Charlie Savage
Appearances
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
Notwithstanding what Patel says at his hearing when he sort of cleaned up for the cameras, if we get that Patel, then that's one thing. But if we get the Patel who's been on all extremist fringe podcasts by the hundreds for the past few years behaving like that person, the FBI is going to be a tool of political vengeance.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
I'd just like to light a brief candle to the memory of Matt Gaetz. You didn't even get to the confirmation hearing.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
So what do I mean by American-style democracy is not just that we have elections periodically to decide who's the leader, but we have a system of separation of powers with branches that do not have too much power concentrated within them so that one branch doesn't become too powerful to the exclusion of the others, especially the Congress versus the president, which the founders considered to be the check against tyranny, too much concentrated power in one spot.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
So the erosion of Congress's ability to place checks and balances on the presidency, to create pockets of independent decision-making authority within the executive branch, to shield some executive branch officials from being fired at will by the president on a whim, and therefore making them somewhat not completely subject to his complete control –
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
The seizure we're seeing over the power of the purse in various ways, there's still a freeze on foreign assistance money all around the world that Congress said should be spent and it's not being spent. There is obviously a huge vortex right now of power being sucked into the Oval Office and away from Congress.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
And to some extent because of judicial deference and the creation of presidential immunity away from the judicial system as well. And so that sort of American-style democracy I think is very much being eroded as we speak.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
I think I would divide that into different categories of things. The immigration actions that Maggie was just describing are mostly within the parameters of what everyone agrees the statutes on the books already say, with the big exception of the attempt to redefine birthright citizenship.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
And so that's making very aggressive use of powers, but it's not pushing, for the most part, at the limits of those powers in terms of, is this actually a legitimate thing you have the authority to do? The assault on the federal workforce, the mass firing of inspectors general, in the firing of
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
a member of the National Labor Relations Board, in the firing of various civil servants, including all the Justice Department trial lawyers who just were assigned to work on any of the Trump cases, for example, blowing through explicit legal protections for federal workers. All of these things, though, he and his appointees just did
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
So I've argued that the way to understand this is it looks like they're inviting all these lawsuits. All these people who are getting fired are going to sue because they're going to say, you couldn't do that. Look at this law. You just filed the law. And perversely— That may be exactly what they want.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
You're going to have to explain this theory of expansive presidential power that Jonathan was referring to. The sort of revisionist understanding of the Constitution that kind of dates back to the Reagan administration. The president must have exclusive control of the government and Congress, therefore, lacks legitimate authority to pass laws that create power.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
any kind of limitation on the president's ability to fire anyone he wants or creates any kind of pockets of independent decision-making authority anywhere in the government. They were trying to stomp all these things out. And so how do you stomp them out?
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
You fire the person in the face of this law, the person files a lawsuit, and then you get the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court to say, that law is unconstitutional and create a precedent that expands what executive power means to them.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
Well, we're not just talking about Congress here, right? We're talking about the Republican Party and how it has changed in the Trump era in a way that the Democratic Party has not. The Republican Party is not the party that existed in the 90s or the Bush years, right? the Reagan years, it's become the Donald Trump party.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
And he has successfully driven from that party anyone who might have the sort of institutionalist perspective that you're discussing. The sort of Liz Cheney's are purged. The John McCain's are deceased. There's been enough primary challenges of people who are insufficiently Trumpy that everyone lives in fear for their political career if they get on his bad side.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
Well, it sure looks like he's going to be confirmed. I do not see any Republicans out there expressing opposition at this point. And so Kash Patel would be a very different FBI director than what we have seen. At his hearing, he said... most of the right things about how he was going to follow the Constitution and not weaponize the FBI as a tool for Trump.
The Daily
Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
I think there's a lot of skepticism about whether that's true. He's the guy who has gone on a million podcasts over the last few years and written screed-like books with lists of enemies that need to be gone after, which includes a lot of Republicans and Trump people who've been cast out of the circle. But the FBI is an extraordinarily powerful institution. So
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
One of the things that really struck me about the national conversation that's unfolding around this was an editorial in the Wall Street Journal whose editorial board is very conservative and business friendly and therefore traditionally you would expect to be a friendly place towards this notion of gutting regulatory agencies or bringing them to heel and unitary executive theory and all that.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
But even they were saying, you know, this is demonstrating a downside to that way of structuring government, which is the potential for corruption by centralizing too much authority in a way that becomes unaccountable. And, of course, overlaying this is just the role of Congress in general.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
It's one thing whether this is a better way or a worse way to do it, but completely cutting out the Article I branch of government in making decisions about how to structure things suggests – There's no role left for lawmakers in shaping the basic structure of our federal government.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
Charlie, last word to you. I do think you're onto something, and it makes me think as well about how he likes to invoke emergency power and declare there's an emergency, whether or not the facts on the ground might be realistically described that way. We have an emergency on the border, so I can spend all this money on a border wall that Congress didn't appropriate.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
Sort of like rhetorically creating the situation that then allows extraordinary action would be a theme that unites all of this.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
Well, I think part of it also is that the deal that it looks like he's going to make is going to be a very favorable to Russia deal. They're going to be allowed to keep the territory that they unlawfully seized from Ukraine. And Trump has already said that Ukraine won't be allowed to join NATO, which is another Putin demand.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
And so handing this entirely favorable settlement, if that's what happens, to Moscow looks pretty bad if Moscow was the aggressor and the villain in this story. Of course, in sort of Moscow propaganda land, it was the West's fault. It was provocation by Ukraine and NATO that necessitated this non-war military action.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
And Trump is just embracing that narrative with this remark, which many Republicans and conservatives find grotesque.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
That's right. And hovering over all this is the prospect of eventual NATO withdrawal, which Trump wanted to do in his first term and was talked out of several times.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
All the signs have been that he's interested in a retreat from Europe and withdrawal of the American security umbrella over Europe. Whether that manifests itself in actual withdrawal from NATO or just sort of a undermining of NATO and withdrawal of security commitments in a way that the organization ceases to have meaning is, I think, up for grabs. But that's the direction. Yeah.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
Well, this isn't just about public opinion. This is about the transformation of the Republican Party into an instrument of Trump's personal will, the driving out of people who were willing to stand up to him in his first term. There's no more Liz Cheney's. There's no more John McCain's. People like Marco Rubio were among the Russia hawks who are now just— Negotiating with Russia.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
Well, in a way that's very favorable. to Russia. And so the people who are openly saying this is grotesque are people who don't have political careers anymore. They're like former Vice President Mike Pence. And so I don't see the, I don't want to talk about it from Thune that you just mentioned as something unique to this issue. I see it as just the texture of the times we live in generally.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
Sure. So United States government is structured by acts of Congress that say we're going to have a defense department, we're going to have a justice department and so forth.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
And most of those chunks of government are overseen by people who are directly accountable to the president and supervised by the president and can be fired by the president if they act in a way that don't align with his policy directions. Right.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
But going back to the 1880s and then especially over the course of the 20th century coming out of the New Deal, Congress has also created a series of independent executive branch agencies that are technocratic and have specialized jobs to regulate parts of the economy and that are not directly controlled by the president.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
The president appoints their leaders, usually commissions of multiple board members, but they serve fixed terms and the president can't fire them if he doesn't like what they're doing unless they've committed some kind of personal misconduct under the laws set up by Congress. So this is what we're talking about.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
Federal Communications Commission, Federal Trade Commission, Security and Exchange Commission, National Labor Relations Board, agencies like this. They regulate the economy. They impose rules and regulations on aspects of businesses that very wealthy people sometimes do not like.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
So for a long time, the conservative legal movement has wanted to get rid of that structure of government because they believe that centralizing control over these agencies in the White House with a president they could help elect would be a way to deregulate, to get rid of these rules that cut into their profits.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
And so they have invented a theory that the Constitution should be reinterpreted as not allowing Congress to do this, that if there's anything in the executive branch that's exercising government authority, the president has to control that. And so these statutes that Congress has passed – setting up these independent agencies should be struck down as unconstitutional.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
And Trump has been trying to execute this vision that's been kind of building really since the Reagan administration of a new way of thinking about the Constitution that they are hoping the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court will endorse when the inevitable litigation reaches them.
The Daily
Trump 2.0: Rewriting Histories
And so Trump has been, A, firing people in disregard of the statutes that say he can't summarily do that unless they've committed some kind of personal misconduct. And B, with this new executive order, he's imposing direct White House control over what these agencies do.