the baseball bat and just shattering it into pieces is a lot easier than taking all the individual pieces and trying to put it back together.So even if Donald Trump is ultimately unsuccessful in some of these legal challenges, he might still have practical victories in eroding or basically eliminating parts of the government that he didn't like to begin with.
And in this town, what was the shock like when word went out that all of these employees at USAID were going to be put on leave or going to lose their jobs, when DOGE shows up, when the name is being taped over or taken down off of the building, what was just the sense here?
I think it really was shock.Again, Trump campaigned on reducing the size of the federal workforce.I think that they thought it was going to be done in a more measured way, similar to when [former President] Bill Clinton did it during his time, where there was a significant reduction in force in his presidency, but it was done through a process; it was done through buy-in from the agencies.I think you did see some pushback from Cabinet secretaries to the extent that Elon Musk was doing things, like, “Hey, hey, hey, we need to make some of these decisions within our own department.”
But I do.I think there was a real shock of it because I think that so much of what USAID does or did was the soft-power element of American power around the world, was helping the poor, people who needed health care in countries around the world, essentially to build up American resilience around the world.If we ever need them, they'll always have our back because we've been out there supporting people all around the world.
And I think that that's, again, just part of an ideology that Donald Trump completely disagrees with and wants to torpedo, and I think that they were very successful with it.I think that USAID in Washington did seem like one of those establishment, sort of bipartisan support, regularly funded by Congress, not a ton of scandal.It seemed to be working, and just gone.And I think that the quickness with which it could happen—nothing happens fast in Washington, right?Or they say there's two speeds, glacial and lightning fast.This is lightning-fast stuff.
And this is the “shock and awe” part of it because just the shuttering of USAID, that alone could—you could do weeks of stories about the implications of that around the globe.Just the shuttering of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, just any one of these agencies is a really far-reaching, fascinating story.But when you have a dozen of them—and they're not done, right?This is a real-time thing; these changes are still happening in real time.I think it's really hard to sort of internalize, to really understand how deep the impact of these things could be, because it's happening so fast.
And I think the other thing that's amazing about it is that you would think if you're going to shutter an agency in a previous world, you would go to Congress.This was an agency created by Congress; the funds were coming from Congress.How does this implicate the separation of powers when they take apart USAID?
I think it is deeply significant, but I also think, again, if Republicans on the Hill are not willing to push back on the president, then it's going to happen, and I think that it is also really changing the reality that, for a long time, a lot of foreign policy was bipartisan.The role of America in the world was not particularly contested, at least on Capitol Hill, at least for the people that were funding these agencies and these efforts abroad and this foreign spending.There was always pockets on both the left and right that were questioning this money, but the consensus, right, the mainstream consensus is that this was a good thing, that America having a strong presence in the world is a good thing.
And I think that is also what a lot of these actions are testing is, what is America in 2025, right?What does Donald Trump want America's place in the world to be?It's not just the dissent that it's creating here in America, but on a global stage, these things are happening in a way that I think are stunning people who had been traditional allies.You see the ripple effect of closing USAID all throughout Europe.There's this sense that the U.S. is withdrawing from the world, retracting the power that it once had.
And I don't think people fully know what comes after that.Like, there is this sense of even with the shuttering of USAID, it's like, OK, well, now what?What comes after this?And I don't even think Trump has fully articulated what that is.And it certainly, at least within the foreign policy community, there is a deep level of uncertainty, and also, I think it's going to become a lot more, as so many things have become, much more polarized and much more partisan.And I think that sort of bipartisan unity you've seen in a lot of these foreign affairs or global affairs starts to disintegrate.
If you asked them, why would they say that they didn't go to Congress?Did they not think they could get it through Congress?Did they think Congress was broken?
They probably couldn't have got it through Congress, right, and Congress is kind of broken. ...I don't think it would have failed in Congress because they didn't have the support.I think the opposite.I don't think that they had the support on Capitol Hill to shutter USAID.And if you would have, for example, said, “We want to do this the right way.We want to go through Congress.We want to pass a law.We want to go through appropriations process,” that could take a year and a half, right?That could take two years.Congress does not move fast, certainly with the idea of shuttering an agency.
Look at the Department of Education, right?There has been legislation for 40 years on Capitol Hill to shutter the Department of Education, and it's never gotten a critical mass amount of support.Certainly to get it through the Senate seems almost impossible.And I think Donald Trump looks at those trappings of power, the Senate filibuster, he’s like, “I don't need to deal with that.I'm not going to be held back because [Sen.] Chuck Schumer doesn't want me to shut down the Department of Education.”So they're just going to do it.
And so I think that it's also forced a lot of their opposition to sort of expand their minds of what can happen, because I do think Donald Trump is doing things that even people that were expecting change were like, “Well, he's not going to do that,” but it's like, “Oh, no, he's doing that,” and he's going to do more of that.
And we haven't seen it yet.Like, if there is a check on Donald Trump, if there's something that says, “Oh, I need to pull back, or what's the restraint,” I don't know what that is yet.We haven't seen it.He still is very much in the honeymoon phase of his presidency.His favorability ratings are starting to drop, but I would argue that that's more in relation to economic policy that he's enacting than anything necessarily related to the changes in the federal government.I think people still, at this early stage, see that these changes could be good, that the way they're pitching it at least, a smaller, more efficient, more accountable executive branch is a good thing.But I think by the time the dust settles and it's clear what this new executive branch looks like, it might not actually be what a lot of the country was hoping for.
And the way you've been describing it, Congress has just ceded that power to the executive.
Yeah, and I don't think it's over.Look, Trump hasn't had yet a single legislative fight on Capitol Hill.All of this stuff we're talking about has been through executive action, actions taken independently by him and Congress just sitting there and saying, “OK.”The one thing they've done is the stopgap funding bill.I don't consider that legislating; that's just keeping the government open.And we're going to find out.
One of the tests of his power, I think, is going to be tested very soon, in which Republicans—and they're going to have to do it on their own votes—want to extend his tax cuts, and they want to do a whole bunch of other big policy in there regarding immigration and energy.One big, behemoth, beautiful bill, I think the president will call it—that's going to be really hard to do.He's got a one-vote margin, maybe two votes in the House.52 votes in the Senate.This is when you're going to need almost—you will need unanimity in the party to get this kind of thing done.
And that's going to be really hard to do, so the limits of Trump's power might become more apparent very soon if they have to scale back the ambition of this legislation, or it has to become more than just one piece of legislation because they can't get it done.And there were signs of that.There are indications that it's not all-powerful forever in that when right after the election, when that funding bill fell apart, I think it was something like 30-some Republicans voted against the plan that the president wanted, and that was like a, “Oh, OK.”There are still Republicans who are willing to say no to the president's plan if they don't like it, particularly on economic policy.
So I don't think that there will be no reality checks on Donald Trump's presidency, but in the short term, there have not been any reality checks.
Yeah. And it's sort of the inverse.If you think of other presidents who say they fail legislatively and then they turn to executive power, and with Trump, he's turned to executive power right at the start.
Yeah. And this might be too boring for your audience, but I think—this is what I call boring but important.There's a new majority leader.John Thune is the new majority leader.He is largely untested.He's been in power for a long time.He's very popular.Senators really like him.But he's going to have to pick some fights with the president, and that is one other potential area for conflict.
And I think, look, when Donald Trump was president the last time, he went to battle often with Mitch McConnell.He wanted Mitch McConnell to change the filibuster rules in the Senate because he was real tired of Senate Republicans not being able to pass his agenda.I think it's very likely that John Thune is going to face those filibuster pressures, and I don't know if the Republican Party can withstand it.
There is also—in the budget reconciliation process, it has to go through a very prescriptive, obscure, difficult-to-understand legislative process for what gets ruled in and ruled out, and there's a way that you can break that system, by overruling the parliamentarian.It's happened before.It's not unprecedented.But I picture John Thune in the Oval Office saying, “Oh, Mr. President, we can't include that because we'd have to overrule the parliamentarian,” and that being the norm that Donald Trump is going to say, “Oh, John, I'll never make you overrule the parliamentarian”?
So the further erosion of congressional power is very much on the table, especially as these leaders, like John Thune, Speaker Mike Johnson—also a very sort of junior leader in terms of, he hasn't been in the job that long—how much they are going to be willing to stand up to the president, especially as he's wildly popular in both of their home states.
Thank you.So let's set aside Congress for a second because the other opposition, if Congress is not presenting opposition, there's all of these lawsuits—
Yeah.
—around USAID, around dozens, if not more, of other things that the administration is doing.Help me understand the response from the lawsuits and the courts.
Well, one that I personally think is interesting to see the outcome of, is one of the actions that Donald Trump took was to fire virtually all the independent inspectors general in the federal government, which seems—I'm not a legal expert, but it seems pretty clear a violation of the law.The law very clearly states that you can fire inspectors general, but you have to notify the Senate.You have to give 30 days’ notice.He was like, “Yeah, I'm not going to do that.”
So these inspectors general are suing to get their jobs back, but what is interesting is that they might get their jobs back but then just to be fired.But if you talk to the people studying the case, it's like, “We're fighting for the process.”Like, that it matters that the president follows the law; that it matters that the president follows these statutes, even if this stuff seems very small.
And that is just one, I think, of the—it's clear to understand, you fired all these people, independent watchdogs, who basically exist throughout the executive branch to identify fraud, waste, abuse, and investigate potential wrongdoing in the government, exactly the kind of people you think Donald Trump would like to have inside of his government for someone who says that they want to root out waste, fraud and abuse.And the ability to not just fire them, but then, what does he want to do with the office?That's one of the big question marks here, too, is, OK, these people have been fired.Do they get their jobs back, yes or no?And then also, if they don't, does Donald Trump let those functions of government atrophy?Do we just live in a world where there's no inspectors general anymore?Or does he try to put people in these jobs that are also more partisan political actors?So I think that's one of sort of the bigger question marks about, what is ultimately the end goal here?What do you want to do with this power if you ultimately win in all of these cases?
Yeah.And I suppose that's another independent sort of check that he's trying to take out, with the inspectors general.
… The role of inspector general was created by Congress.It is a response to the Watergate scandal.In the years after Watergate, Congress, at the time, was controlled by Democrats, and they passed a number of laws, and the inspectors general is one of it.
And it's an interesting role in government because it's one of the few people that have almost a direct line to the president and to Congress.Congress works very closely with IG offices, and often Congress will ask IG offices to conduct investigations that Congress doesn't have the staff or the power or the ability to do because they're not housed inside these agencies.
So firing the IGs, again, isn't just about creating a less transparent government if these roles are not filled but also really cuts off a channel to Congress to be able to have the ability to do sort of accountability within the executive branch, too, so it's kind of a two-fer for Donald Trump.
So how much of a threat are the courts to all of the things that they're doing?They're hearing cases about whether Musk was properly appointed, about whether you can just take apart USAID.I mean for—and with Congress on the side, for the White House?
The court system is basically the only check right now, because if you consider that the president isn't as swayed by public opinion because he's not going to be on a ballot again, you have Congress sort of taking a back seat to ceding this power, and it's really the courts.And I think that's also why you see the attack on judges, sometimes by name, and also, more broadly, the ability of the judicial branch to stop or put holds on what the president's trying to do.You already have Republicans on Capitol Hill introducing legislation that would ban the ability for any judge to do a nationwide injunction.You have people like Elon Musk suggesting that these judges should be impeached for taking actions that stop the president's agenda.I think that's highly unlikely.The impeachment process is deeply inefficient, and that is one of those areas where I think the limits of Donald Trump's powers would be tested.I do not think that Republicans are willing to start impeachment proceedings for any judges, and certainly not for the simple offense of just ruling against the Trump administration.We don't live in that world.
Trump Takes on the Courts and Law Firms
The other thing that's interesting, as you said, there's attacks on judges. There's the ability to appeal.There's possibly the chance that they could legislate some sort of solution.But he also goes after lawyers and law firms, and he issues first an executive order … with Perkins Coie. …And then we'll talk about Paul, Weiss [Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison].Tell me about what those executive orders were doing and what message they were sending.
Yeah. I think you could—this is fascinating.This is a little bit outside of my lane of expertise, so I'll talk about it more from the political than from the legal.But a lot of these law firms that the president has targeted employed Democrats or people that worked on cases that were against his interests, so part of it goes back to that retribution thing, that Jack Smith's law firm was one that it was targeted, taking away security clearances from lawyers and firms, but also very aggressively sort of trying to tell law firms what they can and cannot do, and I think it is creating havoc in the legal community right now for how big firms are going to weather this.And I think that the thing that people have to keep in mind is that a lot of these big law firms get their money from big corporate interests, and big corporate interests right now don't see a lot of advantage in picking public fights with the Trump administration, especially when the president is very willing to sort of pick winners and losers and use the power of the White House to sort of punish individual actors or companies.
So I think law firms are under a tremendous amount of pressure, certainly from within—from within their own legal colleagues, to say, “We should fight this.”But then the politics of doing business in Washington—if all of your clients are about to flee your firm because the president doesn't want to do any business with that firm, that is a really difficult bind to be put in, just from a business perspective.
So you can see that a lot of these big law firms that deal with hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars of cases, of foreign government interests, the president has the power to sort of bring them to heel.And the fight within firms of who's going to fight the Trump administration and who's going to get onboard I think is creating huge divides in Washington right now and is, again, I think one of the biggest stories happening in government.But again, it's hard to really drive home why telling a law firm that they have to do certain cases or things, how destructive that can be, again, to the confidence that the law is the law, and it's not just subjected to the political whims of the executive.But Trump pays no mind to that.
And I think he sees this moment, for a lot of people that have been his critics or have been his political opponents in the past, to sort of come to the table and make a deal, and I think that Trump would look at something like that Paul Weiss conversation as a big success.And again, what I think is so striking about this moment is how much of it is happening in broad daylight, right?This stuff isn't happening in the dark of night in parking garages.People are releasing statements.There's photographs of them in the Oval Office.
All of it is happening in public, which I think helps Trump in many ways, because I think it's harder to explain to the public that maybe this isn't the most ethical way to run government or maybe you should have concerns about what the president is doing when the president is the one telling you what he's doing, right?He's very forthcoming about this, and I think it's harder for people to connect the dots that something could be wrong when it's all happening in broad daylight.
And is it just retribution against a firm that he doesn't like, or is it also a message to firms that might get involved in challenging things that the government is doing?
Sure.The chilling effect is worth acknowledging, not just within these law firms but within government, too, right?Part of the firings is in the IGs or other people in the special counsel's office.If you're sitting in government right now, and you see wrongdoing, what's the incentive to speak up or raise your hand, right?When you fire all the watchdogs, when you kind of shut down these offices, it is absolutely sending a message that we're not interested in what you have to say.Whistleblowers right now would not feel a lot of incentive to come forward.
And the same, I think, is true with law firms, in that it's like, look, if you want to do business, right, if you want to do business in this town, if you want to do business with this administration, you'd better not do business that goes against this administration.And it seems the quiet parts are all being said out loud.
And when that deal was made, the Paul Weiss moment, what was the reaction?16How powerful a moment was that?
16
The New York Times: How a Major Democratic Law Firm Ended Up Bowing to Trump
I think there are people within the law community that are horrified by it, and I would say that you are seeing—there's Marc Elias, who's one of the most prominent Democratic lawyers in town, where he put out a statement saying that, “This is not just about Trump and law firms.This is about the rule of law.This is about democracy itself.And firms will be judged, and lawyers will be judged about how they conducted themselves in these periods.”And I think there's some truth to that.These are big, existential, foundational questions about this country, about the rule of law, about how business is done in Washington, that are all being pressure-tested.
… But it's not like all of the law firms got together and decided that they were going to oppose this or speak up, and I guess, internally, in Paul Weiss, they were saying other firms were ready to take their clients.
Yes.And I also think there is an element—if you want to negotiate with Trump, if you want to do business with his administration, I don't think that corporate interests see any value in public criticism.Trump is very sensitive to public criticism.And so I think even if firms or corporations or interests before the government are fighting this tooth and nail, a lot of that is happening behind the scenes.They don't want to have press conferences about all the legal challenges.The corporations are trying to stay out of politics in ways now that are—you're seeing them tie themselves up in knots because the president is so retributive and so willing to single out a company or an actor or a player that I think that it also is sort of having a chilling effect in how business does business in Washington.
People don't really know what to do in this moment because the president is so ultimately unpredictable that you can't—and you can't take any assurances from anyone in the administration unless you hear it from Trump himself.
Yeah.It's really remarkable how much power has changed, and the ways that he operates power in ways I think people didn't expect.
No.
They thought, like, maybe an FBI investigation but not that you would potentially shut down a whole law firm.
I think that there is this sense that presidents, modern presidents, have always acted with some element of restraint, that once you become president and the pressures of the office, that you see yourself as leading the whole nation, that you see yourself as representing not just the country but the idea of America here and all around the world, and Trump is just a really unrestrained figure.I don't think he feels beholden to any of those expectations of how the president should look or act.Look at reports that they're going to have corporate sponsors at the Easter egg hunt at the White House this year.He sees ultimately an ability to make money from the office in a way that presidents have shied away from in the past.Usually they go on to make a lot of money after they leave office.A willingness to sort of do things that could enrich the president, right, and things like launching a meme coin right before he becomes president of the United States.Things like that, that I think are sort of shocking.Opening the door to corporate sponsorship events at the White House, where you get their logo and, “Welcome to the White House.17Brought to you by Coca-Cola.”
There's a level of disregard for what had been acceptable ethics in how politicians conduct themselves in Washington.Sort of what was broadly seen as the right thing to do, or the legal or the ethical thing, and none of those roles apply to Trump, and understandably.He is a figure unlike no other [sic].… So it doesn't seem like a shock that he doesn't feel bound by these restraints, by Congress or by the law or by past precedents or the way that it's always been done or norms.You hear a lot about norms.Trump won by shattering all of that stuff, so why would he feel like he has to stop now?
Deportation of Venezuelan Migrants
And one of those areas that he campaigned on, where he's going to exercise a lot of power, or try to, is on immigration, where suddenly, it seems like in a short period of time, a lot happened in the beginning, but suddenly, in a short period of time, people with green cards are arrested and talks about it being pulled and then it's going to lead to this moment with the Venezuelans being flown to El Salvador.Help me understand their approach to power and what the administration is doing when it comes to immigration.
I think when it comes to policy issues, the president and everyone in his administration believe that so much of his victory was tied to immigration; that they truly believe that this country does want tougher immigration laws; that they want fewer people residing in the country illegally.And that is the biggest campaign promise of sort of deliverables to the people that Trump wants to keep.
And again, I think they are willing to push the boundaries of the law to get it done.Deporting people without due process, without ever stepping before a judge, again, things that past presidents wouldn't do.And even in the cases of some people potentially having legal residency, but having criminal records, being removed from the country, again, is a bit of a “shock and awe” campaign, right?He's pushing the envelope of deportation politics further than I think past presidents have done.And I would also say his top border guy, Tom Homan—and he said this, and I think it's true—is that one of the ways that they felt like they failed in the first administration is that they didn't defend what they were doing enough in immigration the first time around, so it was easier for it to be vilified.
And I do think you see, this time around, way more of a robust communications strategy around deportations, much more rapid response, much more on offense.Tom Homan does media all the time, all the time, defending the actions of the administration.You have people like the Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, going on these raids, these very public shows of cracking down on immigration.
And it's very unapologetic, and I think that that is by design.They want people to see these images of the deportation planes.The White House account itself, on social media, is putting out videos of the sounds of people boarding, boarding deportation planes.It's sort of crass, in some ways, the way they have done it, but I think that these are the images that they want the country to see.I think that they see this as wildly successful.
And in some ways, I think that this is where they are pressure-testing the willingness of the public to go along with these kind of things, and I think that there is a sense that it is easier to convince people in this country that people that are not citizens aren't due the same rights as the rest of us, right?I think that that, as a political argument, not as a legal one, I think that they feel like that's a pretty easy case to make.
And again, these are going to be tested in the courts, but I think, in the court of public opinion, I don't think that any Republican right now feels like they need to sort of slow down on the immigration front.
What are they doing when they invoke law from the 1700s, the Alien Enemies Act?18Are they looking for loopholes?What are they doing when they're—
18
Well, I think that they're trying to test, again in the courts, how far the president can go to affect immigration policy under the guise of national security; that it's not just about immigration; that there's a broader issue at hand.I think that's why you hear Trump and many of his allies often refer to the crossings at the border as an “invasion.”That is a very specific choice of word that they're using, and I think part of it is also building up to another potential, or another ongoing legal fight, to undo birthright citizenship.It's all tied together, in terms of immigration.I think that Trump sees that birthright citizenship should never have existed and that using words like “invasion” or national security arguments is maybe the best argument they can come up with to try to make it harder for people to become citizens.
Some of these people could be deported or removed.There's process to do it.But what do they want?They want it faster?They want to not have the due process?
Well, where I think that public sentiment and the facts are on their side is that deportations were really inefficient and that Joe Biden did oversee a massive wave of immigration over the border, and the country didn't like it.So I think that if you—the president certainly used the “M” word, “mandate,” on many things, but the closest thing I think he would come to actually having a mandate is on immigration.And I do think it's that simple.I think people want fewer illegal immigrants in the country, period.
And these planes, then those planes, where they're saying these people are members of a dangerous gang.19That's a powerful place for him to be politically.
It is. And it's a dangerous place to be.Take Trump out of it.Just the government's ability to, without due process, without a judge, without a ruling, say, “You're an enemy of the state, and you have to get out,” that's a pretty aggressive interpretation of presidential power that I don't think aligns at all with sort of constitutional views of due process and the rights of people residing in this country, even if they're not citizens, to be held to the same legal standards of our court systems.
So yes, that is, I think, one of the most provocative and potential for, again, eventual court pushback against the president.But I think you have to push as hard as you can on immigration law because even if you don't win them all, hopefully, I think, in the end, you will have a system in which it's harder to cross the border, in which it's harder to seek asylum, in which it's harder to stay in the country illegally, and that law enforcement is given much more resources to find and deport these individuals.
And I guess the question is, if they are testing the court system, or if, as what will happen, which is they have picked a very popular—what they see as a very popular issue, as a very strong resonance, “We are protecting America from criminals who are in a gang, and we're getting rid of them.The courts are getting in the way,” and if you want to pick a fight with the court, or delegitimize them, or criticize them, that seems like that's a strong issue for them.
Yeah.And I think you see, with the court system now putting injunctions, or trying to stop these deportations, or trying to slow down what the Trump administration is doing, I think you see that same pushback now being pushed against the judiciary, like, “You don't get to tell me what to do.”And part of that, I do think, is public opinion may be on Donald Trump's side in some of this.So use that, right?Use the power of, “Hey, the country elected me to do this, and you're some judge no one's heard of telling me I can't.”
But ultimately, I don't think that Donald Trump can get around the court system, unless you take it to the extreme, in which Republicans in Congress would be suddenly willing to impeach all these judges and reinstall Trump loyalists, and we're just not there.We're just not there.The court system is still the best and strongest check against the Trump administration, and it's just too soon to say if it could withstand the challenge.We just don't know yet.This is the real-time test that the judicial system is feeling, along with the legislative branch. …
Trump and the Judges
I guess that must be part of what they're doing, is testing how far could I push it?What will happen?What will the judges do?Like, can they actually?How much power do the courts actually have, if they play sort of cute with it?
I think that Trump really wants to get as much as he can before the Supreme Court.There just is a broader—I think the president specifically and conservatives more broadly think that a 6-3 conservative court is much more likely than at any time in the past generation, certainly at least since the [former President Ronald] Reagan era, of ruling in a more conservative fashion.And it’s difficult to get things to the Supreme Court, right?There's thousands of court cases across the country every year, but the Supreme Court only takes up a very finite amount.
So smartly picking the legal fights that might get there is part of this strategy, and I think that they think, if they can ultimately get some of these cases to the Supreme Court that they will ultimately decide in the president's favor.I think the ultimate showdown would be if the court ruled against President Trump in some capacity, and he would just say to the Supreme Court, “Defy that court order.”Then we would just be through the looking glass.We'd be at a place where we haven't been before.
You said that that impeachment is not really going to happen.It's not a very good tool and one that they can actually use, but that the president attacks the judge, says a lot about him as a sort of “radical left-wing lunatic,” the talks about impeaching him.20What does that moment say?What is he doing?
It's certainly intimidation, right?I think that there's an element of the president that people know.And look, when the president attacks you publicly and by name, there's an element of risk and danger there, especially for judicial figures that have seen more violence towards judges in recent years.This is also a pretty volatile political climate, to be singling out people as sort of anti-government or radical or dangerous.
So I do think it's an intimidation tactic.It can also have sort of chilling effects of people who want to serve in these roles, but ultimately, I think that, again, having an independent branch of government, which I think that some of Trump's top allies would argue that it shouldn't be as independent as it is, is just going to be really hard for him to get around the courts.It's just hard to do.It's long.It's arduous.It does not give constant satisfaction or instant satisfaction the way that I think a lot of both Trump supporters and Trump opponents would like to see, but he's going to still have to work that process.
That's why they're trying to work the judges so much.And again, I would point to the fact that what Republicans are against now are the same judicial tactics that they often used when Barack Obama was president, to stop presidential orders going through that they didn't like.So this is a power that they have used when they were in the minority to great effect, but now, when they're not in the minority, they want to take it away.
... Is it a message that, to that judge, to other judges, “You'd better think twice”?Because I think of the reports after Jan. 6 of some congresspeople who might have voted to impeach him but were afraid.
I don't have any evidence to suggest that that would affect the way a judge would rule, and I think that, more often than not, I think that judges take their independence and their role very seriously.But I don't think that it improves sort of the political climate or the perception.Again, faith in institutions matters a lot here, and I do think the president—maybe this consistent and sort of endless attack on the judiciary now, and we'll see how far it goes, does further erode public confidence to just say, “Hey, maybe all these institutions are just corrupt.”Like, what are we left with at the end of this, right?How do Americans feel about their country?Do they have confidence in their courts that you get a fair shake, that you get due process, that it isn't all just political? …
Is he changing the political groundwork or lay of the land, as far as how especially his supporters in the party view the judiciary?
Yes.And I think it's sort of bigger than that in that all of this stuff that Donald Trump is trying to do to reshape the government—traditionally, when people want to do big change, the buy-in has always been bipartisan, under the theory that you want the country to have faith in what the country is doing, right?It was about public trust.So you didn't want to have one party reshape Social Security, or you wouldn't have one party write the campaign and election laws.For the big stuff, the existential stuff, you want some element of buy-in.
And again, Trump is throwing all of that to the side, and I think what is dangerous about those moments, the reason why you wanted bipartisan buy-in, is you wanted people to continue to have faith in all of these systems, right?Well, if both parties said it was OK, then everybody can agree that this is good for the country.
And again, Donald Trump is not going to be president for forever, and he is going to spend four years trying to win these fights, to expand presidential power, and we don't know what's on the other end of it.But we do know, at some point, the party that isn't his is going to control the White House.And think about the unintended consequences of politics.I think the best example that I cite to is, back in 2014, when Democrats, under Harry Reid, blew up the Senate filibuster, and Mitch McConnell, the modern-day political philosopher Mitch McConnell, said at the time, “You're going to regret this, and you're going to regret it sooner than you think.”21
And I think about that quote a lot to what's happening now, because I think right now, a lot of Republicans and a lot of Trump supporters in the country are cheering this on, and they love seeing this change, and they think that Donald Trump is doing exactly what they elected him to.
But if you fundamentally change the nature of the presidency, we don't know what happens on the other end of that.And it might be the Republican Party that is ultimately creating a new type of presidency that ultimately, one day, super-empowers a Democratic candidate that might advance ideas and agendas that they support, right?So if you're not for the power when the other party has it, then maybe you shouldn't be for the power.And I think that part of why I think what Trump is doing is so fascinating is he doesn't seem to be considering at all those longer-term consequences.It's just about him.It's about his presidency and what he can do in these next four years.
You're saying it's not just a small change.These are dramatic changes.
I think it's seismic.I think that Donald Trump has, at least right now, the capacity to remake American government.I try to avoid hyperbole when you're talking about things in American politics, but if he is successful—what if he's grandly successful?What if the courts all rule in his favor?What if at the end, the SCC and the FEC report to the president?There's no inspectors general, and he can fire and hire whoever he wants throughout the executive branch.That is just a tremendous amount of power, centralized into one individual, that maybe you could go back and say a president like George Washington or the early presidents had.But in modern day, that would just be unheard of for a president to have that kind of power, particularly in a country that has virtually no limits on how much money can go into its political system.It just creates a completely different playing field for how the country is led.
That's fascinating.Yeah, especially if he gets the court alongside, then Congress isn't going to be able to come back and change some of those things.
Yeah.
So let's just end with the court, and especially with John Roberts, since he gets called the Roberts Court.What is the moment that he is facing, and the dilemma, the decisions or the challenges?
I think the existential dilemma that John Roberts faces is that the Supreme Court, the public's faith in the Supreme Court is at historic lows right now, that it used to be part of the—part of government that people felt very highly of, and that's not the case anymore.Trust in the Supreme Court has eroded greatly over the years.I also think that he, as the head of the judiciary, these attacks on judges are serious and he put out a rare statement saying as much to that effect.22
And I do think that he has a direct interest both in keeping the country together, which is something you've seen in his past rulings.You might point to his decision to uphold the Affordable Care Act, as, “Is it worse to break it than to—does it do more damage to the country,” right?And I do think that he takes the job very seriously, that he thinks about the country broadly.And look, Donald Trump might get another Supreme Court Justice, right?He's got four years in office.It is not inconceivable that he also leaves the presidency with a 7-2 … conservative court. …
So I think John Roberts is also being tested, and also in a way that, frankly, chief justices haven't been tested politically like this in the modern era.There was huge battles before the Supreme Court in the past, but I think that the public nature of it, the personal nature of it, is not something that fits the sort of personality in the way that John Roberts has conducted himself, which is really almost like a private figure.He does not speak out often.He does not seek the limelight.It is not something that he—the justices sort of are these obtuse figures to most of Americans.
And so I do think that there was already a lot at stake with how the country views the court, but I think there's even more at stake if we get to that sort of redline moment of a court ruling that the Trump administration says, “We're not going to abide by that.”
… He did speak out.How unusual was that for him to issue a statement, relatively quickly after the talk of impeachment?
I think how quickly he responded was very notable, because I cannot say this with absolute certainty, but I cannot think of any other time that John Roberts in his tenure put out a statement in quick response to something that was happening more broadly and politically in the country, right?The court just tries to exist above politics, and I think it speaks to the severity of the moment and how serious the moment is that he used that to weigh in publicly in a way that he virtually never does.
At the end of the day, what does the court have that could be a check?What is the power that they actually have in making one of these decisions?
I think they have tremendous power, and I think that, just for one example, like birthright citizenship, which I think for many people seems like a pretty cut-and-dry, the Constitution says birthright citizenship is a part of the Constitution and legal.I think that there's an unpredictability to the court.I think that [Supreme Court Justice] Neil Gorsuch and [Supreme Court Chief Justice] John Roberts and people have sometimes been swing votes.So I think there's this sense of, like, you don't really know how the court is going to rule.You never really know how the court is going to rule.
And again, I think it goes to public confidence.I think there's also what happens if they issue a ruling that the country vehemently opposes, right?What does that do to faith in institutions?What does that do to civic society?A lot of this stuff, it's not always the laws that get broken, that are what erodes things.It is sort of those norms and standards of democracy, of the way that we believe the country should conduct itself.And when those things erode further and further and further, it just changes the nature of what American democracy is, how it operates, what it looks like and how much faith people have inside of it.
That's one of the questions we have at the end is, can we just rely on the courts to maintain this system?Do they have enough power on their own?Or is it inside that world of politics, and where the court is, and where people are?
In the short term and in pragmatic terms, yes.The court is really the ultimate check on the president.If the world changes—and the world changes a lot—if the president becomes deeply unpopular, if Republicans on Capitol Hill say, “We can't support these actions,” it's quite possible that Democrats could flip a chamber of Congress in the midterm elections, and suddenly you have a minority party with subpoena power and an ability to extract all kinds of investigations and hearings.
So the design of the system is to never have no checks, right?It's built into the system that there will be checks.It's more about this question, again, of power and norms.Like if a Congress doesn't stand up to a president, or doesn't—and not stand up to a president.If a Congress doesn't stand up for the legislative branch, its own role of government, not just its fealty to the president or a political loyalty to the president, to say, “Hey, the Constitution says we get to spend the money.We're going to fight for that power.”If the power is not fought for, then it's handed over, right?Power doesn't just disappear.Someone's going to try and take it.
And so I think you do see these clashes of the three branches right now that is testing not only our civic institutions but our public faith in those institutions.It's testing the legal system, and it's testing presidential power, and it's testing sort of how far Congress is willing to go, to let all of it happen, before it says or does anything.
And as you said, the courts coming in three years later, like how much can they reconstitute some of these things?How would they even ever order USAID to do what it used to do?It's like the president's operating on facts on the ground, while these cases are—
He might win even if he loses, right?If you even look at shuttering the Department of Education, what if, three years from now, they say, “He couldn't have done any of that,” but they've already broken up the department and housed it in different agencies.Or if it's functionally been operating at a much lower level, what's the end result of that?And I think that the paradox that Republicans see right now is that I'm still not sure that the Democratic party could run on building back up government, right?That's still not exactly where the country wants to go.
So I think that he benefits somewhat by having an opposition party that doesn't have a really good response to what he's doing, and I think that there is a disconnect.And USAID is an example of that, where I think that Democrats on Capitol Hill raced to the USAID office, and they did sort of a press conference outside of it and combating it.And I talked to one Republican strategist, where he was like, “I hope the Democrats spend the next two years being the party that supports foreign aid.”Like there is a pressure valve on this that Democrats can look like they're fighting for government, that they're fighting for big government, that they're fighting for more spending.
And I don't think they have figured out entirely how to articulate the argument that what Trump is doing is bigger than that.It's not just about spending.So I do think he benefits in the real-time political moment of having a pretty weak and divided minority party that hasn't quite found its footing on how to push back against this.
That's interesting, yeah, because it doesn't seem like the democracy or the rule of law is an issue that is resonating in the way, like—
Democrats tried it, right?The 2024 election, the Democratic Party tried to make about democracy, about this big idea of “institutions matter” and that Jan. 6 mattered; that you don't want people that are going to campaign as strongmen.Trump campaign’s joking that he would be a dictator, right, that we need more strongmen in the world.He was very open about this.Democrats elevated that every chance they got.They thought it would appeal to swing voters, and it didn't, right?
So I think that also leaves the party at a little bit of a loss in how to make the counterargument to what Trump's doing because I think they're like, “Well, we just tried to do that a couple months ago, and it didn't work.”I think the counter to that is, now that Trump is doing it, now that it's not just a theoretical campaign argument, that you're seeing the real-time effects of it, it might start to change both how the public sees it and how the opposition talks about it.
America’s Future
So what is this moment that we're in, that we've been talking about?We started with the Justice Department, or speaking at the Justice Department, with what he did on the first day, with consolidating control inside the executive branch, with challenging the lawyers who were threatening him and the courts and pushing aside Congress.What does all of this, together, tell you about the moment we're in?
It's almost like Trump has hit the fire alarm in Washington, in the federal government.Everyone's trying to race to get down, and you don't know who's going to survive.I think it's an extraordinary moment.It is an unprecedented moment.And I think that there is so much unknown, that at least within the Beltway, within the confines of Washington, I think there is a lot of fear because I don't know if people feel confident what's going to happen in the courts.
I think that, again, it's not entirely sure the full “why” of what Trump is doing.Like, OK, say you win.What are the policy goals you're trying to extract?Where is all this challenges to executive power taking us?I think there is a lot of profound questions of just, what does it mean?What does America mean right now?And Trump has a decidedly different view about it.But he has articulated it and won an election with it.
And so it's hard to say that he shouldn't be doing it, right?I think he feels that he has a mandate to do these things, and he has built out a political infrastructure that is ready, willing and able to execute a lot of the demands that I think would not have happened in his first term.So he understands power in a way now that I don't think he understood as sophisticated as he does now in his first term.I think he knows exactly what he can do now, and he is willing to execute it.
And the inability to see around this corner I just think creates a tremendous amount of uncertainty in what's going to come at the end of it all.
Thank you.Yeah, it's fascinating, because whether you agree with what he's doing or not, you can't say he's not doing anything, or he's not changing Washington.And a lot of presidents have run on changing Washington and haven't.
I will say, and I compare phrases with one of the guys I talked to, that one of the conservative legal scholars I talked to who supports the unitary executive theory, said that prior to Watergate, you did actually have these more powerful presidents.There was more executive power in people like LBJ [former President Lyndon B. Johnson] or FDR [former President Franklin D. Roosevelt] and that a post-Trump presidency might harken back to days of just bigger, bolder presidents, that the president will become much more accountable to—that elections will matter, in some ways, matter more, because people will fully hold the president accountable and that they might be able get more done, right, that a presidency can be more effective than it has been without these constraints and checks and balances on it.
I just think that that also carries with it an inherent amount of risk, right?I think that it does mean that it is a government that is less transparent, that is less accountable to the public, that there's a chilling effect on anybody within the government, like whistleblowers that might want to speak out.It's a darker, less transparent way that democracy would operate, but I think supporters of it would also say that it would make the president much more capable of affecting change in real time.
And maybe, in a modern world in which governments might need to move faster and do things quicker, that that might be beneficial to the speed at which the world is moving.If you look at Congress, Congress hasn't been able to pass laws—Congress hasn't been able to pass a major immigration law since Ronald Reagan was president, right?The inefficiencies of Washington are real, and Trump is capitalizing on a moment where I think the frustration at the inefficiency is to be able to fix the immigration system, that Congress spends too much money.All of these senses that the country has is like, he's captured that, and he's executing on it.He's just doing it in a way that I do think—I don't think we can understate that he could profoundly change the way power works in America and the way that presidents operate and how much they're able to do within the rule of law.
Thank you.That's a great answer for us, especially on that idea of immigration and that frustration, and maybe you can see it on both sides, too.You can see that, without those constraints, it's easy for them to close Social Security offices and cut things, because they're going so quickly, that cause backlash.And people who might not care about process might care about decisions being made so quick, but there's a positive.
But then, think about it, too.If an [Sen.] Elizabeth Warren type wins the presidency in 2028 and suddenly inherits all of this expansive presidential power and politicized agencies, the way that they could, in the reverse, go after Wall Street or break up banks.It could imbue so much more power in a president to do so much more in ways that we have not felt in our lifetime. …
Media’s Role
I have a question for you, which is sort of in line with what you were saying about the change in Washington, the time of great change.It's a time of great change in journalism, too.What's it like to report in Washington right now?How different is it to try to get anything, understand anything, talk to anybody inside the Trump administration?It seems to me run by the guy at the top, and he has one way of operating.But tell us a little bit about that, from what happened with the Associated Press to emboldened kind of journalists working in Washington now, if you could call them journalists.What's going on?And how different is it for you, trying to get to the story?
I think there's a lot of contradictions when it comes to Donald Trump and how he deals with the media, because in so many ways, he is the most media-accessible president of the modern era.He talks to the press all the time in a way that, even compared to his most recent predecessor, Joe Biden, just never did.So you can't fault him for that, right?He's not an inaccessible president.
What I do think is difficult is he is creating new functions of government, and DOGE would be a great example of that, that doesn't have any real structure.It's unclear who does press for them.It's obscure and murky by design, so it's really hard to do accountability journalism, about these functions of government.It's not that it's not being done, but yeah, it's harder.It's harder to get at what they're doing.
And I think they would argue that they are being transparent by posting the contracts they're cutting on social media and places like that.So I also think that—I think Trump benefits a lot from, again, low public faith and favor in traditional mainstream media, and he's also willing to pick fights with media outlets that, again, I don't think past presidents would do, sort of picking and choosing who gets to be in the press pool, removing organizations like the Associated Press, which is one of the most mainstream and nonpartisan news outlets in the country.23And I don't think that—I think he benefits from, again, that's the kind of action that might have caused public outrage 20 years ago, and I think barely registers a blip now in the broader public, that maybe, I think, a lot of people think we deserve maybe being pushed out of the room at times.
23
And I think that the president benefits from the ability to communicate and amplify messages through conservative media in ways that it—I don't think you can compare another president who had the same type of media, media system to communicate in.And he has former members of his administration having their own television shows.There's new cable networks.I think the president himself is able to speak constantly of any number of things that is on his mind and drive the news story.
And I do think that the thing that Trump is a master of, he's the master of it, is attention.He knows how to get and hold attention like nobody else.I think that so many past presidents have sort of struggled with, like, how do you get the people to care about this, or why isn't anybody talking about Build Back Better, or different things.And that's not a problem for Trump.He knows how to get people to focus on the things he wants to focus on, and he's a communicator like no other.I think his supporters would say they think he's an extraordinary communicator.I think it's partly because he derives so much attention from—the people that love him, tune into everything he says, and the people that oppose him sort of tune into everything he says.He does seem to capture the full political spectrum with everything he does.
And also, I think everything he does is so consequential, so you do see that there is a tremendous amount of engagement and coverage of what's happening in Washington right now.And honestly, a smaller federal government, there's less to cover.If you eliminate the Department of Education, it becomes a fundamentally different way to talk about education in this country.
And so you don't feel a sense of intimidation as a reporter when he attacks Peter Baker or Susan Glasser or Maggie Haberman on his site this morning, or some of the networks seem to be caving and paying him off so that he won't come after them?Do you feel any of that sense?Is there a chill in the air?They're after NPR.They're after PBS.They certainly got all of our attention.And the things you're talking about, about Donald Trump, are bread and circuses.It's not substance, really.Or substance is in there somewhere, but you have to separate the wheat from the chaff in an awful lot of ways against people who are extremely hostile to the idea of a free and aggressive investigative accountability press.What's that like, Susan?How does it feel?What do you think about that?
I can only speak for myself, but no, I don't feel a chilling effect.I think that Trump has the effect of sort of centering the mind of how big and important a story it is.Where I think there are challenges are some of the things they've done is firing people or shuttering things like FOIA offices, so the acts of journalism to try to get more information out of the government and the channels by which you could do that are getting tighter and more obscure, so I think that is a real-time challenge.24
I think that the broader challenge that the media has right now is there's just a lot less of us.There used to be a much more robust press corps in Washington.There used to be people that covered all 50 states, local regional papers.You just had much more dynamic coverage and an ability for people to go really deep on stories that not all news outlets can do.I don't think people understand how minimally resourced and strapped so much of traditional American journalism newsrooms are right now, and I think that that reality also benefits Trump because there isn't as much thorough, detailed coverage on a lot of these niche issues because a lot of those news organizations simply just don't exist anymore.
And so there's a tremendous amount of power on national news organizations to cover all of these stories, and it's almost an impossible job.The velocity with which he is creating news, which all of these stories matter.Every single thing Trump is doing is important and worthy of coverage, but there is such a breadth and volume of it that I think it's—the challenge is, how do you connect the dots, and how do you make people understand what's happening in a way that makes sense and in a way that feels nonpartisan and truthful?And I think that is particularly hard to do when the public, in part because they've been—when the public doesn't trust the media, in part because the president has been attacking the media for the better part of the past decade, and I think that does have an eroding, corrosive effect on how people see journalists and the job they do.
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