← New Books Network
New Books Network
Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney M. Milkis, "Subverting the Republic: Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism" (UP of Kansas, 2025)
01:01:30
Loading summary
Transcript92 lines
- [00:01]
Commercial Narrator
Wouldn't it be great to manage your portfolio on one platform? Well, now you can trade all in one place on Robinhood. That means you can trade individual stocks and ETFs and also buy and sell crypto using seriously powerful and intuitive tools at one of the lowest costs on average without needing to manage multiple apps. Robinhood makes withdrawing and depositing crypto seamless. Send crypto to your Robinhood account or send crypto from your Robinhood account to other wallets without deposit or withdrawal fees from Robinhood. Trade all in one place. Get started now on Robinhood Trading. Crypto involves significant risk Crypto trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Crypto llc. Robinhood Crypto is licensed to engage in virtual currency business activity by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Crypto held through Robinhood Crypto is not FDIC insured or SIPC Protected network fees may apply to crypto transfers. Crypto transfers may not be available to all customers. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal securities Trading is offered through an account with Robinhood Financial LLC member SIPC, a registered broker dealer.
- [00:57]
Sid Milkus
Mint is still $15 a month for.
- [00:58]
Commercial Narrator
Premium wireless and if you haven't made.
- [01:00]
Sid Milkus
The switch yet, here are 15 reasons.
- [01:03]
Nick Jacobs
Why you should 1. It's $15 a month.
- [01:06]
Sid Milkus
2.
- [01:06]
Nick Jacobs
Seriously, it's $15 a month.
- [01:09]
Sid Milkus
3.
- [01:09]
Nick Jacobs
No big contracts.
- [01:11]
Lily Gorn
4.
- [01:11]
Sid Milkus
I use it.
- [01:12]
Nick Jacobs
5.
- [01:12]
Sid Milkus
My mom used to say, are you. Are you playing me off?
- [01:14]
Nick Jacobs
That's what's happening, right? Okay, give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront.
- [01:19]
Lily Gorn
Payment of $45 for three month plan $15 per month equivalent required New customer offer first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra.
- [01:26]
Commercial Narrator
See mintmobile.com this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses. Monetary Magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.
- [01:56]
Nick Jacobs
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [02:00]
Lily Gorn
Hello, this is Lily Gorn with the New Books Network, the New Books in Political Science podcast. Today I'm joined by Nicholas Jacobs and Sidney Milkus, who I will call Nick and Sid. Throughout the podcast. Authors of Subverting the Republic, Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism. This this was published in 2025 by the University Press of Kansas and is a really interesting and important sort of situating of Donald Trump within American political history, but more particularly with regard to our understanding of the presidency itself and how that has changed over 250 years or so. I'd like to introduce Sid Milkus and Nick Jacobs and ask them to tell us a little bit about themselves and how they came to this project. Hello, Nick and S. Who would like to start?
- [02:51]
Sid Milkus
Oh, Wally, I'll start. So I teach at the University of Virginia where I've taught for 25 years. And I have always been interested in the presidency, but the president's connection to the political system more broadly, and particularly political parties and social movements. I came to this project with, and I'll pass baton to Nick in a second, but I came to this project in large part because of Nick, who was my student at the time and now is a rising star and a great friend and colleague. And we had written a book, what Happened to the Vital Center? Which was a long look at presidentialism and partisanship. And as we were writing that book, we were writing lots of things about Trump. And Nick noticed he had written so much that we had a follow up book to what Happened to the Vital center and focus our story on presidential partisanship, on Trump in particular. And we looked at the first term and the interregnum. The 2024 election ended, Lily, before we finished that book. But we wrote a postscript, and I think the postscript shows the book holds up well. And nothing really has surprised Nick and me very much. It's as crazy as the second term has been, given all the work we've done, we haven't been shocked by anything.
- [04:32]
Nick Jacobs
Thank you for having us. I'm a associate professor at Colby College and I came here after I did my graduate work with Sid, and I went to uva, which is a powerhouse of presidential studies, and learned with Sid, and then came up here to Colby, where I teach on the presidency and federalism, American politics more generally. And as Sid mentioned. Right. This work began. I actually remember the day. I remember the article. It was seven months into Donald Trump's first term. We had an opportunity to write a sort of a thought piece, empirical thought, historically situated piece on Donald Trump for the Forum. And we were going back and forth on title ideas, and we said, oh, I alone can fix it. People will love that. Right? I remember the editor at the time, Jeff Stonecash, wrote us back immediately, says, you guys can't be serious. What has he fixed? And the whole point of this first article we had ever written on Trump was, this guy is way more successful. So this is August 2017. Sorry, it's 2017, after he won. This guy is way more successful. Than then people are giving credit for. He's doing things through the labyrinth, through these backdoor channels. What's a county, There's a dumpster fire, for sure. There's chaos. But we really sort of tried to situate him as a rational actor given these changes, these transformative changes in the modern presidency. And flash forward, a bunch of lawsuits and administrative actions, a pandemic, a riot. Later, as Sid said, we had written something like 100,000 words on Donald Trump in four short years. That didn't feel so short. But I'll say, in pulling together the book, we both were a little frustrated by how much we hadn't written. And so although a lot of this book draws on our. Our past writings on Trump in the administrative state and changes in party organization, we actually had never written a single thing about his 2016 campaign and his primary. We have. We had to write a whole bunch more on that. You know, we focus in on the Supreme Court and legal decisions that not only mattered in real time for the Trump's policies, but have now had an enduring effect on the presidential office and what we're. I mean, we're living through that real time. So I think the book was a real opportunity to expand on our original insights.
- [07:33]
Lily Gorn
And so I wanted to start out because not everybody is a student of the presidency, as the two of you are. And I try to be with the term itself in the title, presidentialism, which is something that scholars of the presidency, not just the American presidency, but other presidencies talk about as well. And just to have listeners understand what that term means kind of in context of the American system.
- [08:08]
Sid Milkus
Yeah. I have to say, Lilly, I'm disappointed to hear you just say you think you're a presidential scholar, since you were a student of mine. You took my graduate.
- [08:18]
Lily Gorn
I did, I did.
- [08:19]
Sid Milkus
I thought I taught you everything there was to know it.
- [08:22]
Lily Gorn
You did. You did.
- [08:25]
Sid Milkus
So presidentialism, we're sort of invoking, as many people have since Trump emerged, Juan Linz's classic article, which was published in 1990, about which he was entitled, I Believe Nick, Presidentialism and the Perils of Presidentialism. He was comparing presidential systems to parliamentary systems, arguing that presidential systems were more dangerous, and he was focusing mostly on Latin America. They were more dangerous because they didn't lend themselves to the kind of compromises that could be worked out in the coalition building after an election and during governing. Presidential systems tended to be winner take all systems, with great antagonism between the president and the other parts of the government. Another term I sometimes use, this Presidential dominion, the dominance of the presidency, the sway the President holds over all features of the government. Now, interestingly, when he wrote that piece, Lyn considered America an outlier. And what I found most fascinating about that, Lilly, because of my long interest in president and parties, is that he didn't believe it was the Madisonian system, the system of checks and balances that made America an outlier. Rather, it was its moderate public opinion cultivated by this catch all party system, this decentralized party system that had held the President in check. And Nick and I have written about this even through the Roosevelt years. But even as he wrote that article in 1990, that check, moderate public opinion and the party system were in decline. And there was this emergence of this kind of presidentialism in the United States. And Trump has led a lot of people to look back at Lynz because Trump is a poster child for the perils of presidentialism that Lynz was analyzing.
- [10:46]
Nick Jacobs
I'll just briefly add to, to Sid's point. I think like all isms, presidentialism has a dynamic quality to it. It's an ideological force. It's not just the President and the Persona of the person that occupies the office. It's not just the rules that structure what the office does. It's our collective tendency to invest greater and greater responsibility to that person and to that office for managing the nation's political affairs. It has a temporal aspect to it. It's dynamic. Unsurprisingly, it was of course, Sid that pointed this out to me. It is a term used by Franklin Roosevelt in his own remaking of the presidential office, his own reimagination of what that office could do and where it should sit in the American political system. So the book zeroes in on a lot of pivotal moments in that first Trump administration that always has an eye to the fact that those episodes are the consequences of long term developments that have put greater and greater authority in that office, often unintentionally.
- [12:13]
Lily Gorn
And I wanted to sort of start there. Thank you for that definition of presidentialism, since that helps listeners to sort of understand particularly the US System, which had not looked necessarily like a lot of our Latin American colleagues in terms of the presidency. But Sid and you taught me well that we understand the presidency in context of its historical background and the evolution of this office over 250 years. And one of the points that you all focus in on is not just FDR or even Teddy Roosevelt. We got a lot of Roosevelts in.
- [12:55]
Sid Milkus
The book.
- [12:59]
Lily Gorn
But particularly what happened in the 1960s and 70s and I think this is really important. And I've been thinking about this a lot in terms of that period being another, if you will, refounding of the sort of American system. We've had a number of refoundings, I think, over 250 years. We can point to things like the Civil War, obviously, but certainly the growth of the administrative state with the Roosevelts, both of them. But you zero in on this period when there is all of this civil unrest and social movements that also, to some degree, stretch into the parties in interesting ways. And the presidency itself sort of comes into the fore and evolves, if I want to use the passive voice. So could you talk a bit about what you see in that particular period that basically has set up for where we are now?
- [14:15]
Sid Milkus
Yes. I'm glad you noticed the importance of the 60s, Lily. I don't know when I taught you back when I was at Brandeis, near Boston College, I talked about that as much. I think we were talking more about the New Deal as the inflection point. Right. But my work since then greatly helped with Nick, who's taught me as much about the 60s, certainly, as I've taught him. I think one of the things that fascinates me is how. How little scholars have tried to place the 60s in the stream of American political development. They tend to view it as an elaboration of the New Deal, part of the long New Deal, or as just this interregnum of disruption that was put to rest by the conservative reaction to that disruption in the 70s and 80s. But I don't know if I call it a refounding, because it doesn't have the kind of resolution, the rebuilding of a consensus we saw at the New Deal. It's kind of like the progressive area, where you have these really foundational cultural struggles that have always been very difficult to resolve in the United States. And the battles in the 60s, I mean, a lot of people refer to this as the Second Reconstruction, are over. The question that goes back to the Founding who belongs to the American community? How inclusive or exclusive can we be and still be a great nation and carry on this grand experiment of democracy on a large scale? And these issues, this question of who belongs, Lilly, has haunted the country from its beginning. We had codified slavery in the Constitution. But what happened in the 60s is that what was once kind of an episodic battle became a routine part of American politics. And Nick and I discovered how the 60s are still playing out. The assault from the New Left against the crimes of racism and imperialism. And Corporate dominance and the counter mobilization to that in the 70s and 80s. That battle is still going on in American politics. We see it in struggles over patriotism and immigration and of course, civil rights and traditional values. These are at the forefront of our politics today. What Nick and I have tried to figure out is how these cultural battles have affected American political institutions. And I think I should turn to Nick now, let him have a chance to talk about the institutional consequences of that and how as important as the New Deal was in establishing presidential dominion, the 60s accelerated that in a way that has brought us to the kind of politics we've seen over the last couple of decades. Nick, do you want to talk something? Yeah.
- [18:01]
Nick Jacobs
No, I really appreciate the question and the very careful read of the argument because I think you summarize it 100% correctly. It is very common to look at the presidential office and it's still even debated whether or not such a thing as the modern presidency exists. I mean, Sid and I think maybe make our priors pretty clear. We think that this office is one that can only be understood as a set of secular and episodic developments and that there is a modern presidency. But a lot of the times you look at the modern presidency and as you said, you start with TR, who begins to bring new force to the office. Then you shift to Wilson, writes a bunch of academic treatises and gets us involved in war. And then the modern presidency, it's finally mature by the time Roosevelt ends office. And there's something deeply ungratifying about ending the story about the modern presidency there. Because as Sid and I write in our first book we wrote together, so much of the old presidency still remains in the New Deal presidency. I mean, Roosevelt's attempt to totally build a new modern presidential office is in so many ways incomplete, especially as it pertains to the President's role in the party system. Many of Roosevelt's and Sid, this is Sid's canonical work. I mean, so many of Roosevelt's attempts to remake the party system are non starters. They hint at the possibility of a more presidency centered democracy. But the court packing plan fails largely because of resistance within the Democratic Party. The purge in the 1938 midterms. It's sort of mixed, but not as successful as modern day presidential involvement in the primary. And you do get the emergence of the executive office of the presidency in 1939. But when you compare it to what the executive office of the presidency becomes, especially in the 1960s and the 1970s, it pales in comparison. The 60s and 70s relate to this earlier transformation. But it's not just a difference of degree. It is really a difference in kind and part of and just briefly wrapping this up, you're spot on to point to the ways in which that social unrest gets channeled through the party system in ways that it had previously not happened. It gets channeled through the party system because the president becomes in so many ways the locus of our political attention. The president becomes central to movement politics in a way that Franklin Roosevelt and T.R. these sort of old patricians of our political system never did. I mean, Sid has done some important work showing that the second Roosevelt in particular was involved with some social movement activists, particularly labor, but not nearly the long litany of social movement groups that are active in the 1960s in pushing on the presidency. That's coupled to the growth and this is the only thing I'd add to the summary you gave, coupled to the growth in the administrative state in the 60s. But as Shep Melnick reminds us, also in the 1970s, that's really where it begins to take off. And so when you look at today's presidential administrations and when you think about the stuff that Donald Trump is doing now through the Office of Civil Rights and the Department of Education, through his Office of Management and Budget and the Government personnel office, with Doge through the DoJ taking action on pretty recent federal criminal statutes, that's all a part of an administrative state that isn't New Deal based, but based in the 1960s and the 1970s because of the demands of those activist groups. So that's the corporate quick line on institutions.
- [22:29]
Sid Milkus
Yeah, quick by academic standards. Lily, I think a saying of the women's movement is the personal is political. In the 60s, politics just gets into every nook and cranny of our lives. And all centered on this question, this existential question of who belongs to the American community. And that creates a kind of intractable. That's why I wouldn't call this, I wouldn't call this a refounding lily, because it's kind of an ongoing churning. These issues are not can't be resolved. Like, you know, you can't compromise these issues like you can on Social Security.
- [23:03]
Commercial Narrator
@Blinds.Com, it's not just about window treatments. It's about you, your style, your space, your way. Whether you DIY or want the pros to handle it all, you'll have the confidence of knowing it's done right. From free expert design help to our 100% satisfaction guarantee, everything we do is made to fit your life and your windows, because@blinds.com, the only thing we treat better than windows is you. Visit blinds.com now for up to 45% off with minimum purchase plus a professional measure at no cost. Rules and restrictions apply.
- [23:33]
Lily Gorn
Yeah, this is one of the, this is one of the reasons I think about this as a kind of refounding, because it was never resolved.
- [23:40]
Sid Milkus
Yeah, maybe that's the refounding. Right.
- [23:43]
Lily Gorn
Yeah. It didn't go in one particular direction or another. It went in both directions. Intention and, and has continued since the 1960s and 70s. And so we live in a space now, I think, Sid, you're correct, where the tension is about who belongs in the American community. And all of these political dimensions are, you know, excluding or including. And that's one of the reasons I keep thinking about that period of time as unresolved.
- [24:17]
Sid Milkus
Yeah. And as it's unresolved, as you have these intractable divisions, these social activists who kind of fill the void when the party's establishment is weakened by kind of the antinomian attack on institutions in the sake. So the McGovern Frazier reforms are critical here. And the presidency is looked to to cut the Gordian knot, if you will, break through these divisions and make things happen, get things done.
- [24:51]
Lily Gorn
And so you posit, as we've now talked about, sort of the presidency sort of taking on a kind of different role in a lot of ways that comes out of not only sort of the administrative reforms of the New Deal, but as you noted, Nick, the administrative reforms that happen with the further growth of the administrative state, regulatory policies and so forth. But what is it about the presidency and perhaps the individuals who inhabit that office? Because those are two different things. What is it about the presidency that changes and that we see essentially Donald Trump as perhaps the culmination of.
- [25:46]
Nick Jacobs
I'll point to the first very notable and visible change, which I think are rooted in clear institutional developments that emerge out of the 1960s, 1970s, and that Sid already alluded to the McGovern Frazier reforms and the, and the Democratic Party and then the Republican Party following up and adopting a system of primary based selection for the president and the subsequent nomination contest. So. Right. And opening up the presidential selection system to essentially anyone. You change the rules of the game, you change how you become the party's standard bearer, and you change what skills and attributes are valued as a result. How you do win the game. You don't win the game by wheeling and dealing in the back smoke filled back rooms, as we always talk about, the people that Win the primary system, win when they position themselves as outsiders. So running against Washington, running against the establishment, the swamp, whatever you call, is not a new thing. The first victor in that. Well, I guess McGovern is technically the first victor, but he goes down into flames. The first successful Democrat that takes advantage of McGovern, Frazier, is Jimmy Carter, who, I mean, couldn't be more different from Donald Trump in so many ways. Yet in running his presidential campaign, Musk positioned himself as an outsider. Right? That's how he gets name recognition. That's how he takes over the party, becomes the party standard bearer. So now we've been living with just 50 years of running against the establishment. It's not a coincidence that over 50 years, just trust in institutions also plummets because the system is set up to run against itself. And at a certain point, And I think 2008 is notable with Barack Obama's capture of the nomination, also an outsider with very limited experience in federal office, the president begins to position, or the presidential nominee begins to position themselves as the leader, not just of a party, but as a movement, because it has to distinguish itself as something different. These are not organizations with long histories and long futures that need to be stewarded with strong principles. I like that word that we threw out there. It's the churn and the rules. And the system is incentivizing that churn. So. So by the time you get to Donald Trump in 2016, he's full on. I am the leader of a movement, of a group of people that are taking back this country. And I think there's a clear connection between that style of politics and the systems we established that encourage it. So I think that's my. That's the easy one to see.
- [29:12]
Sid Milkus
Trump even sees himself as divinely inspired.
- [29:17]
Nick Jacobs
I don't know if we. Anything we did did that. That might be the unique.
- [29:22]
Sid Milkus
God save me so I can make America great again. Part of this, Lily, is that I think this is a fascinating development, untroubling. When the presidents become movement leaders, they also become factional leaders as part of that, because these movements really, it's really hard to build a majority coalition or consensus as the leader of a movement party, because social activism is really important in American politics, but they really usually represent structural change that doesn't have majority. That doesn't have majority support. And I think that's an important shift from the New Deal presidency to we'll have to come up with a better term than the sns. And I don't like the term postmodern President. I hate posts and neos, so we have to come up with a. Maybe by the end of this podcast we'll figure something out. But up through the late 60s and through Kennedy, there was some obligation on the modern presidency, even as they were party leaders, to rise above parties and present themselves as leaders of the nation. And things like the Cold War made this kind of an imperative. The. The public administration scholar Herbert Kaufman referred to this as neutral competence and the development of the bureaucracy and respect for the bureaucracy and expertise was a part of this. I think the Democratic Party has a lingering commitment to this, but they don't. They've been motivated to fight fire with fire in responding. The Trump administration taking and taking on the bureaucracy for partisan objectives as well. But presidents still presume to represent the people. Biden and Trump both talked about being stewards of the people, but really they were factional leaders who pursued partisan policies, and particularly administratively, where they didn't have to rely on Congress to pass a law. And so I think that's a huge change. And it makes it very difficult for presidents, who are a big part of the presidency has always been to respond to emergencies. Lincoln and the Civil War is a good example of that. Roosevelt, the Great Depression. But that's become difficult for presidents to do. We saw this with COVID 19. Now that they've become factional leaders.
- [32:12]
Lily Gorn
But one of the points that you do make in the book and that we kind of see all around us on a daily basis these days in the second Trump administration is the argument from the president that it is an emergency, whatever the situation is. You know, this is the, these are the kinds of words in the rhetoric that he's using with regard to, you know, putting troops in Washington, D.C. and wanting to send them to Chicago now and so forth. So the sort of embedded capacity of the executive, as I understand the founders, to have designed it, to be able to respond to emergencies has kind of been flipped on its head. If everything is an emergency, then the president has the capacity to do anything, which is essentially what Trump has been saying in his Cabinet meeting this week.
- [33:10]
Nick Jacobs
Right. And I think a lot of the.
- [33:12]
Sid Milkus
Great point, Lily.
- [33:13]
Nick Jacobs
Yeah. And I, I think a lot of the political and partisan developments that we were just talking about, I mean, this, this is what creates the image of American politics or a presidency centered version of politics that is zero sum, right? Our guy won, your guy lost. Elections have consequences. I have a mandate. And this is what Lyn's warned about with presidential systems being designed in a way to almost avoid the necessity of building coalitions and building consensus and the zero sum nature of politics, it doesn't just give the President room to operate. It also encourages his fellow partisans in other branches of government, the Congress, and now especially the states, to encourage the exercise of unilateral power. So I think one way in which the framer's logic has been particularly twisted through those partisan developments is there was always some ambiguity about the nature of prerogative or the ability of the President to act when in absence of law or even in contradiction to law during times of emergency. But what would keep the President from becoming imperial through their discretionary powers were the other branches. But now when those other branches have lost all of their institutional imperative to act, and they don't want to act as a Congress, but instead as Republicans in Congress, and, and I will say Sid and I, we do call out Democrats and Biden in the same way.
- [34:59]
Sid Milkus
Right.
- [35:01]
Nick Jacobs
It's not a feature of conservatism, it's the party system as a whole. But that's the way in which the system has been really twisted is these auxiliary precautions, these checks. They've succumbed to the partisan imperative of winning at all costs in this zero sum game.
- [35:23]
Sid Milkus
Yeah. I mean, presidents have become the vanguard of this kind of winner take all tribalism. And declaring emergencies has been increasingly a method by which they've obtained that power or claim that power to play this role of the vanguard in this existential struggle for America's soul. And clearly Trump has brought this to a dangerous culmination. Fabricating. And we see this now with sending the military to take over Washington and perhaps, you know, playing a big role in LA and perhaps now going to Chicago, fabricating against real, you know, any sense of the facts, emergencies in order in order to claim that power. But, you know, Nick, I'm glad Nick pointed to the fact that Democrats have not been immune from this. And Joe Biden claimed emergency powers to provide student debt relief, which was a big deal. And he was pushed hard to Nick's point about executive center partisanship, Republicans and Democrats looking to the President to do these things. When the Build Back Better bill did not pass immediately, Democrats in Congress, particularly the Progressive Caucus, said Biden had to do something administratively to satisfy some of the concerns of that bill. It's interesting how we've been influenced by German philosophers. So we talked about the cult of person, the charismatic personality Weber. Now we've got Carl Schmitt and States of Exception, which apparently has been read very carefully by a lot of Trump's advisors. And when the State of exception becomes perpetual when emergencies become permanent. My God. I mean, that's a powerful recipe for authoritarian power.
- [37:36]
Lily Gorn
Well, I mean, and that seems to be also where you're sort of laying some groundwork in the book, where, again, it focuses on the first Trump administration. But as you both said, you've not been surprised by anything that has happened in the second Trump administration in terms of the consolidation of power within the presidency itself and the role that presidents have. But in the book particularly, you're focusing on Donald Trump in context of the historical evolution of this office. Can you talk a little bit about some of these? We've now happened upon some of them. But some of the ways that you've seen this, because you do talk about executive orders, you talk about the fact that Biden had the most in his first hundred days, but I think Trump.
- [38:32]
Sid Milkus
Outdid him by about 4, by, by magnitude of 4, I believe, in his.
- [38:39]
Lily Gorn
Second first hundred days. And, and students often ask me about executive orders because they read about them, but they don't know about them because, you know, it's not something that's clearly articulated in the Constitution of the United States.
- [38:54]
Nick Jacobs
Well, I mean, on the specific, you can start with executive orders, but one should never end with just looking at executive orders. To me, it seems like a lot of the actions that were formally issued, not all, but a lot of the actions that were formally issued as an executive order, which is the president's sort of broad directive of how a law should be executed, or a broad directive of what the administrative agencies should do with reporting requirements or the establishment of commissions or new priorities, a lot of them are just there for symbolic value. And I think no matter. I think the Trump administration coming in, I think the Biden administration to some extent, too, the number one goal of their executive order agenda is just to have more, more to show that this office is off and running. A lot of what Sid and I write about, and I think really where the presidency is deeply consequential for our daily lives, happens through much more opaque channels deep inside of specific agencies. I'll say this. I mean, they used to leave a better paper trail, at least when the Obama administration made sweeping changes to Title IX regulations, at least we had a letter, a Dear Colleague letter that stipulated the change, rooted it in some flimsy statutory authority, but it was a paper trail. Now, so much of the policy change we see is taking place without a paper trail. Behind closed doors, phone calls to university presidents, sort of like a rent collector at the dorm asking for the money Unless you do this and X, Y and Z. So, you know, there's just so many tools that the modern presidency has and they learn from one another. And, you know, we write elsewhere, I forget. And it might be a quote from an interview that, you know, in many ways, Obama, through his We Can't Wait campaign in his second term, left this loaded administrative gun on the desk of the Oval Office for Trump to use not just to roll back Obama's directives like daca, but to expand them out. Then Biden learns from Trump, you know, uses very similar legal authority to take on administrative action. Trump has a particular gift for pushing the envelope, though. I mean, we have not had such serious conversations about the impoundment of funds since Richard Nixon. The courts are going to have to decide that question. I thought they had already decided it, but I guess not. So the ability to essentially to not spend money that Congress appropriates to impound funds. Congress in 1974 put restrictions on their ability, but Trump seems to think he can do it. We've never seen such massive firings before. So we have seen presidents flex their muscle quite extensively in personnel changes to the federal bureaucracy, but not shutting down funded agencies by firing all the staff. That is new. Sid, what are your go to fun ones administrative innovations that you find interesting and shocking?
- [42:45]
Sid Milkus
Yeah, well, I just want to mention a broad point first that we talked about how the polity is churning by social issues. Who belongs? And immigration is not just a social issue, but it has tremendous cultural implications and it's telling, I think, guys, that since daca, which the Dreamers initiative that Obama issued, all the policies, struggles and tactics have been administrative, that we have had no law that would give shape that would codify any form of immigration policy. So we have these dueling administrative actions, immigration advanced by Obama and Biden, and then a draconian nativist policy pursued by Trump in 1.0 N and even more dramatic in 2.0. That's a dramatic undermining the rule of law, which is the foundation of a republic. And Lilly, you should tell your students, as Nick was suggesting, that when we say executive orders, we think of like an official executive order that has certain restrictions upon it. You have to go through certain steps. But more and more presidents are taking carrying out executive administrative initiatives in more undercover, under the radar ways, as Nick was suggesting. So almost all the immigration initiatives have been through memos, right, Nick?
- [44:36]
Nick Jacobs
Tariffs.
- [44:36]
Sid Milkus
Yeah.
- [44:37]
Nick Jacobs
I mean, there's some statutory authority there from the 1970s. This is very much related to your point about emergencies, but that's the other big one.
- [44:46]
Sid Milkus
Yeah. The other thing I wanted to mention is the and Nick started here is that a lot of these executive actions are directed to the basis to the party loyalists to rouse the bases. There's kind of this top down, bottom up of politics. Now. They're many of them are performative. I mean, build the wall in the first term, Trump claiming emergency action to do. I don't think much wall was built, but that was a slogan to rally the base. Trump has just issued an executive order banning burning the flag. There have been a couple of Supreme Court cases saying that that's a right of free expression. A president cannot by decree unless he is the state as claiming Louis XIV powers claiming, you know, prescribing burning the flag, declaring and claiming in any individual who does it have to spend has to spend a year in jail. So that's not going to pass muster, I don't think legally. But it's a, it's a signal to the base that this guy is is a strong defender of law and order.
- [46:00]
Lily Gorn
In terms of signals and symbols. Because you've both been sort of talking about how some of the more recent presidents, Obama, Biden, Trump. 1 TRUMP 2 I would say even probably George W. Bush, that there are sort of symbolic turns and signals that they have used in their role as president that, you know, we see some of this from the Roosevelts and others.
- [46:41]
Sid Milkus
You know, we have a new Roosevelt who's in our active in our politics now. I don't think we'd have time to get into that.
- [46:48]
Lily Gorn
That's fine. I'm going with the old Roosevelts. But even thinking about Nixon's articulation of the silent majority, which is signaling and symbolic. And so how do these kinds of not only sort of rhetorical flourishes, but also sort of administrative flourishes, if you will, how does that sort of become this now part of the executive, part of the presidency in ways that are different?
- [47:26]
Sid Milkus
I mean, as I just said, a lot of these executive orders, a lot of them are very important. Child separation had a profound effect on thousands of people's lives. And so this is a powerful executive weapon. But since the president has been pulled into the vortex of partisanship and Nixon might be a good place to start there, a lot of these executive orders are performative. They're directed symbolic, as you put it, they're directed to the base. And my former another I think the only people writing good stuff about the presidency are my former students. That might be a bit of self aggravating, but Kenny Luande has written a book where he talks about how that's basically what administrative action's about. Now, these are performative acts where the president tries to stage action that makes him him or look like a strong leader, an effective leader, as Nick put it before. But I think Kenny, over, over, over. I think he exaggerates a little bit by suggesting that virtually all of the administrative presidency now is about performance. And he misses two things. Some are very, very serious policy that have dramatic consequences. We see that with immigration policy now. What's going on with universities. I never thought it was happening. I've written about presidential aggrandizement for four decades. I never thought a president would issue an executive order against a civil rights policy that would lead to the firing of the president of my university. So some of these things. So there's this sort of uneasy balance between real executive orders that have serious, serious policy consequences and this performative nature, this symbolic nature, Lilly, that you talk about. But both of those things are deeply steeped in partisanship. And that's the other thing Kenny misses, that the presidency has become the vanguard of partisan, of the effort to fulfill partisan objectives symbolically and with serious substantive policy. These performances are not just for the press, for the media, but are oftentimes directed to the base, to mobilize the base during government, to sustain the president's power, but also in elections. I'm sorry, I want to leave you a chance to talk about this, Nick, as well.
- [50:25]
Nick Jacobs
It's such an interesting question. And I started just sort of thinking more about the ways in which the president has become such a more central cultural figure and really shapes not just what we are talking about politically in terms of what government, what bill is being debated. They don't really debate bills anymore. What's going on in Washington, D.C. and more, just setting the terms of the debate for these deep divisions in American society and really profiting politically speaking off of the creation and the growth of those divisions. And, you know, I think you're right. You reflect back on, like George W. Bush and the post 911 era being a central point of cultural contestation about America's place in the world and what our wars in the Middle east meant in this sort of weird era where we were fighting over what it meant to be patriotic. But it wasn't all consuming. And then I think with Obama sort of representing, as Ron Brownstein calls right, the coalition of the ascendant, right, it wasn't just some guy that won an election. Right. It was this moment where America was redefining itself and now with Trump, it's the same thing. Right. It's just these deep battles centered on what a single individual is sort of shaping. With Trump now, right. Everything on the right gets boiled down to four letters. You're making America great again. You're making health great again. You're making agriculture great again. Right. And so, like, the ability to just command the cultural scene and put everything in the shadow of your version of nostalgia, I mean, that's. I'm just reflecting. Like, I've never really. We've thought about it, we've written about it, but, like, that's a power that far exceeds any single policy change. Roosevelt didn't do that.
- [52:44]
Sid Milkus
Probably. What makes it. One of the things that makes so powerful, Lilly, I think, is it's grounded, you know, that these cultural differences have led to a divide which didn't exist during the New Deal, between metropolitan areas and rural areas and small towns. And Nick has written brilliantly about this, about this divide. It's the most serious regional divide which we've had since the Civil War. And to reach. To see to the absurd degrees this goes, my daughter sent me a text the other day, said, what's this battle over? Over the Cracker Barrel? Simple. Why is everybody making a big deal out about remove. Was it Uncle Herschel removed from the symbol?
- [53:32]
Lily Gorn
The guy, he's been put back in.
- [53:35]
Sid Milkus
And Trump told the Cracker Barrel chief executive they should put Uncle Herschel back, and he did. So the president is engaging in the symbol for the Cracker Barrel restaurants. But that's part of this cultural chasm we have in the country now between metropolitan areas and rural areas and small towns, which is cropping up in all kinds of ways, both some that seem trivial, some are very important, like this law and order after the president's making sense. Sending troops into urban metropolitan areas, not into some rural areas where the crime rate is actually higher in many areas of red states.
- [54:24]
Lily Gorn
Yeah. And there's also race as a big component of a lot of.
- [54:31]
Sid Milkus
Yeah. The battle over who belongs. Lily. Race is front and center. So much of this is centered on immigration, but which, of course, also relates to race and ethnicity.
- [54:42]
Lily Gorn
So I wanted to ask the two of you before we conclude, are you writing another book together or what are you working on now?
- [54:53]
Sid Milkus
What do you think?
- [54:53]
Nick Jacobs
Not yet. I mean, something might just stumble upon our laps. I mean, Sid and I are still writing together. It's exhausting keeping up with the headlines.
- [55:09]
Lily Gorn
It is.
- [55:10]
Nick Jacobs
And there's so much. There's so much more this time around. I'll say than the first time.
- [55:18]
Sid Milkus
Both.
- [55:19]
Nick Jacobs
In terms of how it's rooted to this very deliberate strategy that's much more comprehensive than anything we saw in, in 2017, in the first Trump administration. I remember a long time ago, maybe this is the next book. I remember a long time ago when I was a grad student with Sid, thinking about how presidents learn from one another and how presidents learn during the course of their administration. And there's sort of a deep irony that the four years that Trump had off made him, I think, a more powerful president. It allowed him to retreat back and MAGA acolytes to retreat back into the think tanks, into the state houses and really rethink a second strategy. This culminates right in the publication. Now, Everybody knows Project 2025, but.
- [56:18]
Sid Milkus
It.
- [56:18]
Nick Jacobs
Goes beyond those policy recommendations. He's a leaner president, he's a meaner president, like in that way. And I don't know, maybe there's something there.
- [56:33]
Sid Milkus
The next thing we're going to write together, we've just signed a, so to speak, signed a contract to do this is we're going to write about how presidentialism has affected federalism and how federalism, which once was some constraint on presidents, have now become the battlegrounds of a kind of presidency generated national politics where things like battles over reproductive rights and law and order are fought in a broader sense. I'd like to enlist Nick in this project I've been contemplating for a while about those major periods in American history where we fight over who belongs where. Those are the central battles, and they lead to a churning rather than a resolution. So I'm thinking about Reconstruction era, the Progressive era, and the sixties and seventies, and the sixties and seventties being an apotheosis, which makes this churning a routine part of our politics. But I think Nick's a little too busy to engage in that kind of. But it's striking to me that none of those periods, Lily, have really been treated, I think, adequately by American political development scholars. The focus has been much more on critical junctures, what are commonly understood as critical junctures, like the Civil War, the New Deal, the Jacksonian period, the Jeffersonian period. I'd like to look at those what are considered interstices, which I think tell an important, maybe the most important story of American politics. I don't know if I can get Nick to help me with that.
- [58:15]
Nick Jacobs
You don't have to twist my arm too hard. You just have to clear my calendar.
- [58:19]
Lily Gorn
Well, I look forward to having you both back or individually back on the new books. In Political Science podcast to talk about whatever you write next. It's always a pleasure to to see you, Sid and Nick, to get to know you in your work. So I'd like to thank Sid Milkus and Nick Jacobs for joining me today to talk about Subverting the Donald J. Trump and the Perils of Presidentialism, which is published in 2025 by the University Press of Kansas, which you could purchase at the University Press of Kansas website. Do either of you have a brick and mortar store with an online presence? Do to whom you would like to give a shout out? A brick and mort mortar store, like a local independent bookseller that also has an online presence where your book can be bought?
- [59:09]
Sid Milkus
Oh, Barnes and Noble, certainly.
- [59:11]
Lily Gorn
I understand. Barnes and Noble is great.
- [59:16]
Nick Jacobs
Now we'd appreciate it, as always, to buy directly from the publisher.
- [59:22]
Lily Gorn
Exactly.
- [59:23]
Nick Jacobs
And if it means you even just want to send me an email, I got some promo codes. So I'd happily shave a few percent off if you send me an email and help Kansas out.
- [59:35]
Lily Gorn
All right.
- [59:36]
Nick Jacobs
They're great press for us and thank.
- [59:38]
Sid Milkus
You, Lily, for having us. As I suggest for I'm very proud of my students and we really appreciate this podcast and the great questions you asked us.
- [59:50]
Lily Gorn
Well, it's a fascinating book and an important book and so I appreciate you two talking to me about it.
- [59:56]
Nick Jacobs
Thank you very much.
- [59:57]
Sid Milkus
All right.