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History As It Happens
The Ideas Behind Trump 2.0
01:10:31
The theories of unrestrained executive power guiding the Trump administration's assault on the administrative state and its attitude toward the federal judiciary draw on a far-right intellectual tradition. The thrust of these ideas is that the...
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- [00:01]
Martin DeCaro
History as it happens. May 27, 2025 the ideas behind Trump 2.0.
- [00:08]
Damon Linker
Another executive order signed by President Trump today that makes 66 total federal judge.
- [00:13]
Martin DeCaro
Is blocking President Trump's executive order to dismantle the Education Department, one of the.
- [00:18]
Damon Linker
First departments losing staff. The U.S. forest Service.
- [00:21]
Donald Trump
Cutting down the size of government.
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Damon Linker
We have to.
- [00:23]
Martin DeCaro
We're bloated, we're sloppy.
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Donald Trump
We have a lot of people that aren't doing their job. We have a lot of people that don't exist.
- [00:30]
Damon Linker
Trump administration's beginning ma layoffs of federal workers impacting multiple agencies, dismantling or as Steve Bannon would put it, the deconstruction of the administrative state.
- [00:41]
Martin DeCaro
What do Carl Schmidt, Leo Strauss, the Claremont Institute and Adrian Vermeule have in common? Or what is their connection? The idea of an unrestrained executive, a leader who by necessity must wield emergency power to do whatever he wants. And this is the driving force behind Donald Trump's return to the White House. The genealogy of an ideology. Next, as we report history as it happens, I'm Martin DeCaro.
- [01:08]
Damon Linker
In that state of emergency, it is not only permissible that the leader can break from the normal standards of the rule of law, or what Strauss calls in his own terminology, natural right. What is by nature right in a given situation. The normal standards of natural right not only can be suspended in a state of emergency, but in fact, breaking from those standards of right, wrong, natural right, rule of law is positively the right thing to do.
- [01:47]
Martin DeCaro
I'm guessing you don't recognize this voice.
- [01:50]
Russell Vote
Forgotten men and women of this country, those who work hard every day in cities and towns across this country, deserve a government that empowers them to achieve their dreams. While Office of Management and Budget may not be a household term, the agency's.
- [02:05]
Martin DeCaro
Work is profoundly that is the director of the Office of Management and Budget, Russell Vote at his Senate confirmation hearing in January, where Democratic Senator Gary Peters questioned him about whether, as one of the most important figures in the new Trump administration, he would follow the law if vote would spend the money appropriated by Congress or in Peter's view, simply ignore the law and enable President Trump to do whatever he wishes.
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Russell Vote
My time at omb, we follow the law consistently and we will continue to do so.
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Gary Peters
So that you can withhold funds that are appropriated by Congress. Do you think that's within the law?
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Russell Vote
Again, Senator, we did not hold inappropriately funds. We were engaged in a policy process with regard to how funding would flow to Ukraine. We released the funding by the end of the fiscal year.
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Gary Peters
Do you believe the Empowerment control Act of 1974 is the law of the land that you must follow.
- [03:01]
Russell Vote
It is the law of the land. As you know, the President has run on that issue. He believes it's unconstitutional. For 200 years, presidents had the ability to spend less than an appropriation if they could, if they could do it for less. And we have seen the extent to which this law has contributed to waste, fraud and abuse. But as it pertains to the parameters of how we would use that, that's something that his team will have to consider when they are confirmed in these roles.
- [03:27]
Gary Peters
So you know that the Impoundment Control act has created a process that's been held by courts over and over again. Courts in Train v. City of New York have consistently rejected attempts by presidents to withhold funds unless Congress clearly allows it. And Clinton versus New York also determined that laws which allow the President to unilaterally cancel appropriations are unconstitution. Correct me if I'm wrong, but is there anywhere in the Constitution gives the OMB director to determine whether or not a law is unconstitutional?
- [03:59]
Russell Vote
Again, there are 200 years of practiced by the presidents of the United States.
- [04:03]
Gary Peters
Have used so you're saying these courts are wrong. That's fine if they're wrong. But these are the laws of the.
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Russell Vote
Land right now I'm aware that they are the laws of the land and the caseload that is on the books. And this is something that the administration will consider when they are in these roles if confirmed.
- [04:17]
Martin DeCaro
Also back in January, Damon Linker, the writer and political theorist behind Notes from the Middle Ground on Substack, wrote, if Russell Vote is confirmed as Office of Management and Budget Director, he will continue to enact and accelerate the radical sweeping agenda he began to implement in that same position during the final two years of the first Trump administration. From that record and his testimony before a Senate committee last week, as well as the executive orders released this week, Linker wrote back in January, it is clear that he and the administration plan nothing less than a full scale assault on the regulatory and spending powers of the executive branch, reversing trends that have been underway since the early 20th century. Again, Damon Linker writing back in January, so this may not be as exciting or attention grabbing as calling Trump a fascist or comparing what's happening in our country today to the rise of Nazism in the 1930s, although a figure from that period is a big part of the story we're going to tell in this episode. But as I was saying, the Office of Management and Budget is usually not what grabs our attention. But Linker contends Vogt's approach to slashing the administrative state and his belief in a powerful or unitary executive draw on a long intellectual tradition on the right, one that deserves more attention. Writing in the New York Times this month, Linker says these arguments, imported from Europe and translated to the American context, have risen to greater prominence now than at any time since the 1930s. Damon Linker will be here in a moment. Rather than analyzing Carl Schmitt, however, much of our political discourse these days focuses on a more infamous German from that period. We won't hear us discuss Hitler too much in this episode. Rather, Carl Schmidt, Leo Strauss, the people at the Claremont Institute, and a Harvard law professor named Adrian Vermeul, their ideas and theories about executive power are the driving force behind the Trump administration, even if the president himself hasn't read a single page of their work. Damon Linker is a senior lecturer in the political science department at the University of Pennsylvania and a senior fellow at the Open Society Project at the Niskinen Center. He writes the newsletter Notes from the Middle Ground on Substack. Damon Linker, welcome back.
- [06:50]
Damon Linker
Thanks for having me, Martin. Great to be here.
- [06:53]
Martin DeCaro
So you wrote what is, in my estimation, the best piece yet explaining the ideas behind Donald Trump's approach to wielding executive power. Let's return to that in a moment. However, I feel like I do need to ask you about another item in the news dealing with national politics, and that is the Joe Biden revelations and how he and his people covered up his health problems. It's still not clear exactly what's wrong with him. Senility, dementia, just really getting old and incapable of running a country at the age of whatever it is. 82. Your thoughts on what we've learned?
- [07:26]
Damon Linker
Well, obviously the actual substance of the details in the Jake Tapper Alex Thompson book, book Original Sin, are juicy and, you know, filling in those gaps in our knowledge. But the general outline, the general story I actually think has been obvious for a very long time. I wrote my first substack post calling on Biden as if it would work, calling on Biden to step down from running again in September of 2023. I did it again on my substack and then rewrote it the Atlantic, in mid February 2024. The Atlantic actually ran a few pieces along those lines several months before my first piece, but to me this has been obvious for a very long time. The polls showed that roughly two thirds or more of the electorate and well over half of even Democrats thought he was too old to run again. And yet he decided that he would run again. And we now know that this was, as it appeared to me at the time, a sort of conspiracy of his top aides and Jill Biden, the First lady, to conceal the extent of his age related debility from the country, to deny that it existed, to smear anyone who raised it, to dismiss the concerns of voters, and to insist that actually not only is he not facing age based stability, but he's sharper than everybody else. Even the top young people in the room fight to even get a word in edgewise and demonstrate that they can keep up with this brilliant, sharp guy. This was all a lie. It was a lie repeated over and over and over again. It's a travesty. Here's a guy who did successfully beat Donald Trump, and he and his team seem to have convinced themselves that no one on planet Earth could do the same. Therefore, he needed to be the nominee again and needed to run because having a primary, acting like an actual functional political party and deciding among many viable options to go up against Trump again was too dangerous and couldn't be countenanced. And we live at a time where trust in public institutions is low and sinking ever lower. There are many reasons for that, some of them justified, some of them are a result of right wing demagoguery, but it is a reality. It is the baseline fact that all politicians have to contend with and Democrats have to wrestle with it in an especially wrenching way because we are the party of wanting to use public institutions to improve the country, help people with their struggles and so forth, and to then add to that baseline reality this despicable dishonor, honesty and place, Joe Biden's pride and vanity and the power hungry drive of his senior aides to continue basically running the country while he was incapacitated at times. To add that to the litany of obstacles that Democrats now have to overcome in making a good pitch to the American people to be trusted with power. Again, just unconscionable, indefensible, and I'm angry about it. And frankly, I wish more public Democrats in public life would be more publicly irate about it, because the people who are involved in this need to face accountability. There need to be consequences, almost as a kind of display for the American people that look, we recognize this was bad and it should never happen again. That's how you demonstrate you're worthy of winning an election in the future and.
- [11:37]
Martin DeCaro
Build back credibility if possible. So my view on this from the beginning is, well, I'M nonpartisan, although my listeners are probably familiar with what my political leanings or biases are. I'm not partisan. I'm not a member of either party. When Biden won in 2020, I felt he met the moment and I wanted him to be a one term president right from the start. Not that anyone listens to me either. Damon Linker but prior to your date, I was talking about this in the spring of 2023, roughly 18 months before the election. And I actually thought he would step down, giving the party 18 months to find a successor that he announced in spring 2023 after the midterm elections of 2022. That's it, folks. I'm gonna be a one term president. I will not seek reelection. When that didn't happen though, what are you left with? Okay, this guy's old. He's better possibly than the alternative which turned out to be Donald Trump. I want to give somebody the benefit of the doubt because, you know, the people around him couldn't possibly be so irresponsible and reckless as to hide the shortcomings or hide the problems of an aging man who can't do the job anymore. Well, that's exactly what happened.
- [12:48]
Damon Linker
Yeah. It is quite amazing to have lived through it all and now we're living through the aftermath. I mean, the reality that we are all contending with of life under Donald Trump is a function of the series of decisions by the Biden administration. And we really should probably move move on from the topic. But I guess the last thing I'll say is I remember the arguments of partisan Democrats about why very early on, when you were writing about it in spring 23 or I in the fall of 23, the arguments I would continually hear and push back was always some version of one. Kamala Harris is a weak alternative. She would do worse. Which in my opinion parenthetically is a further indictment of Joe Biden, given that he picked her her when he was in his late 70s and would be in his early 80s by the end of his first term. If that's really what leading Democrats thought of her, she should never have been invited on the ticket in the first place. So have a primary, no vice president. I mean, they obviously have a huge leg up to succeed the sitting president. But we have a contest and sometimes that person wins and sometimes they don't win. And like the insinuation was like we're gonna tear the party ap if the party's first brown skinned woman vice president isn't like, you know, anointed the nominee Then we're gonna tear each other apart. Like, what view of Democratic small D Democratic politics is this? Come on, grow up. We're a party. We gotta have an election. We gotta figure out what we think is best for us and the entire country. And it's an open contest. No one is anointed. And, you know, the Democrats have made a habit of, of this. Now, Hillary Clinton was expected to be anointed in 2008. She lost Barack Obama. Then it was assumed in 2016 that she would be anointed. And because Bernie was the main opposition and the party was, I think, justifiably concerned about what that might mean, they circled around Hillary Clinton as if, like, how dare anyone suggest it could be anyone other than her? I think that instinct is bad and we need to shuck it in the ditch and, and just let the process play out, however it plays out.
- [15:19]
Martin DeCaro
Next month, I have a podcast coming up called Democrats in the Wilderness, comparing this moment to the last time they were in the wilderness, the late 80s, early 90s, when Republicans appeared to have taken permanent control of the presidency. And my guest for that episode is going to be Sean Wilentz.
- [15:38]
Donald Trump
In the name of the hardworking Americans who make up our forgotten middle class, I proudly accept your nomination for President.
- [15:47]
Damon Linker
Of the United States.
- [15:51]
Donald Trump
We can seize this moment, make it exciting and energizing and heroic to be American again. We can renew our faith in each other. And in our second, we can restore our sense of unity and community. As the scripture says, our eyes have not yet seen, nor our ears heard, nor our minds imagined what we can build.
- [16:25]
Martin DeCaro
So your piece in the New York Times under the headline these Thinker Set the Stage for Trump the All Powerful. It is the best piece I've read so far explaining the ideas behind Trump in power. For a long time now, I have cautioned people, cautioned listeners of my show anyway, to not rummage around the 1930s Europe for answers to our current political crisis in America. Your op ed made me reconsider a little, but not for the usual reasons. You're not talking about fascism. We'll get to that in Carl Schmitt in a bit. First, how did you do this? Where did you look to link? Schmidt Strauss, Claremont Institute. Adrian Vermeule. These are names and ideas that are not on, you know, the minds and in the conversations of, say, ordinary people every single day. When we're talking about the ideology of Trumpism, what does Trump believe in? What is driving his administration, really? What is driving the people in his administration enacting these Policies. How did you connect these thinkers? I certainly would not have looked to make this connection.
- [17:29]
Damon Linker
It goes like this. I mean, I studied with students of Leo Strauss in graduate school about 30 years ago. And so he's often on my mind. I'm working on a book on him, in fact. And so, you know, I often have Strauss on the brain. And the fact is that one of the many intellectual factions on the right who are very adamantly supporting Trump are the people around the Claremont Institute out in California. And they have kind of genealogical connections to Strauss, because the institute was founded by students of a guy named Harry Jaffa, who is himself a Strauss student from the 1940s. So there's a link there. And I sort of started there because it has long been something. I noted that in Strauss's most well read book called Natural Right in History, which appeared in 1953, there are a few pages, pages right in the middle of the book, where Strauss is talking about, for want of a better term, we could call executive power, basically senior political ruling or leadership. And he describes a situation in which a leader faces an emergency. And in that state of emergency, it is not only permissible that the leader can break from the normal standards of the rule of law, or what Strauss calls, in his own terminology, natural right, what is by nature right in a given situation. The normal standards of natural right not only can be suspended in a state of emergency, but in fact, breaking from those standards of right, wrong, natural right, rule of law is positively the right thing to do in those exceptional circumstances. That idea is extremely reminiscent of a very similar point in the work of Carl Schmitt, who wrote, well, for many decades, but he kind of burst on the scene in Weimar Germany during the 1920s. Strauss reviewed a famous book of Schmidt's in the late 1920s. They had a correspondence. Schmidt wrote Strauss a letter of recommendation so Strauss could get an academic appointment when he fled Germany when Hitler rose to power in 33. So they were entangled. So Strauss was critical of Schmidt, but in the scheme of, like, possible positions in political theory, they're like this far apart, like half an inch. And it's a very important distinction that I won't get into that they disagree about, but, like, in the bigger picture, they're not that far apart. So that was part of the link. And then you have the Claremont Institute, which is kind of the third cluster that I talk about in the Times piece, who I already explained are kind of descended directly from Strauss. And then you have this guy named Adrian Vermeule, who teaches at Harvard Law School who is not connected to Strauss in any discernible way I can figure, but explicitly looks back to Schmidt as an influence and praises Schmidt regularly in his writings. So what you then end up having are several connections to this guy named Carl Schmitt. And what is distinctive about his thought is that he thinks that politics in its essence is revealed in extreme or emergency situations where the normally valid rules are suspended in favor of a single individual, using the ancient virtue of prudence, practical wisdom in ancient Greek phronesis, to kind of size up the situation and decide what's the best thing to do. Now, I'll stop in a sec. But listeners. This sounds sort of abstract, but listeners who are of a certain age might recall in the years immediately following 9 11, there was a big debate in American politics about the ticking time bomb scenario. Like, would it be permissible to torture a suspected terrorist? If we got intel suggesting there was a white van on a street in Manhattan with a nuclear bomb on it going to go off in an hour and it would kill 2 million people, devastate urban life everywhere in the world. If such a horrific event were to happen and you captured someone who you think knows where the van is, is, would it be okay to torture that person? Charles Krauthammer wrote essays about this, saying, yes, it is permissible to torture that person under those extreme circumstances. That's a very Schmidian kind of claim. And so in a nutshell, my piece in the Times is about how this vision of executive power as a single individual in a context or a situation of extreme same threat or danger or emergency suspends the ordinary rules of law and morality in order to size up what's necessary in this situation and to do what's right to save the community from threat. That is the kind of vision of executive rule that I think is animating a lot of people around Trump. Trump doesn't read this stuff, doesn't know anything, anything about it, but intuitively he loves the idea that he's the decider beyond the limits imposed by the rule of law.
- [23:21]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, Trump has not read Schmidt or Strauss, as far as I know. Or Adrian. Inconceivable, frankly, these ideas are what's important behind Trumpism. These are the people now in his administration, not Adrian Vermeule himself, but people who subscribe to these ideas are Heritage foundation types as well in his administration. Not like Trump 1.0. He had more establishment types there. So just a couple of things so you mentioned. Well, first, it's great that the New York Times gave substantial space to an essay about political theory that you wrote about here. You don't normally see essays like this.
- [23:55]
Damon Linker
It was a bit of a rough editorial process because they kept trying to kind of simplify it and popularize it, cut out distinctions, and I kept putting them back in because I didn't want to say inaccurate things. But in the end, I think we had a good compromise.
- [24:14]
Martin DeCaro
By the end, they want to popularize it. Right. For a general reader, and this is a hole in my knowledge, too. I am not familiar with some of these political thinkers. I actually read some of Adrian Vermeil's work before connecting with you here. We'll get to him in a second. The ticking time bomb thing. The best analysis of ticking time bomb theory was written, in my view, by Alistair Horne in his book A Savage War of Peace, about the French war in Algeria. He deals with the ticking time bomb stuff and torture in his introduction. If anyone has that book, check it out. I still think about it. I've read it 10, 15 years ago, and it still weighs on my mind. It is really brilliant. So back to unchecked presidential power in an emergency. We have to take another step from that, because we don't have an emergency now. Despite what the Trump administration is saying about different aspects of American life, they want there to be a permanent emergency so they can rule this way. You say these ideas were imported initially from Europe. I think you mean Schmidt and Strauss by that, because these ideas would be anathema to the Founding Fathers, who are wary of unchecked presidential or executive or monarchical power.
- [25:21]
Damon Linker
I think it's actually a little complicated. I mean, obviously John Locke was one of a handful of very influential political theorists for the founders. There are chapters in the Second Treatise of Government titled Of Prerogative, which are on this exact topic. I would actually say that although I'm a real critic of Trump and a lot of the uses that people in the administration and around the administration are making of this cluster of ideas, I think the reason why these ideas exist missed. Is not because the theorists, like, are craving dictatorship. Some of them might be. Schmidt, I think, sort of was. I don't think Strauss was craving dictatorship when he was writing in 53. He wasn't thinking, I wish Eisenhower would read my book and become a dictator. But these are perennial problems in politics, and they emerge from the character of politics, that there are emergency situations in which decisions sometimes do have to be made and so forth.
- [26:29]
Martin DeCaro
And like habeas corpus in a. In a revolt situation, in a rebellion.
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Damon Linker
Yeah, like yeah. Lincoln suspends habeas corpus because the country was at Civil War. And not only that, but for contingent, very unfortunate reasons. The capital of the Union was literally across the river from the Confederacy and surrounded by a border slave state in every other direction. So, like, talk about a vulnerable capital. You know, given those situations, I do think it's defensible that you have to suspend habeas corpus for fear that the entire kitten caboodle will go down the toilet. If you don't, you uphold the principle that we will not suspend it. And the result is the. The Union's cause is even weaker than it seemed to be early on in the war.
- [27:21]
Martin DeCaro
Lincoln did have Congress retroactively approve his suspension of habeas corpus because it really is Congress's responsibility. Although maybe some people disagree with that. But, yeah, I mean, if he doesn't do it, potentially have no republic left anymore after that.
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Damon Linker
That's precisely the distinction that this tradition is pointing to. Like an emergency is a situation in which not acting in this aggressive way leads to the destruction of the very community itself.
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Martin DeCaro
Yeah, Just one more point about Lincoln. He only suspended it for one part of the country where the rebel troops had attacked. Union soldiers passing through on their way to Washington, I believe. Anyway, whether Lincoln was right or wrong, what about this problem of governing like it's a permanent emergency, which is what the Trump people are doing?
- [28:08]
Damon Linker
Well, that is what Trump appears to be trying to do on multiple fronts. I mean, this whole idea of invoking the Alien Enemies act, there's questionable wisdom to that act at all. It's a very extreme law, but it is a valid law on the books. It's very old, but it has never been invoked in a situation in which we were not explicitly at war with a foreign power. You end up, then, in order to justify applying it to the situation of these Venezuelan immigrants, having to come up with, I think, absolutely cockamamie argument along the lines that members of this gang from Venezuela are themselves the equivalent of foreign soldiers sent here from the Venezuelan government. Like as if In World War II, Nazi and Japanese Imperial Japanese soldiers had infiltrated the country and were doing battle with the United States on American territory here in the country. That would be the analogy, which is utterly absurd. If that were true, we would be at war with Venezuela and sending troops to wage war there right now, which we obviously aren't and won't because it isn't true. It's a pretext, and he's doing that repeatedly. Stephen Miller, I think, is the main guy in the administration who's whispering and Trump's ear continually about this, coming up with pretexts to be able to deport as many people as quickly as possible without giving them due process or abiding by habeas corpus because it's such an emergency, we can't afford to do it.
- [29:55]
Kristi Noem
Well, the Constitution is clear, and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land, that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So I would say that's an option we're actively looking at. Look, a lot of it depends on whether the courts do the right thing or not. At the end of the day, Congress passed a body of law known as the Immigration Nationality act, which stripped Article 3 courts, that's the judicial branch of jurisdiction over immigration cases. So Congress actually passed, it's called jurisdiction stripping legislation. It passed a number of laws that say that the Article 3 courts aren't even allowed to be involved in immigration cases. Many of you probably don't know this. I'll give you a good example. Are you familiar with the term Temporary Protected Status, or tps? Right. So by statute, the courts are stripped of jurisdiction from overruling a presidential determination or a secretarial determination on TPS when the Secretary of Homeland Security makes that determination. So when secretary and terminated TPS for the illegals that Biden flew into the country, when courts stepped in, they were violating explicit language that Congress had enacted saying they have no jurisdiction. So it's not just the courts aren't just at war with the executive branch. The courts are at war these radical rogue judges, with the legislative branch as well, too.
- [31:14]
Damon Linker
The key lines in this book of Strauss are that not only does the executive, in a condition of emergency, decide what needs to be done, but it's up to that person to decide whether or not we are in an emergency in the first place. So if you ask the question, well, who decides if we're in emergency? The answer would be, well, Donald Trump does. That is, I think, an extremely dangerous thing to presume. And it speaks to what you said earlier about Lincoln retroactively going back to Congress to sign off off on the suspension of habeas corpus. I mean, Kristi Noem, the head of the Department of Homeland Security, said in her testimony to Congress this week that she, first of all shows she doesn't know what habeas corpus is. But secondly, she indicated exactly what I'm saying, that the person who decides whether or not to suspend it is Trump, when in fact, no, technically, Congress is the only entity that's supposed to be able to, to do that. So, Secretary Noem, what is habeas corpus? Well, habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country and their rights. Let me, let me stop and suspend their habeas corpus. Excuse me, that's, that's incorrect. And she, of course, wants to cut Congress out. And Congress, in its typical fashion lately, probably will be very happy to say no, actually let Trump make that decision because we don't want to be bothered.
- [32:43]
Martin DeCaro
I don't see the American tradition here. I mean, there have been times where executives have abused their power, but we look back at it and say that was an abuse of power to these thinkers. This isn't an abuse. This is how it's supposed to be. I mean, Strauss talked about something. The most competent and conscientious statesman should be entrusted with dictatorial type powers in a crisis. I mean, who's that person?
- [33:09]
Damon Linker
Well, again, yeah, that's, that's supposedly Donald Trump, but he's among the least conscientious people who could possibly be given such powers. So, yeah, I mean, I, there is obviously the major problem for this tradition of like, well, who, who ends up in that chair of being statesman to be given these enormous powers and that it's, you know, not at all clear that it's the most capable and competent.
- [33:36]
Martin DeCaro
It is because it is, because it is. So there's no way to falsify it and there's no way to restrain it. Another question I have for you, Damon Linker. I mean, as you mentioned, these ideas have been around for a while, on the fringes, maybe somewhat arcane, esoteric debates. When did they begin to enter the bloodstream of the mainline of the Republican Party? You say not Reagan, not unitary executive. I'm going to get to unitary executive in a little bit with you and Dick Cheney, who is not mentioned in your opinion, but when did this start entering the Republican main line?
- [34:10]
Damon Linker
Well, there are a couple of traditions here. The first is, as you just mentioned, the tradition of making arguments about the unitary executive. Those do trace back. Some people say they go back even further than this. But I really see it as an active intellectual tradition that gets cultivated and encouraged on the right with the Reagan administration. The Reagan administration, in a kind of nascent version of kind of the Trump revolution, were excited when they got to power in 1980. And early, well, actually in power, obviously early 81, when they got to power, they wanted to curtail the powers of the administrative state in various ways and they were very frustrated by the fact that they couldn't. Now the main reason they had had trouble then was because in the wake of Watergate, Congress had instituted a lot of new regulations to constrain presidential power. It was a kind of relatively late modern reassertion of congressional supremacy because of Nixon and what Nixon tried to do, because Nixon pushed very far in imperial presidency. So there was pushback after that. And it was in the wake of this, only six or seven years later that Reagan was comes in and a lot of people were frustrated that gee is like there are all these independent agencies. We can't fire these people. They have their own agenda. They won't just bow to our will. This is very frustrating. We got to get rid of these people and they didn't really succeed in doing it. David Stockman, the budget director who was, you know, the Russell vote of the Reagan administration, would rail against this. He wrote a very notorious essay for, I think for the Atlantic and like 1985, in which he complained endlessly about the restrictions on his power. And so that was the context in which the Right, through the Federalist Society, started to devise legal theories about how really the President is meant to be the head of a unitary executive. Now, I didn't go into it in this way in the op ed, but I should have. It was another one of these distinctions I figured I couldn't draw out because it was already too long and they were a little uptight about there being too many distinctions. So the unitary executive basically says this theory says that the President sits atop the executive branch as its head, like a head does to a body. So sort of like the medieval theory of the body politic. So it's a very vertical theory. It says that anyone who works in the executive branch looks to the President as his or her boss. And if the President wants to fire any of these people or give them direct orders about what they're supposed to be doing or not doing, they must obey. So it's very top down, but only within the executive branch. And originally, unitary executive theory was paired with a view that Congress, Congress actually needed to stop delegating so much authority to the bureaucrats in the executive branch. So it was paired with saying the President is the boss of these people who work in the executive, but in the end, Congress shouldn't delegate that much authority to them in the first place. So in theory, at least originally, if you had the unitary executive theory enacted in place, it would be paired with actually a reassertion of congressional power. As well. And that they saw would be a kind of rebalancing of the separation of powers. Now, the thing about the tradition I'm talking about, which does come from a different strand of thinking from Europe, is actually horizontal. I mean, it is vertical within the executive branch, like unitary executive theory, but it's also horizontal in the sense that it is hostile to the separation of powers. It believes in executive supremacy over the other two branches. That's why it meshes with what we're seeing so much from the Trump administration, with its contemptuous dismissal of federal judges. When the federal judges say, wait, you can't do this, this, I'm going to put a temporary restraining order on this executive order from the office of the president, and it's going to have to be hashed out in the federal courts and ultimately by the Supreme Court. If Congress could muster a little ambition to speak in Hamiltonian terms, to stand up for its own institutional rights and privileges against the president, then according to these theories, Trump would also be then pushing back against against Congress and saying, no, the presidency is supreme to Congress also. But that dimension of the argument isn't even happening because Congress isn't doing anything to push back. Where does that come from, you ask? It comes basically through the genealogy that I trace in the piece, from Schmidt to Strauss, from Strauss to the students of his on the right, who he directly teaches in the forties and the fifties and the sixties, sixties at the University of Chicago, and then most pertinently through the strand that goes to his student Harry Jaffa, and to the Claremont Institute. And then the Claremont Institute's embrace of Trump. The most direct point by point influence would be from then the Claron Institute to the arguments of Russell Vogt, who is the OMB director under Trump and is behind an awful lot of the stuff that we're seeing going on in Trump that have to do with assertions of executive authority, again, both vertically within the executive branch and horizontally vis a vis the other branches.
- [40:07]
Martin DeCaro
You've written about Russell Vaughter, Russell Vote, as well in the New York Times and on your substack notes from the Middle Ground, which I subscribe to. You're the only paying substack subscription I have.
- [40:20]
Damon Linker
Well, I hope I keep making it worth your while.
- [40:22]
Martin DeCaro
Well, I do always learn something from your writing. You seriously engage with these ideas. You don't dismiss the ideas behind Trumpism in a condescending way. So it's a bunch of nonsense. It's all fascism. Trump's voters are a bunch of stupid rubes. You never engage in that kind of discourse and I try to avoid it as well. We have to take ideas seriously, even, even or especially when we disagree with them. So you brought up the administrative state. A few more things to cover here. You brought up the administrative state. That's a huge part of this story because these thinkers viewed that as a major turning point. So we have the executive branch and we don't want all these layers of rules and bureaucrats and lawyers telling the President what he can and cannot do. Congress continues to delegate more and more authority to the administrative state. Why? Well, we have something called, say, the epa. Congress is not experts in, say, air quality. Congress members come and go. The people in the executive branch may or may not be experts on air quality or they may have other interests. They're not going to uphold the public interest. They're going to uphold some special interest and pollute the air. So the alternative then is to have professional bureaucrats who know something about how to preserve air quality. This is just an example example. But these are, these are the people that Russell Vogt and like minded thinkers, like minded activists, if you will, want to get rid of.
- [41:42]
Damon Linker
Right? I mean, they're kind of two strands of this. And one of them follows what I was talking about earlier about the post Watergate era. Then these are like the less deep traditions because this only traces back to the mid-70s, roughly. But that tradition is post Watergate and it effectively sets up a series of inspectors general within various departments and agencies of the executive branch. And these are people who are supposed to be overseeing what happens within these agencies. And you know, ironically, this is precisely because of things like congressional delegation to the administrative state. There's an acknowledgment that, wow, these people who are never elected have a of lot of power to regulate our lives, the economy and so forth. And given that fact, we should have a lot of rules dictating what they're allowed to do and not to do. But how do you know if those rules are being followed? You appoint an inspector general to that department or agency to kind of oversee the, you know, the workflow, the paper trail, make sure that everyone's doing what they're supposed to do to abide by the law and the extant regulatory history, both rules that have been literally written and then rules that have developed sort of de facto almost through a kind of common law practice within the executive branch. This becomes a very strong constraint on those very bureaucrats within the executive branch. And this again mostly follows post Watergate. But earlier than that, you have the emergence of the administrative state itself from nothing, which is, is what happens under, well, under the progressives, a little bit under TR when he's president, then under Woodrow Wilson especially, who actually was the only PhD to ever hold the presidency and actually had elaborate theories of American government that defended the creation of something like an administrative state precisely because he saw, I think largely rightly, you know, Wilson has all kinds of problems. But on this I think he was correct and every other other extant liberal democracy in the world. What I think verify this, that modern government is complicated in a nation state. It's a big political entity. Our lives are complicated. We have science, we have technology, we have medicine, we have industry. We have things going on that can be dangerous. We can eat food that's been contaminated and it can make us sick or kill us. We can drive a car and if it has a safety, safety flawed, can kill us or injure us badly and so forth. Extrapolated across chemicals, the chemicals in our food, chemicals in the air, pollution. You go on and on and on. Given that fact and the fact that these are complicated things, these are not things that like the great wise statesman Donald Trump can just sort of look into his heart and ponder by looking out at the country what the best course of action is. You need expertise. You need to look at science and scientific studies and decide between them when they point in different directions. And then you need statistical knowledge, scientific awareness. All of these things mean that we need not only civil servants to do this regulatory work, but they have to be smart, they need to have educations, they need to be experts. And sometimes they're not the experts working there, but we need to know. They need to be expert enough to know which true experts in the private sector should be brought into give testimony and to give them advice. And that's how the executive branch often runs. This theory about executive power isn't comfortable with any of this. It really does have a pre modern monarchical view of governance that holds that the primary power of the state is that kind of almost mystical sizing up of what needs to be done, making a decision and then acting. And it is uncomfortable with the idea that there are these advisors, like going back to the, the medieval period, in the early modern period, before the rise of liberal democracy, you had the privy council who would advise the king. And so they probably wouldn't have an objection to that. That would be like a dozen top trusted advisors around the prince president by analogy today that's okay because they're handpicked by the president or by the king in the old days. But the administrative state is effectively the privy council multiplied exponentially to be tens of thousands of people who not only are there to advise the president but to do sort of have their own agenda and do their own thing and they stay on from administrative to administration. A lot of these people on the right are like, why is the guy who worked for Obama and Biden still working for me? I don't trust that person. They hate us. They're going to slow walk the things we tell them to do and they're going to stymie us and keep us from actually ruling. We want to rule, which means we should have the power to get rid of all the, those people and replace them with people devoted to our agenda. And that counts for them far more than, you know, people being trained in statistical analysis and scientific studies about air quality and so forth.
- [47:23]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, well, you know, bureaucracies mess things up and they're captured by special interests too, of course. Yeah, but perfect.
- [47:31]
Damon Linker
Like all human governance.
- [47:32]
Martin DeCaro
Rather have that.
- [47:33]
Damon Linker
Thank you.
- [47:34]
Martin DeCaro
Than one person saying do it this way. Couple more things here. Unitary executive and Dick Cheney. I have Malcolm Burns, excellent book here. Iran Contra, Reagan's Scandal and the Unchecked Abuse of Presidential Power. In his conclusion, he says the congressional and independent counsel processes which investigated Iran Contra fail to create a disincentive for future administrations against ill conceived exercises of presidential power. Iran Contra was after all, largely a competition for control among the branches. Subsequent presidents, says Byrne, have already taken significant steps to enhance their clout. In the George W. Bush administration, Vice President Cheney took the lead in expanding the reach of the executive branch, in particular after 9 11. In early 2002, Cheney lamented that ever since the Nixon administration. And that echoes your point, Congressional demands on the White House to compromise on important principles of executive authority had caused erosion of the powers and the ability of the President of the United States to do his job. Cheney subscribed to the notion of the unitary executive first raised by the justice department in the mid-1980s. So you say this goes far beyond what you're writing about now, goes far beyond unitary executive. But there has been been, in my view, a bipartisan, if that's the right way of putting it, an establishment trend after Watergate, after the recovery of executive power, say after Watergate, both parties. The presidency is, is too powerful. And now you have some people saying it's not powerful enough. So.
- [49:11]
Damon Linker
Right. Yeah. And I wouldn't, I wouldn't go so far. I mean, maybe I use this term in, in the midst of, of a long rant that I was going on a little while ago. But I, I wouldn't say that the people I'm talking about aren't vastly beyond a unitary executive theory. It's a kind of hyper powered version of it. So, yes, what Cheney is saying is a kind of precursor to this. It's just that Cheney personally hates Trump because he has aversion to him and that many of us have, and he recognizes that he's the furthest thing from a circumspect statesman who should have that kind of power. But, but those arguments that you, you stated that he's making there are very much align with this and they also align with the immunity decision from the Supreme Court last July. I said this in the substack post that we were talking about earlier, my most recent one, about teaching a course on Trump 2.0. I really relied on in that class a lot on the writings of Jack Goldsmith, who served in the second Bush administration. And he gives a very persuasive analysis of the immunity decision that actually claims that, like, we sort of missed the boat on the importance of that decision, that yes, it does have the immunity thing, which, which is a big deal. Although he claims, claims that a lot of the immunity part of it was implicit already. The real thing in the immunity decision that was so alarming is that it picks up a lot of these threads of unitary executive theory and sort of treats them as givens that will end up serving as precedents for a lot of these decisions I think we're going to see from the Supreme Court over the coming months, months and years under Trump. They're going to, I think, give Trump a fair amount of what he's asking for when it comes to that vertical dimension of presidential power within the executive branch.
- [51:18]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, I read that Jack Goldsmith piece that you linked to and, well, who am I to disagree with him? He knows a lot more about this than I do. Had a couple of bones to pick with what he said. I'm going to return to that subject in a different podcast, although I do want to ask you about the Supreme Court when we wrap up. We're going to wrap up soon. Damon Linker, you've been very generous with your time. I did want to bring up Carl Schmidt one last time, but not dwell on it. I've read probably 25, 30 volumes on the Third Reich. So when I saw you mention Schmidt in your piece, I pulled Richard Evans book, the Coming of the Third Reich off my shelf. I went to the index. I said, if Carl Schmitt was a major figure. He must have an index entry. He's mentioned once in the entire book and it deals with the leadership principle. There's some dispute in the early, early months of 1933 over the nature of the Hitler government and the Hitler coalition. And as Evan says here, the constitutional theorist Carl Schmitt, an influential supporter of the Nazis, declared the present government. The nature of it was determined by the leader. Context here with some dispute over what the Enabling act did and all. You know, I don't know if Carl Schmitt was really that integral to the rise of the Nazis, but his ideas, his ideas seem to have, well, obviously have endured.
- [52:33]
Damon Linker
Yeah, they have endured. I mean, there are left Schmittians too. I mean, he's had a huge influence and he's brilliant, He's a brilliant writer, both in the depths of his ideas, but also as a rhetorician. He's just, he's great at coming up with these like pithy little aphorisms that contain little thoughts that are like, explosive if you think about them.
- [52:57]
Martin DeCaro
Was he a Nazi? He wasn't a Nazi ideolog.
- [52:59]
Damon Linker
He became a, he became a Nazi. He joined the Nazi party in 1933. He was not an early adopter. You know, a lot of right wing intellectuals joined the Nazis in the late twenties as, as the National Socialists began to get some traction and get popular. So he joined once it was clear they won. You know, you're a historian, you know, one of the, the.
- [53:25]
Martin DeCaro
I'm a journalist who reads history books. Go ahead.
- [53:27]
Damon Linker
Okay, I consider you a historian, but at least in the sense of someone whose analytic framework comes from history. One of the things that's so delightful about the study of history is the way that we can look back at a period and see converging threads that before we knew the ending, you wouldn't have noticed. But then in retrospect you realize, wow, this was over determined. Well, Schmidt is part of this broader cultural milieu in the Weimar Republic that all seems to be pointing toward, we want a dictator. You know, like, you can just like you can read Martin Heidegger lectures in 1925. And you, you say, Jesus, it's like he wants to conjure Hitler out of a can or something. In 1925, hardly anyone ever even knew who Hitler was. He was, he was a nobody at that point, unless you were on the far, far right of like street politics and following kind of the far right splinter factions at that point. And yet. So Schmidt is part of that kind of craving for some fewer principe some leader principle to come along and cut through all of the crap, all of the Weimar Republic dysfunction and just take charge. And Hitler happened to be there at the right moment to fulfill those hopes. And so Schmidt's importance in that is in helping to prepare culturally that readiness. And that in some ways is what I'm saying about, about now on the American right, that we are living through a period in which increasing numbers of right wing intellectuals really like thinking about how good it would be if we had a leader who could just do what we're convinced is right without having to deal with these annoying courts. I mean, I saw it just this afternoon on X. You have, just yesterday. I mean, I know where this is going to go up in a few days. But, you know, in, in the recent past, Donald Trump announced, or Kristi Noem announced that Harvard would from this point on not be allowed to accept any foreign students, which is like roughly 30% of the campus is foreign students.
- [55:57]
Martin DeCaro
A judge blocked it and a judge.
- [55:59]
Damon Linker
Blocked it within about four hours. And I can see all already on X. Immediately, all these right wingers just spitting with rage about not only saying this particular temporary restraining order is illegitimate. Because the arguments here are bad. No, they don't even bother with that. They just say, who the hell do these judges think they are? If John Roberts doesn't step in and tell them they can't do this anymore, then he's going to be standing there in the ruins of Article 3 and it will be his fault. And you can tell they're not saying this with a note of sadness. They want it to happen. They want Article three gutted so Trump can do whatever the hell he wants. That's the situation we're in today, where the American right is craving that kind of unlimited executive rule.
- [56:54]
Martin DeCaro
And they would change their minds if a liberal Democrat was in power claiming the same kind of power.
- [56:58]
Damon Linker
Of course. Of course.
- [56:59]
Martin DeCaro
No, you're right. It's what he wants to do. I was about to bring up Harvard myself. I mentioned the university's name there while you were speaking. But yeah, another case of him just saying, I'm going to do this and we'll sort out the legalities later. Or we won't sort out the legalities later. I'm going to ignore what a judge might have to say. Quick question about Adrian Vermeul, then we'll wrap up with the Supreme Court and some comments you made at the end of your op ed. Adrian Vermeule. So I'm not that familiar with his work. He is a Harvard law professor. Okay, so he's not some bozo. I did find his prose and his arguments impenetrable. Based on the links that you shared, I was reading some of his work. So does he want monarchy? I mean, what is he calling for? It's not clear to me.
- [57:42]
Damon Linker
He's trying to give the most extreme, theologically infused version of unitary executive theory. He believes. I used this analogy earlier in our conversation. The medieval view of the body politics. So by metaphor, 330 million roughly Americans is the body of our country. We're a body and it has a head with a mind, a brain who controls it. And that is supposed to, supposed to be the President, the executive, or at least he says the executive branch maybe is that body. Just as I use this analogy in, in the Times piece, I believe that just as if you have a properly functioning body, your arm moves if and only if you command it to, in exactly the way your brain tells it to do. Similarly, every single employee of the executive branch must act accordingly. So you can't defy, you can't slow walk, you can't raise objections based on law, precedent, regulation or institutional norms within the executive branch or within your department or agency of the executive branch in order to, to stymie the will of that head of the body politic who is the President. And he claims that if you don't accept what I just said, you're being completely incoherent by analogy because your body can't do anything if it doesn't have your brain in control of it. That's like saying we can decapitate you and then you, your body can do what it wants. Your arm can then decide what your arm wants to do.
- [59:36]
Martin DeCaro
This is a Harvard law professor.
- [59:38]
Damon Linker
Yes, yes. And I did link to his subsequent post just after the immunity decision where he, he uses the image of the President as a Leviathan and he uses the frontis piece from Hobbes's Leviathan to illustrate it. So I mean, Hobbs Leviathan is, is the ultimate political theory defense of absolute monarchy. The commonwealth is the brain of the dictator who rules it and makes all decisions without question. Absolute rule. Adrian Vermeule is a genuine, I think he is a genuine defender of absolutist monarchy and he wants to remake the American presidency along those lines. And he has to tenure at Harvard. So remember that the next time the right starts complaining about the kind of homogeneously left leaning academic professorship in the United States.
- [60:35]
Martin DeCaro
Yeah, I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing him because we can't dismiss these ideas. And this is why I enjoy.
- [60:40]
Damon Linker
No, he's a smart guy.
- [60:42]
Martin DeCaro
No, we have to engage these ideas. These are the, these are the ideas that are dominant now, at least in this part of our politics. And they're in charge of the government. So. But this is why I enjoy your work, because you do seriously engage with these things. So final piece here. You do end your piece with something I wanted to challenge you on. You say the best way to mitigate the risk, the risk of a president who doesn't have any constraints on his power. You say the best way to mitigate that risk is to insist that presidents accept the constraints of ruling within a constitutional order defined by the separation of powers. And the only way you say, say to ensure they'll accept such limits may be to demand that those who seek the nation's highest office display an understanding of those limits and accept them as a necessary bulwark against tyranny. Well, we got an F on that as a body politic. But Damon Linker, and I know you disagree with my take on this, but I'll give you the final word. The Supreme Court had an opportunity to demand that those who seek the nation's highest office display an understanding of the limits of power. And I know the Colorado ballot case was, was a tough one, but I don't know, I think we're going to look back on this period saying the, the court missed its chance.
- [61:51]
Damon Linker
I will be honest and say I didn't love my own ending. I often struggle when I do an op ed as opposed to, like, my own substack posts, because op eds, like book editors, like, always, want, like, okay, what's the takeaway? What do we do? How do we find fix the problem? Well, you know what, sometimes there is no fix to the problem and it is therefore automatically facile to pretend that there is a fix to the problem. So I hate being forced to come up with a nice little feel good takeaway at the end. And that's a little bit the way that ending was. I would say I'm, I'm going to resist the urge to take up the Colorado question of whether Trump should have been disqualified because it is a big issue and it's a serious issue and it would require a long, continued conversation. But maybe the next time I'll come back and we'll try to hash it out. I will say that the point I was getting at can be illustrated by going back to Richard Nixon. Now, there are all kinds of ways in which Trump is Nixon. 2.0. He's like Nixon after having a case of Red Bull. And the sense that a lot of the overweening claims to executive power, the kind of corruption, the Roy conification, the Roger Stone infused attitude toward governance that Nixon sort of experimented with, is back with a vengeance with Trump. And so in that way there's a real historical continuity there. But there is a difference. Difference. And the difference can be illustrated by pointing to the simple fact that Richard Nixon stepped down and resigned rather than fight. When it came to a certain point. He lied and then he lied and then he lied again.
- [63:44]
Donald Trump
I neither took part in nor knew about any of the subsequent cover up activities. I neither authorized nor incorporated encourage subordinates to engage in illegal or improper campaign tactics. That was, and that is the simple truth.
- [64:02]
Damon Linker
And he fired this guy and that guy and he had to go to Robert Bork to get done what he wanted at the just department to get rid of the special counsel. So he did all kinds of things that sound really Trumpian. But in the end he said, I can't win this, I'll tear the country apart. I'm not going to do what a Roger Stone would have me do, which is never let up, never admit you were wrong, never give up, never stop fighting, fight, fight, fight, until you are the last one standing.
- [64:36]
Martin DeCaro
Nixon listened to members of his own party who said, you got to get out of here.
- [64:39]
Damon Linker
Yeah, and of course that was also at a, at a time when the country as a whole, I think, was, was less corrupt and infused with a kind of hyper partisanship and networked through social media and the right wing media that kind of holds Bunsen burner under elected officials and threatens them with violence sometimes if they don't stick with Trump. So there are all kinds of changes in the surrounding political culture that have us where we are today. But, but that's what I'm talking about is in the end, as corrupt as you might be, as in favor of a unitary executive rule as you might be in the end, when push came to shove, Nixon did the right thing and put the good of the country and yeah, the good of his party ahead of the good of Richard Nixon.
- [65:31]
Donald Trump
I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
- [65:34]
Damon Linker
And that is an act, act of the kind of moral virtue that I was kind of gesturing toward at the end of the opet, I do believe, and this probably will leave us with a big sort of ellipsis that you might want to pick up on in a later conversation. But this tradition that I point to is not entirely deluded. Again, it's in Locke. Strauss traces it back to Aristotle, who in the Nicomachean, as ethics says that natural right is changeable. In other words, what is right and wrong is in most cases inviolable. But there are cases in which even that standard can change based on the situation and extreme developments in that context. Aristotle, Locke, Schmidt, Strauss, Trump, like this is a fissure in politics itself that will always be a threat. And we have to constantly be on guard from letting the extreme case becoming treated like the common case and making it seem as if we're permanently living in an emergency that requires dictatorial rule. But you can't ever make that threat go away entirely. It's woven into the fabric of politics itself. And that's a case where I'm not a historian and I'm a political theorist first, because I think that there are certain permanent things to political life that show up over and over and over again in different historical situations. And given that fact, the only real solution, and I'm doing air quotes here, the only real solution is, is the temporary attempt to make sure that the people we entrust with these potentially dangerous powers are restrained by their own moral convictions. They have to have a restraint in their souls, if you will, so that in the end, when push comes to shove and things get bad, namely early August 1970, the president says, you know, damn it, I can't believe I got myself in this situation, but it's over. I gotta just step down and let the country move on. I don't think Trump would ever do that. And that's the problem.
- [68:07]
Martin DeCaro
This is not Reagan conservatism. The connections to unitary executive and maybe some of the more populist, hard right elements of Reaganism. This is not conservatism of getting the government off our back back. This is not small government. Conservatives who, I mean, there were some fringy thinkers I used to see these articles pop up here and there 10, 12 years ago, who hated Abraham Lincoln, thought he was a tyrant, and thought we'd be better off under the Articles of Confederation again with a very weak executive because the federal government has too much power over us. Well, the pendulum is all the way on the other end now as far as the people who are governing the country is concerned. Where they want the executive to have is unmitigated power, but not to get the government off our back. That is the Harvard thing, dictating to a private university what it can and cannot do. I said we were gonna wrap up, but I can never wrap up. So finally, I let you have the last word. I'll wrap up with a very short trivia question. You remember what Nixon said about legality in the Frost Nixon interviews, right. When he was asked by when the.
- [69:12]
Damon Linker
President does it, it's not illegal. And that is exactly what my op ed was about, is that view. So what in a sense you're saying is that there are certain situations where the president can decide that it's in the best interest of the nation or something and do something illegal?
- [69:34]
Donald Trump
Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
- [69:42]
Martin DeCaro
On the next episode of History As It Happens, Richard Nixon's probably going to come up. We're going to be talking about presidential peacemakers. Many, many American presidents have seen themselves as men of peace even as they bomb the living daylights out of other countries. That is next, as we report History as it Happens. New episodes every Tuesday and Friday. My newsletter comes out every every Friday. Sign up@historyasithappens.com or just go to Substack and search for History as It Happens.