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History As It Happens
Rumors of a King
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to skip ads, get bonus content, and enjoy access to the entire catalog of 500 episodes. The "No Kings" protests across America were aimed at President Donald Trump's mounting abuses of power, based on the idea that he's acting like an elected monarch...
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- [00:01]
Mayra Ameth
A Mochi moment from Sadie who writes I'm not crying, you're crying. This is what I said during my first appointment with my physician at Mochi because I didn't have to convince him I needed a GLP one. He understood and I felt supported, not judged. I came for the weight loss and stayed for the empathy. Thanks, Sadie. I'm Mayra Ameth, founder of Mochi Health. To find your mochi moment, visit joinmochi.com Sadie is a Mochi member compensated for.
- [00:29]
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- [01:01]
Martin DeCaro
As it happens October 28, 2025 Rumors of a King, no Kings Protests planned across the country on Saturday as well. What are your thoughts on those?
- [01:12]
Donald Trump
What are they called? No Kings.
- [01:13]
Joseph Ellis
No Kings.
- [01:14]
Donald Trump
I don't feel like a king. I have to go through hell to get stuff approved. No, no, we're not a king. We're not a king at all. Thank you very much.
- [01:21]
Joseph Ellis
Trump responding via social media, posting an.
- [01:23]
Martin DeCaro
AI generated video depicting a crowned Trump.
- [01:26]
Joseph Ellis
Flying a King Trump jet and sharing another video. First Post, Vice President J.D. vance showing Trump placing a crown on his head. He's gonna get a third term.
- [01:35]
Donald Trump
So Trump 28.
- [01:36]
Martin DeCaro
Trump is gonna be President 28 and people just ought to get accommodated with that.
- [01:41]
Joseph Ellis
So what about the 22nd Amendment? There's many different alternatives.
- [01:44]
Martin DeCaro
Is Donald Trump acting like an elected monarch? The millions of Americans who joined the no Kings protest would say yes, that the current presidentifies the Founding Fathers fear of the arbitrary abuse of power by the chief executive and therefore Trump is wrecking the foundational separation of powers in our republic. That's next with Joseph Ellis as we report history as it happens. I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [02:09]
Donald Trump
I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.
- [02:19]
Joseph Ellis
If you read Article 2 of the Constitution, you tell me what the president can do or not do. It's watching the soccer game being played with three balls and no referees. The real power of the presidency is not defined in the Constitution. Washington himself makes it a powerful office, but the biggest thing he does is walk away.
- [02:46]
Martin DeCaro
Back in March, I produced an episode titled Enemies Lists. It compared Richard Nixon's Abuses of power during Watergate, which he tried to keep.
- [02:54]
Joseph Ellis
Secret because people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.
- [02:59]
Martin DeCaro
With President Donald Trump, who broadcasts his enemies list along with his intention to use the Justice Department, staffed with his personal attorneys to go after the people he hates.
- [03:10]
Donald Trump
Unfortunately, in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and goodwill built up over generations. They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people. They tried to turn America into a corrupt communist and third world country.
- [03:35]
Martin DeCaro
Well, at the time, Trump had yet to seek indictments against his enemies. Well, now James Comey, Letitia James and John Bolton have all been indicted. The president is sending ice stormtroopers into American cities where they terrorize immigrants. He's ordering airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean and the Pacific. Extrajudicial killings of alleged drug traffickers, although no one knows who's being killed. What else? Well, he's musing about running for a third term despite the 22nd Amendment. And he tore down the east wing of the White House to build a ballroom after promising the existing building would not be touched. A metaphor for the way Donald Trump is ripping up the Constitution.
- [04:15]
Donald Trump
People are asking me to run, and there's a whole story about running for a third term. I don't know. I never looked into it. They do say there's a way you can do it, but I don't know about that.
- [04:25]
Martin DeCaro
Since Donald Trump crashed the American political scene in 2016, historians, political scientists, journalists, pundits have tried to affix a label, a definition to what he's fascism or authoritarianism or mafia politics or elected monarch. The coast to coast street demonstrations a couple of weeks ago were called no kings, a nod not to interwar European history and the rise of fascism, but but to our founding era. In its fall issue, AmericanHeritage.com posted an essay written by the late historian William Lucktenburg titled Shall we have a king? Lucktenburg wrote, monarchy was the form of government with which Americans were most familiar and hence an inescapable template. Every one of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention had been born under the British crown. South Carolina delegate Pierce Butler had first come to America as an officer of the redcoats. Wherever they looked in the world, they saw a dominant leader. Catherine the Great ruled Russia, and in Prussia, Frederick the Great had died only a year before. Luchtenberg goes on to say some Americans even dare to think the unthinkable. Shall we have a king? John Jay asked George Washington in 1786. A year later, Mercy Otis Warren, who is writing a history of the Revolution, expressed alarm that the young ardent spirits, especially the students of law and the youth of fortune and pleasure, were ready to bow to the scepter of a king. Well along in the proceedings at Philadelphia, a North Carolina delegate ventured that it was pretty certain that we should at some time or other have a king. Yet Lucktenburg said no one at the convention ever determinately broached the question of monarchy, not even New York's Alexander Hamilton. Still, there was suspicion that the delegates were plotting to impose a king on the new republic. Rumors gained credence at the convention plan to call to a throne in America the Bishop of Osnabruck, a Hanoverian cleric who is the second son of George iii. The delegates regarded this alarum so seriously that for the only time during the proceedings they transmitted information to the press stating, though we cannot affirmatively tell you what we're doing, we can negatively tell you what we're not doing. We never once thought of a king again, that is the late William Lucktenberg and I will share a link to his essay in my weekly newsletter. Yet the framers of our Constitution, after the impotence of the Articles of Confederation, wanted to create a federal government headed by a vigorous executive. And over the past 250 years, the powers of that office, the presidency, have dangerously expanded and are now in the hands of Donald Trump, who respects no laws or norms.
- [07:03]
Donald Trump
Not that I don't have the right to do anything I want to do. I'm the President of the United States. If I think our country is in danger, and it is in danger in these countries cities, I can do it.
- [07:12]
Martin DeCaro
Joseph Ellis is an eminent historian of the American founding, The author of 12 books, including the Pulitzer Prize winning Founding Brothers, and he's got a new book out today, the Great Contradiction. The Tragic side of the American Founding. Our conversation Next AI agents are everywhere.
- [07:31]
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- [07:57]
Martin DeCaro
B R-I K.com Joseph Ellis welcome back my friend.
- [08:02]
Joseph Ellis
Pleasure to be with you again.
- [08:04]
Martin DeCaro
You're an American institution.
- [08:05]
Joseph Ellis
I'm getting old enough that I am an institution. But thank you for mentioning the fact that I got a book out and it's just coming out right now, as a matter of fact. And it does relate to the fact that two things are going on. We're celebrating the 250th anniversary of American independence. And we're engaged in a rather serious debate about the powers of the presidency and the current president as to whether or not he is functioning like a king or a dictator. And those are very live issues. People need to be able to argue about them with some historical understanding. And that's what we're here for.
- [08:40]
Martin DeCaro
The Great Contradiction, the Tragic side of the American Founding by one Joseph Ellis. Hardcover available today, the day this podcast is coming out October 28th. And Joseph, you look fantastic. So I'm very happy to know that I'll see you on camera when the Ken Burns movie on the American Revolution. The documentary Ken Burns interviewed me several years ago.
- [09:04]
Joseph Ellis
And the Burns film is coming out in November. It's a six part film. I'm in it. How much of a role? I don't know. I think a lot of my comments ended on the floor. But nobody has influenced more Americans in terms of their understanding of American history than Ken Burns. So I encourage everybody to watch it as we celebrate begin to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American independence. There are two key documents here. One is the Constitution, but that's not what we're celebrating. The constitution was written 11 years later. The document that we need to know about and read again and spend time discussing and arguing about is the Declaration of Independence. Now, we can't ignore the Constitution, and I know you want to talk about that a little bit, and I'm more than willing to do that. But the Declaration is, you can pull it up on your cell phone. It's only three pages long. We should have an ongoing dialogue throughout America about what those words mean.
- [10:08]
Martin DeCaro
Well, both documents are relevant to what we're going to talk about here because much of the Declaration, the part people don't read, is an indictment of a King.
- [10:16]
Joseph Ellis
There's 27 charges against George III written by Thomas Jefferson. If you read all 27. And that's the part of the Declaration that most Americans never read. It's that the delegates then read most carefully because that's the place where they broke with the king. And that was the final end of our relationship. And that was why they paid so much attention to it. But that if you read through them, I think you will see five or six specific charges against George III that have an eerie similarity to the behavior of the current resident of the White House.
- [10:54]
Martin DeCaro
You know, the fact that you're saying that is something else because I know you always avoid presentism. You've warned me about presit.
- [11:01]
Joseph Ellis
So presentism is the sin of historians. We have to figure out the then before we can talk about the now. As an old teacher, the class should sit down and read and then argue about the second paragraph of the declaration and then the 30 some odd charges against George III. That will be a real lesson on the issue of what should the powers of the executive branch be.
- [11:26]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah. So the reason I wanted to have you on here was to discuss this issue. Whether the founders concerns about monarchy have anything to teach us today. I think they do. We are still living in their republic and there are still a few kings left.
- [11:39]
Joseph Ellis
Right. And it is a republic. Throughout the founding, up until the age of Jackson, the word democracy was an epithet. Democracy meant mob rule. Republic is res publica public things. The public is different from the people. The people don't know most of the time what's right for the long term for the nation. This is really how we get that strange contraption called the electoral college.
- [12:08]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, let's get to that in a bit. I do want to ask you a question to start off here. Broad. It's a broad question because we just had the no kings protests across the country. And I've spent a lot of time with experts on my show over the past, well, four, four and a half years talking about what is Trump and Trumpism. There have been endless arguments over fascism, right wing populism, garden variety nationalist, a kind of mafia don, mafia politics, or a simple extension of this thing we call the imperial presidency that has existed for decades now. He is simply maybe the most vulgar one of the imperial presidents. Right. Especially in the area of foreign.
- [12:51]
Joseph Ellis
Schlesinger was the one who came up with the term. When he wrote that back in the 40s, he didn't mean a king, he meant an expanded power of the presidency, largely because of American foreign policy becoming more important.
- [13:05]
Martin DeCaro
The president having almost unchecked power to start wars or bomb other countries. So the other label, getting to my question finally here, Joseph, the other label we hear is Trump is acting like an elected monarch. I don't think they mean no kings as a literal thing. It's more metaphorical. What does Joseph Ellis say about this? Is Donald Trump acting like an elected monarch?
- [13:28]
Joseph Ellis
By and large, yes. That his second term has exposed that he's committed to the core principles in Project 2025, even though I don't think he's ever read it himself. And those projects are intended to overthrow the current Constitution and to give the president what they call executive authority, meaning authority overall. All you got to do is watch the news every day, whether he's sending troops into a city that doesn't want them, whether he's adding to a building that he doesn't own, called the White House. The more fundamental fact is Donald Trump is a natural dictator. By natural, I mean that a group of Harvard psychiatrists have said that he is a malignant narcissist. That means that Trump cannot process information at odds with his own interest, because the only source of authority for Trump is himself. And when things go wrong and they don't go along with his inclination, he changes reality. Like, I won the election and Trump can't help it. That's who he is now. He took an oath to the Constitution, but there is a phrase in that oath that gives him a buyout. The phrase is to the best of my ability. Trump doesn't have the ability to recognize any law outside of himself, period. That is who he is. And that is appealing to some people, especially people who want a monarch who will, for example, reduce the number of non whites in the population, who want to deny vote to certain to black constituencies, who believe that women shouldn't have the vote, who are really at odds with much of 20th century American progressivism. They're willing to have a dictator who gives them those things when they say.
- [15:18]
Martin DeCaro
Make America great again. That is a nebulous term. You can almost pick any time from the past where you think America was great again. And, you know, to your point, I'm.
- [15:27]
Joseph Ellis
Going to throw one at you you'll never have heard before. I agree. I've tried to think about that, too. It's designed to be nebulous. You're right. And it's, you know, certainly before we had a guy that looked like Barack Obama in the White House, before Martin Luther King had his dream, before Brown versus Board of Education, before the Great Society, before the New Deal. I now think, get this, it's before the American Revolution. That's how far it goes. Because we are rejecting the core principles of the American Revolution. Those are contained in the Declaration of Independence.
- [16:02]
Martin DeCaro
You know, there are people in the Heritage foundation, that ilk, who would say they're actually doing here what the founders always intended. They want a small, pared down, limited government, et cetera. So, you know, I guess that's what I want to get at Here, Joseph, that's a lie. None of these labels really work perfectly. Elected monarch, that is a contradiction in terms. There's also this issue, and Trump even brought this up, too, when he was asked about the no kings protest. He goes, I'm not a king. I have to work like hell to get anything done. He isn't a king or a dictator because he can't be. I mean, this was the whole point of creating the government structure that the founders created. They were informed by the history of.
- [16:41]
Joseph Ellis
That government structure has failed us.
- [16:43]
Martin DeCaro
The question, well, if Trump could, would he act like a dictator? Well, who knows? I think almost anybody. That's the whole point of the Constitution, right? Anybody with that much power would start to abuse it.
- [16:55]
Joseph Ellis
Also, the Supreme Court, we've never had a Supreme Court that acknowledges the right of a president to violate the law and not be prosecuted. Those are the two key branches that are missing and that Trump is exploiting. And Trump really can't understand why he should be prevented from doing anything he wants to do. And there's nobody currently in the Republican Party willing to risk their careers in opposing him.
- [17:21]
Martin DeCaro
And we talked about that last summer, the immunity case. You said there is nothing in our history in the Constitution that would give the chief executive immunity.
- [17:31]
Joseph Ellis
That's correct. This is saying a heck of a lot because I'm saying the worst decision in the history of the Supreme Court, and boy, there have been some bad ones, is Trump versus us, because it's both unconstitutional and it destroys the balance of power within the government.
- [17:47]
Martin DeCaro
Was King George III a tyrant?
- [17:51]
Joseph Ellis
They didn't think of him that way in England, and he was a well read, well liked king, but the Americans regarded him as a tyrant because he unleashed the British army on them in Boston and they were bombing the cities along the coast of New England. From the American point of view, George III was a tyrant. But in his own day, in his own world, in England, he was a decent person who cared about the people.
- [18:18]
Martin DeCaro
He did not rule absolutely. He wasn't ruling by divine right either. The British king, that. That ended, I think, in the 17th century, did it not?
- [18:26]
Joseph Ellis
This is where the Declaration is so important. Up until the American Revolution, all the governments of Europe, to include Great Britain, France, Spain, the Netherlands, all of those governments were monarchies. Power flowed directly from God to a particular monarch. It could be a woman in Russia. Declaration says, no, power does not flow from God to kings. It flows upward from the people to the elected representatives. That is a shift in the tectonic plates of Western political thought. That's what? The American Revolution. That's how it was, a revolution. The Trump presidency is a explicit, quite clear attempt to abuse that power, to not recognize the authority of other branches of government and to conduct himself in the way that he thinks is the only way that he can do it.
- [19:23]
Martin DeCaro
George iii, what was his relationship to Parliament? I mean, we have a president and a Congress that are supposed to be co. Equal branches of government, right? We know that today the presidency is more powerful. What was George III's relationship to Parliament? Was one supreme over the other?
- [19:40]
Joseph Ellis
He was supreme, but Parliament still had the say on legislation and not so much on foreign policy. However, about a third to a half of the members of Parliament were in his pocket. This is the reason. The votes that occurred, which were votes to send troops into Boston that started the war, were overwhelming votes. And Parliament is claiming that it can make those decisions, and the King supports it. They originate with George III himself, who feels that when we threw the tea in the Boston harbor, we really threw him in. And he's got to show that this emerging great power, the military and economic power in the world, is not going to put up with this kind of nonsense. And the domino theory works for him, too. If we let the Americans do this, what's going to happen in our colonies in the Caribbean? What about India? So that he feels he has to take a strong stand. Tell me if this doesn't sound familiar to some Americans who remember the Vietnam War. So therefore, the world's greatest power decides to step into a quagmire, into a war that is both unwinnable and unnecessary.
- [20:51]
Martin DeCaro
It would have been unusual for a monarch to allow valuable colonies to secede peacefully, if you know what I mean.
- [20:58]
Joseph Ellis
But there was an answer there, Actually, Franklin had given it to them. It's called the British Commonwealth. If you let us run our own government and tax ourselves, we'll stay in the empire economically. By the time they offered it, Great Britain was ready for war. And a major advisor to George III told George iii, look, I can take my regiment and march it from Massachusetts to Alabama, and I can win every battle and castrate every male. Don't worry, we got it won. There's no way we can lose.
- [21:33]
Martin DeCaro
What a nice image. Wow.
- [21:35]
Joseph Ellis
For them to figure out the, oh, my God. Since we're into something we can't get out of.
- [21:39]
Martin DeCaro
I was saying that's quite an image. I didn't mean to interrupt before. I was about to say somewhat amazingly, George III never visited his American colonies. And, you know, I tend to think that he wasn't a monstrous tyrant at all. He wasn't.
- [21:52]
Joseph Ellis
Adams thought that King George was the most interesting conversationalist he's ever been with.
- [21:57]
Martin DeCaro
I was saying that he badly mishandled the crisis with the colonies. His adamance and his stubbornness that helped drive the situation forward. So you mentioned earlier about how monarchy was the norm across the world in 1787, when the constitutional from the medieval.
- [22:15]
Joseph Ellis
Ages up to the 18th century.
- [22:16]
Martin DeCaro
How about ancient history? That also informed the Framer's views on monarchy as well. Right.
- [22:22]
Joseph Ellis
In fact, the reading of the classics in the Greek and Roman classics is one of the distinguishing features of the founding generation. They're really well read in that. And if you read the latter correspondence of Adams and Jefferson, which is a really wonderful correspondence, you cannot imagine two political leaders of today, former presidents, doing anything like it. Much of it is they're showing off how much they know about Greek and Roman history and what can be learned from that. The big word that they carry out of that is the word virtue. Virtue means the ability to conduct yourself in court with the public interest, even when it's against your private interest. So Adams claimed, for example, that the proudest day of his life is when he lost the presidency because he did the right thing. He didn't go to war with France as Americans wanted him to do. And so that's the reason the Senate gets six years terms. They have longer terms. They're less likely to just do what their constituency wants. They're more likely to do what's the right thing.
- [23:23]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, that's the exact opposite of the Trump administration, where private interest, it's all about the grift. Getting back to the founders and their generation in this, this thread I'm pursuing here, what informed their views on monarchy and why this idea of having a king today or an elected monarch, so to speak, today is relevant. They were concerned about arbitrary power. Arbitrary power.
- [23:47]
Joseph Ellis
In the Constitutional Convention, there are two ghosts at the banquet. One is slavery, and it's so threatening, if we bring it up, it's going to destroy any chance of any kind of meaningful compromises, and they can't talk about it. The other is George iii and they can't stop talking about him. The only thing they can agree about in terms of the powers of the presidency is that it must not be a version of George iii, a monarch. This is my opinion as a person who's written biographies of Washington and Jefferson. If you read Article 2 of the Constitution, you tell me what the President can do or not do. It's watching the Soccer game being played with three balls and no referees. The real power of the presidency is not defined in the Constitution. It is defined in Washington's two terms. Washington himself makes it a powerful office, but the biggest thing he does is walk away.
- [24:46]
Martin DeCaro
What about the experience with royal governors?
- [24:50]
Joseph Ellis
Oh, appointed by the king, usually from the House of Lords. Yes.
- [24:54]
Martin DeCaro
They were very unpopular in some places and left a bad taste.
- [24:58]
Joseph Ellis
Not so bad. I mean, it varied. They were often uninformed. I mean, you know, the one guy said, I'm going to Virginia. What kind of island is that? They were totally uninformed about the job. And there was. It was being given to them as a. As a gift. Yeah.
- [25:12]
Martin DeCaro
The late Bill Lucktenberg wrote an essay that was just actually republished@AmericanHeritage.com where he said decades of struggle against royal governors had taught Americans that the executive was their enemy, that legislative assembly spoke for the people. But now we'll get to the Constitution here, Joseph. Despite that, Washington and others believe they had to create a strong executive after the experience of the Articles of Confederation where you couldn't get anything done. But they also didn't want, as you said, they didn't want a king. George Washington said the following. I want you to interpret what he meant. I am told that even respectable characters speak of a monarchical form of government without horror from thinking precedes speaking then to acting is often a single step. But how irrevocable and tremendous. What a triumph for our enemies to verify their predictions. This is going into the Constitutional Convention. Yeah.
- [26:09]
Joseph Ellis
It's clear that Washington is worried about discussions of executive power that are verging on monarchy. And he himself, now he's the guy that walks away from power, not just as president, but when he's head of the Continental army, he surrenders his commission and he could have been the monarch. That's what everybody thought was going to happen. And when George III heard that Washington had turned down the crown, George III said, if it's true, he will be the greatest man in the world. Guess what? It was true. And he was the greatest man in the world for that moment.
- [26:47]
Martin DeCaro
No, there are rumors, right? There are rumors that a king might emerge from this. In 1787.
- [26:52]
Joseph Ellis
One of the things that Washington had going for him is he had no male heirs. When Adams came in, he did have a male heir who actually does go on to become president of the United States. Washington was the American cincinnatus. Cincinnatus was the Roman general that stepped away from power, and that was his greatest attribute and the one Thing about Cincinnatus is Cincinnatus can never come back. When the Constitutional Convention is going on and they're talking about the executive power, they're all looking at the chair. Who's in the chair? Washington. We all know he's going to be the first president, but what happens after him, that's more difficult. In a note you wrote to me, you got it right. Alexander Hamilton gave a six hour speech arguing for an eternal term to the presidency. The president doesn't leave until he dies. I mean, he's thinking of Washington really. But it doesn't go as far as to say explicitly that we want to have a monarch. But from that day forward, Hamilton was regarded as a monarchist by many other people in the political scene.
- [27:57]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, well, that would have been an elected monarchy. Monarchies are hereditary. Passes down the air after the.
- [28:04]
Joseph Ellis
Well, I don't, you know, Donald Trump would be an elected monarch. Yes, he's elected as president, not as monarch. But so monarch has implications that it's your children and their children and that kind of thing. I think that what we're witnessing here is a situation in which the Republican Party has decided that it really wishes to support a person who is unwilling to regard the Constitution as anything limiting his power. If they threaten to change that, he will find out, you know, what's the word they use? He will make it difficult for them to be reelected.
- [28:39]
Martin DeCaro
Primary them. You know, I got a couple more questions for you, Joseph, but you know, on that subject, what do you think of this crazy talk that Trump will run for a third term?
- [28:48]
Donald Trump
People are asking me to run and there's a whole story about running for a third term. I don't know. I never looked into it. They do say there's a way you can do it, but I don't know about that.
- [28:58]
Rubrik Ad Voice
In an exclusive phone interview, NBC's Kristen Welker asked the president about a possible scenario where Vice President Vance is elected with President Trump as his running mate.
- [29:08]
Joseph Ellis
And then Vance steps aside. I agree with you. It's crazy talk. On the other hand, I don't think Trump will ever leave the office. He might not run for president, but if one of his minions, the vice president or the current Secretary of State, is elected, he would be included somehow in the cabinet or in some important way. It's impossible for Trump to imagine he is going to not have the power he has now. I agree with you. The Constitution is perfectly clear on this. You can only serve two terms passed in 1951 as a way of correcting what Roosevelt did. Roosevelt served four terms or was elected for a four term.
- [29:48]
Martin DeCaro
Well, you know, there's nothing stopping J.D. vance from running for president and promising everybody, Donald Trump will be my Secretary of State, the Interior. And then so another aspect of the Constitution that speaks to the founders concerns with a too powerful executive. They wanted a vigorous executive, but not somebody who'd be too powerful. That was putting war making or really war declaring. The executive can make war, conduct war, defend against imminent threats.
- [30:18]
Joseph Ellis
Right.
- [30:19]
Martin DeCaro
But war, the power of war declaring, that was vested in Congress, but the.
- [30:24]
Joseph Ellis
Congress has tended to surrender it over the last 50 years.
- [30:27]
Martin DeCaro
But at the time that was big. Right? Because that's right, kings made war.
- [30:31]
Joseph Ellis
But recent wars, the Congress has backed off. And they've tended to defer to the President's judgment in a way that they hadn't certainly in the 18th, 19th century.
- [30:42]
Martin DeCaro
It still seems like the idea for a presidency was worked out in the end through acts of political improvisation, compromise. After all, the Constitution is a set of compromises. Even the name president. Right. Was somewhat of an act of improvisation. That's right.
- [30:57]
Joseph Ellis
I mean, what people said, all a president needs to do is preside. And then they had a big argument about what they should call the President. John Adams was in the debate and he said, what are you going to call me? His, His Majesty, or you know, like they said, then we're going to call you your rotundity.
- [31:13]
Martin DeCaro
And instead of profundity, what kind of.
- [31:17]
Joseph Ellis
Clothing he should wear, what kind of meetings he should have with the public, monarchy hovers over it all.
- [31:23]
Martin DeCaro
But the vague wording, the vague wording of Article 2 that you mentioned before, maybe it could have been no other way because it would have been hard to delineate specific pieces of authority one by one and get a document ratified. Right. But in retrospect, and I know it's dangerous to speculate, what would the founders say today, but wouldn't you agree that they would probably be appalled at how powerful the office of the presidency is?
- [31:47]
Joseph Ellis
Yes. Now of course they would. I have periodic conversations with the leading founders, you know, and that's right, you.
- [31:54]
Martin DeCaro
Live in their world for 30, 40 years.
- [31:57]
Joseph Ellis
John and Abigail were particularly upset with the existence of something called the Internet. They said, this is the source of all your problems and that good luck that we didn't have to deal with that. But I do think that you're right that Even though Article 2 is impossible to read and understand completely in terms of the power of the presidency, and even though the real powers got declared By Washington, Article 2 is clear in one specific way. No, King, that is absolutely clear. And that's why I think that the Supreme Court decision in Trump versus Us is the most unconstitutional decision ever written.
- [32:38]
Martin DeCaro
And no one forced Congress, which gets its powers in Article 1. No one forced this Congress to surrender all of its power either.
- [32:47]
Joseph Ellis
No, no. And especially they've been doing that with regard to making a war for quite some time. I mean, the current occupants of Congress, both the Senate and the House, when you compare them to the original founders, it's like sand to gold.
- [33:00]
Martin DeCaro
You know, maybe I'm using some overstatement there. I said all their power. But I'll give you a specific example. The tariffs, right?
- [33:06]
Joseph Ellis
That is not a presidential power. It belongs to the Congress and they are not. Well, the Democrats would oppose it, but there I'm in the minority and can't win a vote there. But I do think that they simply have surrendered themselves to Trump for fear that if they don't, they will not be able to be reelected.
- [33:24]
Martin DeCaro
I need to read your book and have you back on.
- [33:26]
Joseph Ellis
Do read it. I'm interested. I want to know whether I can still tell a story. I hope I can. I think I can. I'm getting up there. I appreciate you allowing me to appear before your audience here. And again, if you need to read something, certainly I'm hoping you'd read my book. But more important than my book, read the Declaration of Independence and have debates about it in your family and your friends argue about it. Let people who are pro Trump and anti Trump come in and have part of this conversation. Because it's the mother load. It's the core values that the Constitution is attempting to implement in forms of government. And it's what makes the revolution a revolution. So that when we start to celebrate it, we're talking about a form of government that is unlike anything that existed before, has worked for two and a half centuries, and we're thinking of throwing it away.
- [34:24]
Donald Trump
All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen by emboldened radical left Democrats, which is what they're doing, and stolen by the fake news media. That's what they've done and what they're doing. We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn't happen. You don't concede when there's theft involved.
- [34:49]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History as it happens when we look back on the closing years of the Cold War to reflect on the conflicts that were supposed to define a new world order, we often think of Iraq in the first Gulf War. What about Panama? Emmanuel Noriega that's next. Plus, we're gonna have a bonus episode coming soon too. Why a Nazi Jurist is a star today on the New Right and make sure you sign up for my newsletter at Substack. Just search for history as it happens.
- [35:18]
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- [35:51]
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