The FRONTLINE Interviews
Susan Glasser
Columnist, The New Yorker
Susan Glasser is a columnist and staff writer at The New Yorker and a host of the Political Scene podcast. Previously, she served as editor of Politico and editor-in-chief of Foreign Policy magazine. Glasser is the co-author, with Peter Baker, of The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017–2021.
The following interview was conducted by the Kirk Documentary Group's Mike Wiser for FRONTLINE on March 25, 2025. It has been annotated and edited for accuracy and clarity as part of an editorial and legal review. See a more complete description of our process here.
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Trump’s Speech at the DOJ
We’re thinking of starting the film at the moment when President [Donald] Trump goes to the Department of Justice and speaks at the Great Hall. Can you help me understand that moment, what he’s doing as he goes there and he speaks for over an hour?
Yeah, I think Donald Trump is announcing to the world, to Washington, to his own executive branch employees that the era that began with the disgrace of Richard Nixon and the forcing from office of a president who sought to use the machinery of government on his own behalf, that that era is over, very definitively, and that from now on, there is no concept of an independent law enforcement function in this country; that it is not only politicized but exists purely to carry out the personal will of the president.
And I think this speech is a reflection of that.It’s very unusual for modern American presidents to go in person to visit the Department of Justice.I believe the last time it was done prior to this was President [Barack] Obama, late in his tenure, going to a ceremony for then-Attorney General Eric Holder.
Donald Trump’s clear personal agenda in returning to the presidency, I think, is to control the levers of this agency that, more than almost any other entity aside from his first vice president himself, stopped him from challenging the 2020 election.Remember that had his acting attorney general not defied him, had the previous actual confirmed attorney general literally quit and left after publicly breaking with Donald Trump over the 2020 election, had those officials at the top of Trump’s first Justice Department not stopped him, he was determined to roll ahead with his effort to overturn the lawful results of the 2020 election.And I think it’s very personal for Donald Trump.
He also talks about being prosecuted by them, and he uses phrases “lawfare” and “weaponization” as describing what was done to him.Did that prosecution and what he was expressing there also must make it very personal?Because he almost went to jail.
Of course. Donald Trump was not only the first convicted felon in American history to become elected president of the United States, but he was under indictment, under federal indictment by the Justice Department that he now has control over.And he has made it very clear that one of the agendas of his presidency is to almost literally wipe away the record of those prosecutions, to seek revenge and retribution.
Those are words he used in the 2024 campaign—to seek revenge and retribution not only on the top officials of the previous administration, but even low-level people who were just career civil servants at the Justice Department, at the FBI, who participated in those prosecutions of him as part of their job; they didn’t have control over that assignment.
And the purging of the Justice Department and of the FBI is very explicitly a part of Donald Trump’s agenda.
It’s interesting, because whether you think that what he’s doing is right or wrong, the administration would say this is what he ran on as far as the Department of Justice, that he sort of has a mandate to take charge.
Yeah, I think that’s absurd.First of all, Donald Trump actually doesn’t have an overwhelming mandate from the voters for anything.I think when you look at what the actual votes were compared with the hyperbole of what he’s saying, it was slightly under 50% of the country that came out to vote, slightly under 50% of the electorate that did in fact elect Donald Trump president this second time around.1So that’s not an overwhelming mandate from the country for anything, never mind to destroy America’s tradition of independent law enforcement that is not simply there to carry out the personal whim of its top executive.So let’s be clear that there’s no mandate, overwhelming mandate to do anything.
More specifically, I think you’ve seen Trump himself and his own advisers say a whole array of things, which is not uncommon from Donald Trump, but let’s take, for example, one of the most controversial things that he did when he came back to office, which is on the very first day, he issued pardons to virtually all of the Jan.6 rioters and insurrectionists who attacked the U.S.2Capitol at his behest in order to stop the certification of Joe Biden’s election.
2
Well, Donald Trump had promised in a general sense during the campaign that he was going to release people he now calls “martyrs” and “heroes” but was very unclear about what the contours of those pardons would be, and in fact you had his own vice president, JD Vance, publicly saying in a televised interview just days before those pardons that, quote/unquote, “obviously” they would not include the violent offenders on Jan.6.Well, of course that didn’t turn out to be the case, and Donald Trump immediately contradicted his own vice president on the very first day of his second presidency and said he would pardon all of them, including violent offenders, members of radical militia groups, people who literally assaulted police officers with flagpoles.
Trump’s Executive Orders
I was going to ask you about that later, but let me ask you about that now.What was the message that that sent on the first day, to pardon everyone?
Yeah, look, extremism in defense of Donald Trump is no vice, according to Donald Trump.The law exists as a tool that he should be allowed to wield on his own behalf.But essentially, he’s saying, “If you transgress the law on my behalf, then it’s OK.You can do anything, and I will pardon you for it if it’s for me.” And I think that’s a very chilling message to send, and it’s consistent with the broad theme that he has struck since returning to office, which is this idea that, "I am the law; that if I say it’s legal, it’s legal." There is no independent mechanism.There is no independent rule of law; that "I am the leader of this country, and I have such sweeping powers that whatever I say is the law."
Is there an implied threat in doing that?
Well, when you tell thousands of offenders, including many violent offenders, that essentially you can do this crime and get away with it, you’ve got to imagine that that is very thrilling and empowering for those who might seek to do violence on Donald Trump’s behalf in the future.
Let’s go back to that moment at the Justice Department. We talked to Norm Eisen3, and in that speech, Donald Trump refers to him as “scum,” says he’s “vicious,” says he’s “violent.” Can you help me understand that moment, to single out—and it’s not just him—but to single out somebody at the Department of Justice, to use language like that?4
Donald Trump has long used the language that’s more commonly associated with the world’s dictators, tyrants and autocrats to vilify and degrade his political enemies in extremely alarming terms, and Trump, in his first term, did this as well.He has repeatedly called opponents, including sometimes people from within his own party who stood against him, “human scum,” dehumanized them in ways that, again, no one’s ever heard from an American president in public—words that are more commonly used by people like Kim Jong Un.
And the reason is that it takes you outside of the boundaries of a rule-of-law society when you have the most powerful man in the world speaking of his opponents, not just as in the opposition, but actually as … dehumanizing, right?It’s just the language of dehumanization.And so here’s this moment in the Great Hall of Justice, the president of the United States, and he’s speaking of someone who is pursuing legal means to stand against Trump’s actions and, again, accusing that person and by extension all those who oppose him of being subhuman, of being not human.
And there are the chief law enforcement officers of the United States, the head of the FBI, the attorney general.He’s naming people.He says the press, what they’re doing must be “illegal.” Does that seem like a message to them?
Yeah, I think one of the more striking things for me in that speech that Trump gave at the Justice Department was calling out the press and saying that what CNN and MSNBC are doing in covering him in a critical, independent way was, quote/unquote, “illegal.” And it is extremely worrisome as a general sense, I would say, to have someone so powerful make such comments, but it’s specifically threatening coming from Trump now that he is asserting, essentially, that he is the law, and therefore, that suggests that he would go after journalism entities in a way that he didn’t even try to do in his first term.5
He’s always used inflammatory rhetoric.I think the difference we’re seeing so quickly on a variety of fronts out of the gate in the second Trump term is his willingness to accompany that very destabilizing and inflammatory rhetoric with a series of actions that are testing the boundaries of executive power, that are asserting sweeping claims of executive power and taking actions now that move well beyond the realm of rhetoric.
So the first day, you talked about the pardons.He also begins that first day with a raft of executive actions, and it starts in an arena with a cheering crowd, and it continues on at the White House.A lot of presidents start with a lot of executive actions.Do you think that first day, the executive actions, his approach to them was different?Was there something notable?
… No president has ever started with the number of executive actions that Trump has undertaken in his first few weeks returning to office, and he always preferred the notion of the executive order because it plays to his definition of the presidency as almost a kind of monarchical exercise, and he loves the dramatic flourish of a signing ceremony.There’s no messy congresspeople to be negotiated with.It’s just him and a pen, and let the lawyers fight it out later about whether what he asserted was legal.
That being said, I would say that Trump has gone out of his way with these executive orders to deliberately invite legal challenge and constitutional challenge about the powers of the presidency, and that is something that is much more explicit than it was eight years ago when he first came into office.
He has, for example, unilaterally declared in one of his day-one executive orders that birthright citizenship, as guaranteed in the 14th Amendment, would actually no longer apply to people he doesn’t believe it should apply to.6And that’s, again, a sweeping assertion of authority.He unilaterally pulled the United States out of certain international treaties and organizations, for example, the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Accord, things like that, where he has long claimed that the presidency has almost a sort of unchecked power to operate.7
7
The New York Times: Trump Withdraws U.S. From World Health Organization
And then there’s the whole category of executive orders that we’ve seen from this president that really have no precedent at all that I’m aware of, and you might call this bucket of executive orders the personal revenge and retribution bucket of executive orders.And he started out by just targeting a couple of law firms by name that he was mad at for employing or even used to employ attorneys who had worked against him or had prosecuted him in the government or had worked on the Mueller investigation that looked into his dealings with Russia in his first term—but again, targeting specific law firms by name.One example, again, the blanket pardon of January 6ers, that was another day one action by Donald Trump.
So just a blizzard of actions to go along with a blizzard of words, and Donald Trump, in his first day back, probably said more words than Joe Biden said in public in his entire last month in office.
The phrase that comes up a lot is “flood the zone” and sometimes associated with Stephen Miller.
Steve Bannon.
And Steve Bannon.And “muzzle velocity” and “shock and awe.” And there’s a lot of terms that get thrown out.Help me understand that strategy.Do you think it comes from Bannon or Miller or—?
All of the above.It comes from Bannon.It comes from Miller.It comes from Donald Trump himself.His strategy has always been to overwhelm and to sort of throw up as many things as possible at the wall.Donald Trump, for example, his playbook has always included to dabble in outrage.And if there’s one scandal that’s distracting from him in public life, his response, which is very different than almost any other politician I’ve observed over the last few decades, is, “OK, there’s one scandal.I’ll distract from it by creating another scandal or another outrage.”
And I just think that’s who Donald Trump is.That’s one of the things that he thinks works for him as a public figure, and I think it plays into the kind of playbook that his advisers over time, whether Steve Bannon or Stephen Miller, have constructed for him as a political figure.
The Unitary Executive Theory
Donald Trump is not a lawyer, but there are people around him who have an idea of the unitary executive, of the powers of the president.What does he walk into in terms of the theory, the legal theory that predates him and that he seems to—his administration seems to tap in to?
Yeah, look, Donald Trump, as you correctly point out, he himself is not an ideologue, a theorist, but he clearly has a deeply held personal belief that the law is anything he says it is, that he himself, as the president of the United States, ought to wield vast and essentially unchecked powers.
And that, I think, deeply held view is where he is most at odds with the basic concepts of our Constitution, which is all around the checks and balances inherent in American government, that no one branch of our government should have too much power, that it should always be constrained or checked in some way by countervailing forces, whether in the judiciary or in Congress.That’s just antithetical to who Donald Trump is personally.He might not articulate it in legal language.
Now, there is a movement of conservative lawyers—or you could say right-wing lawyers or even, I think at times, radical lawyers, right?I don’t know that “conservative” is really a good term considering how disruptive and not conservative it would be to employ this legal theory.
But basically, there’s been a movement among right-wing lawyers for the last few decades that has sought to place more and more unchecked power in the hands of the executive, and the shorthand for this is this notion of a unitary executive power.Under this, there are many lawyers in this Trump administration and surrounding Donald Trump now who would go all the way back to saying independent federal agencies created back during the New Deal, during FDR’s [President Franklin D. Roosevelt] era, “we believe that they shouldn’t have that independence.We believe that the president personally has the right to control those agencies.”
And so these are kind of testing, essentially, the boundaries of the modern executive branch as it has grown up, and many of these court cases that are resulting from the actions of Trump in his first few weeks back in power are very likely to reach the Supreme Court and to test this question of how unconstrained is the presidency.
It seems like some of the people around him think that—I think Mark Paoletta is one of them—think that they know how the court’s going to come out, and they look at8Trump v. United States and the immunity decision of only last summer.9How important was that decision in setting up this administration coming in?
9
Oyez: Trump v. United States
First of all, that immunity decision, you could say that was like the precursor event to Trump 2.0 in almost every respect.First of all, it helped to doom the court cases that were then pending against him.It essentially spelled the meaningful end of the federal prosecutions of Donald Trump, so in a very narrow sense, it laid the groundwork for him to become president without the threat of federal trial and conviction looming over him.
So they let him off the hook of these prosecutions, so in a narrow sense, that’s true.But I think even more broadly, the idea of this sweeping immunity decision as laying kind of the groundwork for Trump and his advisers to believe that the Supreme Court had essentially already granted him unchecked power.And now, it seems to me, that with many of these actions that he’s undertaking, he’s seeking to test the Supreme Court: “Did you really mean it when you essentially said that I was almost like a king?”
We talked a little bit about the Justice Department at the beginning.The decision of who he’s going to appoint, of [U.S. Attorney General] Pam Bondi; initially it’s Emil Bove; there’s Ed Martin as the U.S.attorney; there’s [Director] Kash Patel at the FBI [Federal Bureau of Investigation].Help me understand them and who he appoints and what message that sends to the top ranks of the Justice Department.
Yeah, well, first of all, I think that the initial selection of this Trump 2.0 Cabinet is very revealing about Donald Trump’s views of the Cabinet, what he’s looking for, what he’s not looking for.It seems to me that Trump does believe that he himself is ultimately the decider everywhere, and so in that sense, does it really matter if these are people who don’t have conventional qualifications for these jobs or even any qualifications for these jobs?He doesn’t seem to think so.
In his view, he seemed to be treating the Cabinet like a Fox News casting call and not an accident, in that sense, that he picked a lot of people who were actually paid Fox contributors, like his secretary of defense, who was a weekend Fox News anchor; or who appeared all the time on television; like his second choice for attorney general, Pam Bondi, who was a regular on that platform, defending Donald Trump and kind of showing the right aesthetic as far as he was concerned.
Remember that his very first choice was literally the former Congressman Matt Gaetz for attorney general, who not only had no qualifications for the job but had come to Trump’s attention in Trump’s first term as president by going on Fox News as a very junior member of the House of Representatives and night after night being the most outrageous, flamboyant and sycophantic in Trump’s defense on cable news hits.And of course, he was derailed by an investigation by his own House of Representatives colleagues into allegations that he was involved in underage sex and paying for it.10You couldn’t think of somebody who would less meet the threshold definition of someone who ought to be the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.
But I think more broadly, it does speak to Trump’s disdain on some level for anyone other than himself as being actually the decider.It’s partially one of the reasons, I think, why you had such high turnover in his first-term Cabinet.It’s why people seem to be selected for how they look rather than what they’re actually going to do in the job.At times, it’s why Trump has chosen people whose views might contradict his own on important questions because he just thinks, well, I’m just going to disregard their views.
I guess someone like Kash Patel, you wouldn’t imagine being confirmed by the Senate, but the dynamics in Washington this time are different.
Yeah, it’s definitely a measure of how successful Trump was on his first-term project of essentially finalizing and completing the hostile takeover—that’s what his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, once said in an interview with us—the “hostile takeover of the Republican Party.” That really was Trump 1.0.11
11
Lucid: Lucid Interview: Peter Baker
And so there was much more resistance, both among Republican elected officials on Capitol Hill, even among the Republicans who Trump appointed to senior positions in his Cabinet and in his government.He faced those constraints from within his party in 1.0.This time, even people who publicly had voiced qualms about perhaps the most unsuitable Cabinet nominees ever in history, in the end, almost entirely did not even cast votes against those nominees.I think that’s a measure of how far we’ve traveled in eight years.
She [Bondi] sends a memo that says, “If you’re going to be a lawyer in the Justice Department, the president’s word on what the law is, my word on what the law is, are binding, and if you don’t want to sign your name on something, it’s time for you to leave.” Was that a break from how we understood the Justice Department?12
12
Department of Justice: Office of the Attorney General Memorandum
Yeah.Look, Donald Trump is the ultimate divider—that’s why we called our book about him "The Divider"—because I think one of the things that’s a hallmark of his time in politics is to turn everything into a divisive question about “Are you with me, or are you against me?;” into a divisive question about “This is a matter of partisan politics.” And many very, very conservative Republican lawyers, they don’t believe that.And many people, I think, who believed that they were Republican Party loyalists, that they shared the ideology of the GOP, that they were working on long-term priorities that were shared by Trump and his administration, have been shocked to find themselves as well in the wood chipper because it’s personal loyalty, not loyalty to an ideology, that Trump and those surrounding him are after in this term, and they’ve been very, very, very explicit about it.And that’s the biggest difference.
And I think the most shocking break with America’s past and its tradition is the rupture between a government of laws and the idea of this president, which is not that we have a government of laws but that we have a government not only of men but of one man, this man.
The Eric Adams Case
It seems like a good example of that for us that was early on was the Eric Adams case and the conflict with the acting head of the SDNY [Southern District of New York], who was also a conservative Republican, a federalist.Can you help me understand that moment and why it matters?
Yeah.A fascinating example of a Democratic elected official in New York City accused of corruption figuring out, correctly as it turned out, that the way to get to Donald Trump and to get his sympathy was to claim that you’re being persecuted by the same big, bad deep state prosecutors at the Justice Department who had persecuted Donald Trump.13And I think this was a pretty concerted lobbying campaign by Mayor Adams to win the sympathy of Donald Trump with an argument like that.
But the deal that they came up with was one of the most transparent quid pro quos that you could possibly imagine, right.You had senior Trump Justice officials essentially saying publicly, “Yeah, we made a deal to drop this prosecution, and in exchange, he’s going to help us with our policy preferences.” And the rule of law is not subject to whether or not you ideologically agree with the policies of the president.That’s the thing: Either you have a rule of law, or you don’t.
And so that’s why I think you had many prosecutors inside the Justice Department who were involved in the Mayor Adams case quitting rather than carrying out what they themselves judged to be a nakedly illegal deal that was made between the Trump administration and the mayor.14
And when you read those letters—because they come out in almost real time, Danielle Sassoon’s letter and Bove’s response to it, and there are other letters from other lawyers who are involved—what do they tell you?15
15
Department of Justice: Emil Bove's Letter to Danielle Sassoon
Look, again, what they tell you is that Donald Trump’s assault on our traditions here is not an attack by an ideologue.It’s not that it’s a right-wing attack; it’s that it’s a profound break and rupture with our traditions that are nonpartisan, of independent justice in this country and independent law.
And I think the political scientists have a term for this.They say that many of the things that Donald Trump is doing are essentially hallmarks of a personalist form of government as opposed to a constitutional form of government, and the personalist is, I suppose, a polite, political science way of saying the person is Donald Trump.
But it’s really remarkable.And again, it immediately underscores the idea that there are going to be different standards for justice in this country going forward.There will be a standard of law for people who are against Donald Trump and then a different standard for those who are willing to do Donald Trump’s bidding.
So many people resign that the letters become public, and we sort of move on.Does that tell you something about power?Because I think about all of the other examples, even in Trump’s term, about lawyers threatening to resign, and that was a powerful threat, and Nixon and Bush and Trump.And here it happens.What does the result tell you about power?
Yeah, I think it’s told [us] Donald Trump has learned something about power in Washington between his two terms in office, and one of the things he learned is that you can brazen out almost anything, and he did appear to be constrained in ways that he is no longer constrained.For example, the threat of quitting: You mentioned that at the end of Donald Trump’s first term in office, he has the idea that he is going to replace the acting attorney general, who refuses to go along with his challenge to the 2020 election, with a more pliant acting attorney general, and he actually seeks to do that, and he moves to install Jeffrey Clark as his new acting attorney general because Clark has agreed to pursue the attacks on the 2020 election.
But he stops in this dramatic confrontation the weekend before Jan.6, 2021, and the reason that he stops is because essentially all of the top political appointees at the Justice Department who remain say, “We’ve joined hands together, and we will all quit en masse if you do this.” These are his own appointees.These are Republican officials.And that is a constraint.Donald Trump reluctantly—very reluctantly, according to the testimony that has emerged from that meeting—after a long time agrees not to pursue his plan to install Jeffrey Clark as the acting attorney general because of the threat of a mass resignation.
And there you are, literally just a couple of weeks into Trump’s new tenure, and he’s, like, “Never mind.That was a mistake.Actually, it turns out politically, I can survive anything like this, and I’m just going to brazen it out.”
I was really struck today, actually, in the midst of another Trump administration controversy over his national security advisers group texting with each other and inadvertently with a journalist about war plans in Yemen.16The response to this scandal immediately—there’s a quote from an unnamed senior administration official to a journalist saying, “We’ve learned that we can get away with just about anything that would kill another administration, essentially, if we brazen it out.” And I think that that is almost like a mission statement for this second Trump term.17
16
Elon Musk and DOGE
How unusual is Elon Musk and DOGE in American constitutional democracy in the way we’ve understood?
Well, people throw around the words “unprecedented” and “historic,” “extraordinary.” I think it’s fair to use those words in connection with the amount of power and influence being wielded by the world’s wealthiest man, Elon Musk, at the beginning of this second Trump term.I think that is a fair statement.I know of no other example of the wealthiest man in the world having this fusion with the most powerful man in the world.
Trump has delegated many of the powers that we would associate with the presidency itself to Elon Musk.He’s created essentially a made-up government agency that exists in no law, that has been authorized by no one, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and he’s shown that Musk, with essentially a very, very small handful of advisers, can take over the entire federal government and wield vast, unaccountable powers.
We’ll see, ultimately, how many of those powers are upheld by the courts, because almost all of them are being challenged in one way or the other, but you can already say that this level of access and this fusion between the interests of the elected president and the unelected billionaire, it just has no precedent.18
It really is remarkable, and it’s remarkable because he’s not only given powers that are remarkable inside the executive branch, but one of the things we’re interested in is he seems to be given powers over congressional appropriations, over whole departments under the theory of impoundment.Help me understand that part of it.I guess [Director of the Office of Management and Budget] Russ Vought was one of the architects of that, that there’s people behind Elon Musk.19He’s in the front with a chainsaw, but there’s a theory and a plan going on behind him.
Yeah, that’s right.Definitely, let’s just say that the image of Elon Musk wielding an actual chainsaw on the stage of CPAC [Conservative Political Action Conference] conference just a few weeks into Trump’s term, one of the most indelible images from the beginning of Trump’s presidency.20And just, again, so bizarre to see this South African billionaire leaping up and down on stage with a chainsaw while wielding a metaphorical chainsaw against the jobs of tens of thousands of federal employees, wholesale nearly gutting and eliminating agencies that have been authorized by the U.S.Congress for which billions of dollars in funding have been appropriated.
He managed to wipe out the vast majority of nearly all of the United States of America’s foreign aid around the world in just a few weeks and, again, on the basis of an extreme assertion of executive power that’s never been recognized.Not only has it never been recognized, but … in response to the excesses of Richard Nixon’s presidency, Congress passed a law, the Impoundment Act, I believe, of 1974, in which it said, “No, the president does not have the right to unilaterally decide not to spend money that Congress authorizes and appropriates,” and that “If he, the president, wants to not spend certain money, here’s a process which he must undertake in order to do that.” And none of those things have happened with that law.21… None of those things have happened when it comes to the billions in federal spending that Elon Musk has unilaterally canceled on Trump’s behalf.There’s been no orderly process.There’s been no notification to Congress of rescissions.22There’s been no deliberation, really, of any kind.
And there are other advisers to Donald Trump who don’t have the public prominence of Elon Musk but for years have been advising Donald Trump that they don’t think that that Impoundment Act that Congress passed in the 1970s is legal.
Well, again, that’s not how it works in our system, right?It’s not up to Russell Vought, who is Trump’s Office of Management and Budget director.It’s not up to Russell Vought to decide what is and is not legal and which laws he is and isn’t going to obey.And so now that will be tested in the court.
But it’s remarkable, because I think, first of all, it’s shown the vast power that Trump is wielding not only from the White House but with Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate.Even though the Constitution so clearly grants Congress the power of the purse, the power to appropriate money—that’s like the core power that Congress has—but did the Founding Fathers really envision a situation where Congress wouldn’t stand up for its own institutional prerogatives?That’s the world we’re living in right now, and I think that’s something that the founders did not appear to fully anticipate, the idea that partisan politics would take hold so thoroughly, that Republican Party interests and support for a president from their party would basically take precedence over their own role.
So you have seen basically Elon Musk tell Congress to drop dead, and Congress has sort of said, “OK, sure, yeah.Why not?”
Another point that strikes me as really important is that while Elon Musk is new to Donald Trump’s world, in fact was not a Donald Trump supporter until the 2024 election, and even partway through the election cycle, many of the people who have been around Donald Trump for years have been promoting this theory of sweeping executive power, even when Congress has appropriated money.23And there were test runs for this in Donald Trump’s first term that people might not have realized. There was a period, for example, when Trump unilaterally refused to spend and canceled U.S.foreign assistance to a number of Latin American countries and essentially dared Congress to do something about it.It didn’t do anything.That was right before, I think, the biggest test run of this in Trump 1.0, and that was, of course, his decision in the summer of 2019 to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in military and security assistance to Ukraine in the effort to politically blackmail the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in order to launch investigations of Trump’s political opponents.24And Donald Trump for months held back millions and millions of dollars’ worth of that military assistance to Ukraine.
23
The Washington Post: How Elon Musk came to endorse Donald Trump
Essentially that’s the same legal theory of the case that they’re now pursuing in a dramatic way all across the government.
Was USAID a test case?That was one of the first, a congressionally created agency with funds appropriated, and they don’t go to Congress and say, “Defund it.” I guess, why?And why do they do it the way that they did it?
I think the case of USAID is an extraordinary example of how this is a Trump assault on the prerogatives of government itself rather than a cost-cutting exercise.First of all, remember that Musk and his agency—this is called the Department of Government Efficiency—he said that he’s here because he wants to cut up to $1 or $2 trillion, depending on which day you catch him, in federal government expenditures.Well, if your job, if your goal is to cut costs, you’re never going to touch USAID; you’re never going to look at American foreign aid.Why?Because it’s less than 1% of the federal budget.25It’s literally the most inefficient possible way to cut government spending, would be to spend your time eliminating and gutting USAID, because it just doesn’t matter.
25
The Brookings Institution: What every American should know about US foreign aid
So I think the fact that this was the very first agency they chose to target in force underscores that this is not a cost-cutting exercise.It’s an exercise in power.I think it was a classic demonstration execution, right?We’ll kill one federal agency in order to terrify thousands of others.
And so that’s the way I look at it, as a very revealing choice by Musk and by Donald Trump, because it immediately communicated the word that—don’t be too credulous about what this is.It’s not about cutting costs, first of all.Second of all, the flouting of standards of legality and due process—again, this was announced from the very get-go in the peremptory, unilateral, lack of transparent way in which it was undertaken.Essentially, one day Musk and his handful of employees showed up at this agency and literally took it over, gained control of their computer systems and their information, locked out top administrators; and began issuing diktats that no one knew where they were coming from and whether they should obey them or how even they could obey them.
And the disregard, I think, for basic facts and due process is another thing we learned right away from this kind of ceremonial execution of a federal agency.
One of the main things that Musk said in public within days of taking over the agency was, “Well, look, this is an agency filled with waste, fraud and abuse.” As evidence of that, he cited an alleged $50 million worth of condoms that the U.S.government was supposedly sending to Gaza in the midst of the war between Israel and Gaza.Well, flash forward.No, of course there weren’t $50 million worth of condoms for Gaza, and honestly, to have that many condoms, you would have been giving every male in Gaza many, many condoms.26It’s just an absurd claim on its face.
And yet not only was that repeated again and again by Musk, by the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, by the time Donald Trump repeated it, it had gone from $50 million to $100 million in nonexistent condoms for Gaza, and this was the pretext being used publicly to explain why they had to get rid of all U.S.27foreign assistance.
27
The New York Times: 6 Inaccurate Claims Trump Has Used to Justify His Flurry of Orders
So I think it was a really important learning for all of us about the kind of power that was going to be wielded by the White House.
Ceremonial execution of a government agency—there’s something about it that’s about spreading fear.Russ Vought is quoted as saying he wanted—
“Feel pain.”
—"traumatized.” That was part of what was going on?28
Absolutely.Donald Trump has all the instincts of a natural-born authoritarian, and that includes understanding the demonstration effect of—whether it’s a ceremonial execution of an individual agency or of a targeting of vulnerable members of the herd, whether it’s a law firm or a billionaire that you can get to cave under, or whether it is going after individual members of the press corps or individual news organizations using a symbolic campaign in order to inspire fear in others—is exactly how Trump is governing.And that is the kind of techniques and tactics that I’ve observed as a journalist, as a foreign correspondent in other countries where there either was no democracy or rule of law.
Why would he go after the inspector generals [sic]?He goes after them en masse, and then he fires the USAID inspector general after he issues a report.Why?
Look, you could go down a list of independent power centers in Washington, and what you will see, I think, is Donald Trump and his advisers pretty systematically targeting individual power centers, whether institutions or individuals, who might challenge Trump in some way or have challenged Trump in some way, so that includes inspectors general at the various departments.It includes independent media at times.It includes independent agencies within the executive branch that he doesn’t want to wield independent power.
And remember that Donald Trump had already clashed with inspectors general in his first term in the presidency, so he was aware that this was the kind of possible embarrassment or check on his power that he did not want to have in his second term.
We talked to an inspector general who was fired who said, “We were a tool of Congress.29We gave them information.” And [Sen.] Chuck Grassley was an advocate for the importance of this.But Congress just sits by.What happened?
Well, it’s even worse than that.It’s not even just that Congress was just sitting by.Congress, you could say, was not sufficiently attuned in the four years between Trump’s two terms in office to what you might call Trump-proofing the system.They didn’t really move legislatively to enshrine into law certain things that they probably knew Trump might challenge.
But amazingly enough, when it comes to the inspectors general, actually, this is one of the things where Congress did pass a law based on Trump’s first-term challenges of the independence of the IGs.Congress actually did, in the Biden administration, this interregnum period, passed a new law that was more specific about what exactly you’d need to do in order to fire an inspector general, and then Trump went ahead and defied that new law anyway.
And in Congress, the Republicans in Congress?
Yeah, you’d think maybe they would take the president to court because he defied a law that they actually very recently passed, that a number of Republicans also supported, but you would be wrong.
Why do you think that people who had advocated for the power of the purse, for the independence of Congress or inspector generals [sic] who were Republicans don’t—have they changed their mind?What is it that has changed?
Look, I think it’s more about the hierarchy for them and, essentially, being seen as being loyal to Donald Trump has become the most important defining ideological characteristic of this Republican Party, certainly as it exists at the federal level right now, certainly as it exists in the U.S.Congress.
In other words, it’s definitional.To be a Republican today means, first and foremost, to be seen as being loyal to one man more than an ideology, more than principles that you claim to care very deeply about.And I’m sure many of those Republicans do believe that that was a good law that they passed, but they don’t believe it’s more important than Donald Trump, and they don’t believe it’s more important than their own career.
And I think we’ve all been contemplating the mystery of what happens to Republican elected officials when there’s a clash between their professed principles and the president, but I don’t think it’s as much of a mystery as we keep making it out to be.They perceive that Donald Trump has a much closer, deeper hold over their electorate, the electorate that they care about, which is their own party, than they themselves do, and as long as that’s the case, they’re not going to defy him.
But also, I think we have to reexamine, compared with eight years ago in the first Trump term, our idea that there’s going to be some moment when Donald Trump finally goes too far, and these Republican senators are finally going to say, “That’s it; I can’t stand it,” or at least the voters will reject him, and therefore they will feel confident to reject him.I don’t think that’s the case.I think that Trump has actually Trumpified the Republican Party and that, more or less, there are a lot more, if not the vast majority of these Republican elected officials, who are actively with the program now.
I don’t think there’s any kind of snapping-out-of-it paradigm, and I think that Washington analysis has been too slow to understand that we’ve got the wrong image in our heads.
Trump Takes on the Courts and Law Firms
… So with Congress sidelined, it seems like a lot of the action moves into courts, and you’ve talked about those lawsuits.Can you help me understand that?The president uses the word “lawfare” in a different context, but it seems like warfare in the courts.
Yeah, I’m not a constitutional expert.I’m not a lawyer.And I think there’s been a lot of bad predicting about what the Supreme Court was going to do.So remember when it was crazy that they would decide that immunity decision the way they did?Well, so, I can’t predict.
But what I think is remarkable, one way or the other, Trump has opened up constitutional confrontations with other branches of government across such a broad array of issues.He has basically, essentially invited the Supreme Court to weigh in on foundational principles of our government.
And so we exist at a possible hinge moment in terms of our constitutional system because he’s certainly invited the Supreme Court to make profound and far-reaching decisions that would actually fundamentally alter the balance between the different branches of government and to potentially make the American presidency far more powerful in an explicit sense than probably it’s ever been before.
The way things are now, which is down in the district courts, and there’s injunctions, and there’s temporary restraining orders, and there’s “hire these people back,” and it’s being stayed, what’s your assessment of the effectiveness of it, of where it sorts of stands, the lay of the land?
Look, you have seen a pretty concerted barrage of hate and complaints and vituperation directed at federal district judges, even appeals courts in some cases, that have gone against Trump.You’ve seen this from Trump himself, in some cases, from his close advisers, from Republican members of Congress, from the MAGA chorus, whether it’s Elon Musk on Twitter or the Fox News primetime hosts.
And these attacks on individual judges, on the idea, the very idea that a federal district judge has the power to stop a presidential executive order seems to outrage many right-wing Republicans who were not very outraged about it when it was a conservative judge stopping a Democratic president from doing something just a few years ago.
So some of that is new; some of it is hypocritical; some of it isn’t.In the civil rights era, you could say one of the defining features of American politics at that time was a lot of raging against judicial activism and judicial powers by white segregationist politicians who didn’t like the direction that the federal judiciary was going at that period of time.
So I think some of this political hot air surrounding the powers of judges is not really new in our politics.The thing that I hear many, many lawyers bracing for is the moment when Trump himself or his government actively defies decisions by judges, and we seem to be on a knife’s edge there, hanging in the balance is the question of whether he’ll be one of the first, if not the first president since Andrew Jackson to take that step of defying outright the federal judiciary.
The other thing that you will know but I don’t remember and that seems unusual is to use the full power of the executive branch to go after an individual law firm, to call it out by name in its own executive order.It starts with Perkins Coie.30Help me understand that moment.Is it a remarkable thing for him to do that?Is he trying to send a message to the people who might be slowing him down in his administration?Is it a way of responding to those?
30
The White House: Addressing Risks from Perkins Coie LLP
Yeah, Look, again, this is something—we throw around this term all the time, but there is no known prior example or precedent that I am aware of of the president of the United States targeting individual law firms in executive order after executive order because—for any reason, never mind the fact that he has what he considers essentially a personal political gripe with them.This is, I think, what people studying it would conclude is a classic abuse of power, to take the powers, vast as they are, inherent in the Oval Office, and to use them to advance your personal agenda as opposed to any definition of the national interest.
Does the national interest have anything to do with targeting Perkins Coie or targeting another law firm because it employs a former prosecutor who used to work with Bob Mueller?That’s not the national interest.We presumably elect our presidents to pursue the national interest and not their own personal interests.
And so I think it’s just really remarkable.The other thing is that it shows the presidential bully pulpit can be used not just behind a microphone or on television or even on Twitter, but the presidential bully pulpit can be used in the form of an executive order because not only are you going after the ability of an individual law firm like, say, Perkins Coie or Covington & Burling, to do business with the federal government, but you’re also sending a message, a chilling effect to all those businesses who might be considering hiring those firms as lawyers.Your intent there is to ruin the business of this law firm because you’re mad that it employed a person.
By the way, many of the people that Trump has targeted are people who were career, nonpartisan civil service officials.The idea that he seeks to criminalize people who were prosecuting him, who have been accused of no misconduct in their professional work, it’s extraordinary.
And if it’s designed to have a chilling effect, has it worked?
I think it has.That’s the thing that nine weeks into the Trump 2.0 presidency, as we’re having this conversation, that’s the thing that I think leaves me and many other people worried, is this question of civil society, and is it standing up for its rights and prerogatives in this second Trump term?
And on an array of fronts, Trump has probed and challenged and looked for weaknesses, and he’s found them.He’s found weaknesses among the billionaire owners of some of our largest news organizations.He’s found weaknesses among the leadership of private law firms who have caved to Trump’s demands rather than be targeted by him.He’s found weaknesses in leadership of Ivy League universities who have sought to protect their funding by making changes to their own internal policies and programs unrelated to the federal funding.31He has found, of course, many executive branch employees who are willing to defy their own personal principles in order to do what he demands that they do to keep their jobs.
31
The New York Times: Trump Battles Academia, but Especially the Ivy League
And so I think it’s a story about a man searching for almost unchecked power and finding people who will go along with it by putting enormous amounts of pressure on them.
… So in that case, a judge in the first executive order says it looks like this is probably not legal.And yet Paul Weiss makes a deal that they don’t fight it.32What does that tell you?
32
The New York Times: How a Major Democratic Law Firm Ended Up Bowing to Trump
Well, again, look, the social scientists have a polite term for this.They call this the collective action problem, and we’ve seen that, whether it’s Paul Weiss or other law firms that have caved under to Donald Trump rather than be targeted by him.
Look at the response of the White House press corps to the banning of the Associated Press from the White House press pool, one of the most clear-cut examples of a freedom of speech violation I’ve ever seen from a White House.33The AP, which is literally the backbone of our independent, nonpartisan, non-flamboyant, non-opinionated reporting in this country, the backbone of small newspapers and news organizations all over America, banned from the White House press pool from which they’ve been a member since the very beginning—I think back in Teddy Roosevelt’s time—because they refused to go along with Donald Trump’s name change, unilateral name change of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America.And they explained that; they laid that out.Their policy—by the way, not that different from other news organizations that weren’t banned from the White House press pool, like The New York Times or The Washington Post, but nonetheless targeted.Trump said, “Unless you”—very explicitly—"Unless you call it the Gulf of America, you’re kicked out of the White House press pool.”
33
And the collective action problem immediately kicked in, and other news organizations did not stand up for the Associated Press.Frankly, they clambered over the still beating corpse and said, “Yeah, fine, I’ll take your seat in the press pool.”34
34
Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press: Media coalition to White House: Restore AP access to press pool
I think that was just, again, without knowing exactly what the right technique here is, I think we can say pretty clearly that every time these organizations cave into Donald Trump, he’s not going to just stop there, and he’s kept going and going and going.
He’s amassing power as it goes along.If we start with the people resigning inside the Justice Department, you end up—nobody from Paul Weiss that I know of has resigned; there’s been no big partners that left in protest over them.35
Well, that’s the other takeaway, of course, that’s very painful from this period, which is that it turns out the people that we think of as having perhaps the most power and agency in our society, the wealthiest individuals in this country, the highest-educated individuals in this country, privileged partners at a law firm—how much money does an equity partner at Paul Weiss earn every year?—that these very wealthy, powerful, entitled individuals, they turn out to be uniquely vulnerable, perhaps more vulnerable, to caving into Donald Trump than rank-and-file civil servants.And this is a really—I think it’s a very painful lesson.
By the way, in Trump’s first term, we saw this as well.Many of the people who had the most power in Trump’s first administration, who privately opposed him, were the most reluctant to speak out publicly, whether that was Jim Mattis, the Defense secretary, or John Kelly, his White House chief of staff.By all accounts, they were privately very dismayed and concerned, and I certainly verified that in reporting for my book after the Trump presidency.And yet they almost never spoke out publicly, whereas you were left with mid-ranking people, like Fiona Hill or [Marie] “Masha” Yovanovitch, to testify in Trump’s first impeachment case.
And I think the message there is very consistent with what we’re seeing in Trump 2.0, which is the billionaires, people like Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, have caved into Trump’s bullying and have gotten on board with Team Trump.And what’s the message that sends to less wealthy and powerful people in our society?
Deportation of Venezuelan Migrants
… It seems like immigration is an area where they feel especially emboldened, and it is an area of great frustration for a lot of Americans, and it has been decades of "We’re going to do something about it," and it seems like the administration comes in and says, “We’re going to dust off the law books, and we’re going to fix this problem.” Is that right?How do they approach immigration?
Dust off the law books?I think they’re burning them up.Yeah, look, if there’s one issue that Trump believes was central to why he was elected president both in 2016 and in 2024, it is immigration, and it is the idea that he is going to be the one who stops illegal immigration to the country.Throughout the 2024 campaign, he used very inflammatory, almost overheated rhetoric, claiming that this was an invasion by rampaging hordes of illegal migrants and that he was going to stop this invasion using very militaristic and martial terms.36And he had the slogan of "Mass Deportation Now." It was one of the big applause lines throughout his 2024 campaign.It was definitely, I think, a motivating factor for many Republican voters in the last election and motivating in particular the GOP base.But I think it was a popular issue even far beyond the hardcore MAGA base for Trump.
36
So I think even now, when the legality of some of his actions are being questioned as president, polls suggest that the goal behind it is still very politically popular and politically resonant in the country, and so Trump and his advisers seem to be using the political popularity of the goal of ending illegal immigration to justify what might be illegal or unpopular means to get there.
And he has appointed public spokespeople in Stephen Miller and Tom Homan, his border czar, who, at times are openly defiant of the law, essentially saying, “Screw it.We don’t care what the judges say.… We’re going to take the toughest possible measures.”
And so that, I think, is a dynamic that we anticipated.It’s not particularly surprising.The question, again, is, to what extent, if at all, will the courts constrain him ultimately?And also, will it be too late by then?That’s the thing.The legal process is slow, measured, process-intensive—essentially the exact opposite of how Trump and his executive team are undertaking these deportations.
And my question is, when you look at two flightloads’ worth of alleged Venezuelan gang members who are sent late on a Saturday to El Salvador, to a very notorious prison without, as far as we can tell, any real due process, let’s say the courts ultimately ruled that this was a misuse of power by the Trump administration, let’s say that the courts even say it’s wrong to invoke late-18th-century Alien Enemies Act to do this, is El Salvador’s president [Nayib Bukele] going to send these people back?37What happens to someone like the poor, apparently gay, barber from Venezuela whose lawyers say that he was caught up improperly in this because of tattoos that he has?38And we’ve all seen the pictures of this guy.He’s going to get eaten alive in this El Salvador jail.Is he going to be sent back if a judge in America says that he wasn’t given due process?I don’t know.
38
I think they’re trying to create facts on the ground that can’t be challenged, that are outside the reach of the law here in America.
When you say about the speed, that story of the flights is good example of that.It seems almost like they’re trying to get them out faster than the judge can rule at the beginning, and then once the judge issues that injunction, to—
Yeah, I think speed is absolutely a core part of what they’re after here, to create facts on the ground, to create shocking new realities, because it’s really hard to get your government back after large swaths of it have been demolished.
And I remember before the election in 2024 trying to get this point across, that the lesson that I had taken from covering other societies where democracy has been rolled back was that the most effective time to fight for your rights is before they’re taken away, not after, and I think that the creators of this strategy in the White House, the people surrounding Donald Trump are very well aware of that dynamic, too, that they have a certain window of time to move as quickly as possible to create new realities.
There’s one reality, which is inside the courtroom and what the lawyers are saying to the judge and trying to say they weren’t violating it, and then there’s another, which is like the president of El Salvador sending funny emojis about the fact that the flight wasn’t turned around and government officials retweeting it and the message that they’re giving to the public.Tell me about that part of what the public message is.
The open defiance of a federal judge, again, it has precedent in American history, but I think it’s a measure of how debased the Republican Party has become, that what was once considered outrageous when Trump did it back in 2016 as a political candidate, when he attacked a judge in one of the many cases then pending against him at the time, that outrage no longer exists.And not only that, but some of the very people who were professing outrage back in 2016, like Sen.Marco Rubio, have now become the cheerleaders for the flouting of judicial authority eight years later.
Secretary Marco Rubio is one of the people who joined in sort of defying the federal judge’s order.And there was this moment—it seems almost farcical, right?This is the thing about the decline of democracy.It sounds like very sweeping and grand, but often it’s captured in small, absurd, stupid little moments, and one of those was surely after a federal judge ruled that those deportation flights to Venezuela should be stopped or turned around if they were midair, and it turned out that didn’t happen, and they landed in El Salvador, the president of El Salvador tweeted, against a picture of the migrants being offloaded in his country, "Oopsie," as in, “Oh, sorry, poor judge, oopsie.”39
39
Nayib Bukele: X Post
And here’s Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, retweeting that, the same guy who, as senator, was so appalled and embarrassed and ashamed by Donald Trump’s rhetoric attacking a federal judge.
And the videos where you can see people’s faces—
It was like a music video.It was like a made-for-TV production, which, again, the point of the federal judge was, in granting a temporary restraining order, was these men were already in federal custody.There was no urgency on Saturday night to deport them without due process, without even checking that they are who the government said that they were.
The ACLU lawyers, maybe the judge, maybe a lot of people say due process, that’s an important thing, but it seems like the administration says, “We’ve got a winning issue here.” These people, they claim, are members of a gang or even, in the president’s finding, terrorists of a foreign country invading America.It seems like they see this as one they want to go to battle over.
Yeah, that’s right.Donald Trump believes that the political support for getting rid of foreign gang members and murderers and killers and rapists, that this is a winning issue for him and that the ends justify the means.
I guess I’m wondering, is it about getting that power over immigration, or is part of this about getting the one branch that isn’t complicit, that it’s a way to undermine?
Look, a lot of this is about acquiring power for the president and sweeping assertions of executive power.He’s reshaping the American presidency, and I think that you have to say that’s the goal here, because the president and our government already have very large powers to deport violent criminals.This is not something where you need Congress to give you further authority to do that.… You have the authority as president to deport a violent criminal who is in this country illegally, so let’s be clear on that.
This is about expanding the scope of executive authority, and given that you already have the power to do what you’re doing, you’ve got to wonder if there’s any goal other than to just make the president, as Donald Trump called himself already more than once, a king.
What do you make of that, that imagery?He seems like he’s joking.He’s sending pictures of himself as a king and saying he’s a king and giving quotes that might not actually be Napoleon, but people think are.40What do you make of that?
40
The New York Times: ‘Long Live the King’: Trump Likens Himself to Royalty on Truth Social
Well, look, let’s just say, first of all, that we don’t have any other presidents who joke about being kings, OK?So it’s a break with an American presidential tradition just to have a president talking about being a king because our whole deal as a country was to not have a king.And in that sense, Donald Trump has already proved himself many times over to be kind of the Founding Fathers’ worst nightmare.They literally were most worried, in establishing this country, about the prospect of an executive ruler who would see himself as a king.
Now, Trump often does project this in almost a joking way, that he’s trolling his opponents, that he’s “owning the libs” somehow, by tweeting images of himself as a king or by talking about himself as dictator, but just for a day, in an interview during the 2024 campaign.
But the frequency with which these references crop up, and I think the longstanding tendency of his opponents to not take Donald Trump’s threats seriously enough, suggests that there’s something going on here; there’s a theme that’s going on here.And you’ve already seen both Trump and his supporters talking about how he should actually be staying in office for a third term, that he shouldn’t have to leave office after only two terms despite the constitutional amendment that requires our presidents to serve no more than two terms.And by the way, there’s no loopholes in there, but it’s kind of amazing that they’re already talking about that.
Trump and The Judges
To finish the story about the judges, he calls for impeachment of a particular judge in this case.As you said, a lot of presidents have criticized judges; a lot of politicians have criticized judges; recent presidents have criticized Supreme Court decisions.Is there something different about what he’s doing and the way he’s going after this particular judge?
Yeah, absolutely. I think calling for the impeachment of an individual federal judge is not something we’ve seen from a president, period, no matter how much they disagree with a ruling by that judge.And it’s part of Donald Trump’s longtime habit of wishing essentially to criminalize disagreement with him, and many of the things, for example, that he and Elon Musk have been saying are criminal abuses, of waste, fraud and abuse inside the federal government, if you actually look at what those are, those are actually policy decisions they disagree with.
But Trump uses the language of illegality and criminality in talking about people who disagree with him, people who stand up to him.The media is illegal if they report things he doesn’t like.The federal officials are illegal and criminal if they spend money on things that are policy priorities that he disagrees with, and this federal judge should be impeached and removed from office for the crime of standing up to him.
I don’t know if it will have a chilling effect on these judges, but it’s in the context of a polarized political time and the threats against the judiciary.
Yeah, look, the threats in general to the federal judiciary, to individual members of Congress, to members of the media, this is a much more ominous and threatening time than any I can previously remember in covering Washington these last few decades.And there is a strong sense, like on Capitol Hill, if you talk to individual members of Congress, many Democratic members of Congress have told me, “Well, yes, I talked to my Republican colleagues.They said they wanted to vote against this particular nomination, or they wanted to vote against this particular bill supported by Donald Trump, but they were afraid to do so.”
What do you think of [Chief Justice John] Roberts, who wrote the decision that we talked about before, who then comes out and—I don’t think he names the president, but says we shouldn’t be calling for the impeachment of judges based on a decision we don’t like; we should appeal.41What do you think of Roberts in this moment, of his response and the position he’s in?
Yeah.That was a remarkable thing, I thought, to have this very quick statement the very next day after Donald Trump calls for the impeachment of a federal judge.You have the chief justice of the Supreme Court essentially disagreeing with the president in a statement saying, “No, that’s not an appropriate use of power.” And while he doesn’t refer to either Trump or the judge by name, it’s still a remarkable rebuke from the sitting chief justice.
And yet of course, it’s, in the end, just a piece of paper.It’s a statement that actually has no meaning or value attached to it, whereas the decision that Justice Roberts wrote in the immunity decision has the full force of law and was arguably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, legal victories that Donald Trump has had in his entire time in public life.
So it’s a little bit hard to reconcile Justice Roberts, the institutionalist, Justice Roberts, who throughout his career has claimed to stand for a kind of traditional vision of the Constitution and of the balance of powers in our system, with the same man who wrote this decision granting Donald Trump sweeping unfettered powers that even many conservatives didn’t think were inherent in the presidency.
Chief Justice Roberts and the Supreme Court
A lot of this now is going to be in the hands of him and Amy Coney Barrett as all of these cases come.That court is going to be really central in whatever’s going to happen to our constitutional democracy.
That’s right.It’s hanging in the balance.Right now, as we’re having this conversation, there are the cases making their way through our legal system that I think will determine whether the boundaries of the presidency are forever changed.
How much is it in the courts, and how much of it is only the courts that’s going to determine the outcome of this?Can the Supreme Court—because as you said, there’s questions of whether the Supreme Court will even be followed if they make a certain kind of decision.
Yeah, I do think the Supreme Court, of course, cares a lot about its legitimacy, and the legitimacy of an institution right now is in question, because all institutions have suffered an enormous erosion in the trust and respect that the public has for them, and that definitely includes the Supreme Court, which has seen its approval ratings dwindle precipitously in recent years as it has become more explicitly conservative and politicized.Certainly with its decision to eliminate Roe v.42Wade and then with its immunity decision on behalf of Donald Trump, there’s a sense among many Democrats, many liberals in our society that it has become a politicized instrument of a conservative revolution basically in our government.
I will never forget appearing at an event a few years ago, and this was, I think, in the immediate aftermath of the Roe v.Wade decision, and watching an audience of older Americans, probably classic Upper West Side liberals, booing at the mere mention of the Supreme Court.And that’s reflected in the public polling numbers.
And so the court has to be concerned with its legitimacy, its standing in society, and the fact that it’s coming at a time with the general erosion in trust and credibility of our public institutions.
Can it fix this?I guess it’s to be determined in the future, but that’s a big question of what institutions can do.We’ve seen the Justice Department, as we’ve been talking, the Justice Department has been brought under control, and people have been pushed out.The Congress has moved to the side, at least right now.The law firms seem to be intimidated—maybe not everybody.The judiciary is sort of under attack and delegitimized.…
Look, the description, as you paint it, of our institutions either caving or under enormous stress to cave against what appears to be a pretty concerted assault by the executive, by the chief executive, a power play, if you will, I just keep thinking of America’s adversaries abroad in Russia and China, elsewhere.This is like a great moment for them, that we’re being undone by our own internal feuds and a conflict that has no obvious path toward resolution.
And I’m very mindful of what I consider to be in some ways a mission statement of the second Trump term.It was an interview that Donald Trump gave in October of 2024, right before the election, and he said, “America has adversaries.America has Russia; there’s China.But there’s also the enemy within, and of all of those, I consider the enemy within to be the greatest enemy of all.”43
And I think this is an inward-looking moment of crisis for the country as Donald Trump asserts sweeping, untested and unchecked powers in the presidency, and if he succeeds in claiming those, we’ll have a different country with a different way of running our country.
Attacks on the Press
… You see the attacks … And you were saying before, you felt it personally.Tell me why, why it’s part of the story or what you’ve seen.
… Yeah.I just would say that, to me, Trump’s attacks on the independent media are very consistent with the other elements in the authoritarian playbook that he seems to be running through with great speed and fervor at the beginning of this second term and that there’s a reason that all of the cases that I’m aware of in the last couple of decades of what you might call democratic rollback include the leader first or nearly first going after the independent media.
When I first arrived in Moscow at the very beginning of Vladimir Putin’s tenure 25 years ago now, in Russia, that was, again, one of the very first things that they did in attacking democracy was going after the independent press.In this case, NTV was the only independent national television network that had ever existed in Russia’s history, and they very systematically went after it, essentially took it over and installed a new ownership, a new leadership that was loyal to the Kremlin.And I think you’ve seen that in other societies, in Turkey, for example, in Egypt and Hungary, where a pillar of a free society is independent media.
And so all these other efforts to acquire power in the executive, whether it’s going after judges or going after law firms or going after billionaires, they’re not going to succeed if you have too loud of a voice presenting independent reporting and real facts and real transparency.Donald Trump has always said, “Don’t trust anybody except for me,” and that’s the language that is incompatible with an independent press.
And for you personally, when he names you, when he names your husband, Peter Baker, what does it feel like is happening?44
Who knows what goes through Donald Trump’s mind when he’s sitting late at night in Mar-a-Lago and picking up his phone and launching vicious personal attacks on whether it’s individual reporters or individual judges?The kind of bullying, name calling—those are integral to Donald Trump’s public and private persona.
Nobody likes a bully.Nobody likes to be bullied.We’re very lucky that we have the First Amendment in this country protecting journalists and protecting freedom of speech.And it’s really one of those incredible ironies that Republicans have successfully used this idea that they’re the party of freedom of speech and yet come into office and gone after, whether it’s the free speech of the Associated Press or the free speech of individual lawyers at these targeted law firms to work on behalf of causes that they care about, or it’s the free speech of government employees themselves.
They’ve been purging websites at the Pentagon, for example, of terms that they don’t like, like Enola Gay, the famous bomber, because apparently it’s the word “gay,” or terms like “women in combat,” for example.45And this is from the people who, at the same time, proclaim themselves to be the public proponent of freedom of speech.
Role of Democrats
[Director Michael Kirk] … I have one question I like to try to ask at the end of this. There is a small group of lawyers we haven’t heard from—Barack and Michelle, Bill and Hillary. Where are they, Susan?
Clearly, they’re golfing to a certain extent. Look, all the time people are asking this question of, who’s going to lead us to oppose Donald Trump?The Democrats’ disarray, disorganization, infighting, feuding has certainly been one of the striking attributes of this period of time.They still seem to be very much embroiled in their own unresolved debates over why they lost the election in 2024 and how they can move forward in 2026, and they don’t seem to be presenting a strong, concerted, clear message of resistance to and opposition to these sweeping moves by the president.
And that includes the people who have run the country previously, not just the former President Biden but also Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton.They spoke out very forcefully against Trump in the campaign but have been remarkably silent, I think it’s fair to say, in the last few months as Trump has asserted all these sweeping rights that could change the country.
Why?
The explanation one has heard over time, like from George W.Bush, for example, is well, speaking out wouldn’t really help, that it would only draw attention to me or make me a target, and in the end it wouldn’t accomplish the goals that I would want anyway.And so that has been a lot of what we’ve heard over time.
But look, many of the people with the most power and purchase in our society, whether they’re the billionaires or the former presidents, have found a lot of reasons not to be the ones on the front lines of opposing Donald Trump, so you’re left with me and Peter.
Fear in Washington
One other thing.You didn’t use the word “fear” a lot here, but we’ve heard “fear” from a lot of people who we’ve talked to, that there are a lot of people who are afraid to react—congresspeople, senators, public officials, rich lawyers, people in the media.
Yeah, look, I agree with that.It’s remarkable to me how many of these big, powerful men in our society are so damn afraid of Donald Trump.It is an amazing thing to watch happening in real time.
And by the way, this is, again, something I took from my Russia experience.So many people turned out to be so afraid, and at least there was a different history and tradition, so they had a much more recent understanding of what it meant to be afraid of the power of the state being wielded against you, because this is a state that had undertaken atrocities all too recently in their parents’ or grandparents’ generation.
But that’s the excuse in Russia.What’s the excuse here in the United States of America?It’s really something to see people who have so much power and standing to fold.What’s the worst thing that happens to a Republican member of Congress who decides, “No, I can’t vote for the alleged alcoholic and mismanager who’s been accused of sexual misconduct to be the secretary of defense”?46Why is that senator so afraid to vote against that nominee?Because they’re going to lose office in a primary two years or four years from now?It’s pretty remarkable.There is life after Congress, and some of these members of Congress act like there isn’t.
46
Some of these wealthy people, on some level, you have to conclude that perhaps they really are all in on Trump these days, because Jeff Bezos is still going to be an incredibly wealthy guy even if his tax rate goes up a lot, even if he doesn’t get the government contracts he wants for his space company.And so why?Why?
Susan, are you afraid?
People have asked me that.I suppose the answer is that I ought to be, but I also understand that journalism is a privilege and not a right, and I feel like to cover this historic period in the country involves not just the good parts of journalism and not getting just the parts of getting to interview people who were behind the scenes in historic events, but also, at its most basic level, we’re back to core principles about why we’re journalists, which is that we have to report the news on behalf of the American public without fear or favor, independently, with critical-mindedness.
And I’d rather that that not be tested in the ways that it seems to be tested right now, but I do understand that that is the obligation that we have as journalists.It’s not only to cover it when it’s easy to do so.
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