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Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force
00:27:05
Since his inauguration, President Trump has exercised a level of power that has directly challenged the checks and balances that, on paper, define the U.S. government. The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Charlie Savage discuss Mr. Trump’s plan to institute a more powerful presidency.
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- [00:00]
Advertisement Speaker
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- [00:34]
Michael Barbaro
From the new York Times, I'm Michael Babaro. This is the Daily. Since his inauguration, President Trump has exercised a level of power that has directly challenged the checks and balances that on paper, define the US Government. Today I gathered three of my colleagues, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Charlie Savage, to talk about the absence of resistance and about Trump's plans to make a more powerful presidency permanent. It's Friday, January 31st. Friends, welcome back. Some of you, welcome to the Roundtable. Charlie Savage, welcome.
- [01:31]
Jonathan Swan
Thank you.
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Michael Barbaro
Maggie Haberman, as always, a pleasure.
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Maggie Haberman
Thank you, Michael.
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Michael Barbaro
Jonathan Swan, welcome back.
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Advertisement Speaker
Thanks.
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Michael Barbaro
I want to start by asking you to describe, in a word, if you'll indulge this exercise the past two weeks, just one word, intense.
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Jonathan Swan
Surprisingly well planned. I know that's more than one word predicted.
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Michael Barbaro
I knew one of you was going to say that. And that's because we have had a series of conversations with you three that in many ways prepared me, prepared all of our listeners for what the last two weeks, to a degree, have looked like. And that's why we asked you all to come back. Let me just explain. During the campaign, the three of you embarked on a reporting project to understand what Donald Trump's second term would look like, the norms it would challenge, the presidential power it would seek to expand, and the ways in which it would test our democratic system of checks and balances. You all came on the show to talk about it. We called the series Trump 2.0. And now that Trump is president and has unveiled such an aggressive and muscular agenda, it made sense to have you back to assess and explain what he's done so far and how it maps on to what you had foreshadowed in that previous conversation. So I guess, Jonathan, since you used the word, maybe we'll start with you. But where should we start? With predictions versus reality?
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Advertisement Speaker
Well, I don't want to sound obnoxious, but pretty much everything that we wrote is coming to bear.
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Michael Barbaro
That's not obnoxious. Just for the record.
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Advertisement Speaker
Thank you. So our first piece in the series was about the expansion of power. This idea of scouring the executive branch Looking for any pockets of independence and removing them. And we're now seeing early examples of Donald Trump doing that, firing officials who might be checks on him, ridding the executive branch of people who may be disloyal to him. You have retribution as a theme that we came back to again and again and again. And you're seeing that play out in many different ways. Some we didn't even imagine, actually. I suppose he defied our capacity for imagination when he decided to pull security details from people he doesn't like who are under active death threats from Iran. But, you know, besides that, pretty much everything from his immigration agenda to his plans for the Justice Department introduced, introducing figures like Kash Patel go down the list and immodestly kind of copy paste our series, and you're basically getting what you're getting in the last eight to ten days.
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Michael Barbaro
Maggie, what has stood out to you as you contemplate what your reporting suggested this term might look like and what it's actually been in these first two weeks?
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Maggie Haberman
As Jonathan said, we made clear that Trump and his allies were looking for ways to maximize the executive branch's power and that they believe this is constitutional, that they are arguing that certain checks on it are not constitutional and that they were prepared to take their chances in court and see what they could get away with. Now, there was one blemish to that, which was this memo that went out from the Office of Management and Budget that froze congressionally approved funding for federal aid and grants across government and created mass confusion and ultimately was rescinded. So that was them testing the limits and not succeeding. That was the rare problem point for them. Everything else they have done, particularly as pertains to immigration, has worked the way they've wanted it to, which is to say what?
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Michael Barbaro
How has it worked?
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Maggie Haberman
Which is to say that they have not been stymied by loud protests. They have had some court challenges that they expected, but those have just kind of gone on in workmanlike fashion, as opposed to the resistance that we saw in 2017. And they are hitting some numbers on arrests of migrants who they say have criminal records. And they are narrating that and making mugshots available and making public these numbers about the volume of people who they have arrested. And mostly, Michael, they're facing a pretty dampened Democratic pushback, especially compared to what we saw in 2020.
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Michael Barbaro
Charlie, I want to ask you how much these actions that the president and those around him have taken over the past two weeks are testing the limits of presidential power and just the law And Maggie started to hint at this, how the rest of government, both legislative and judicial branches, the checks and balances, are responding or not responding.
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Jonathan Swan
I think I would divide that into different categories of things. The immigration actions that Maggie was just describing are mostly within the parameters of what everyone agrees the statutes on the books already say, with the big exception of the attempt to redefine birthright citizenship. And so that's making very aggressive use of powers, but it's not pushing, for the most part, at the limits of those powers. In terms of, is this actually a legitimate thing you have the authority to do? The assault on the federal workforce, the mass firing of inspectors general, in the firing of a member of the National Labor Relations Board, in the firing of various civil servants, including all the Justice Department trial lawyers who just were assigned to work on any of the Trump cases, for example, blowing through explicit legal protections for federal workers. All of these things, though, he and his appointees just did.
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Michael Barbaro
Why do something that, assuming there are lawyers in the government who are as smart as you, why do it?
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Jonathan Swan
So I've argued that the way to understand this is it looks like they're inviting all these lawsuits. All these people who are getting fired are going to sue because they're going to say, you couldn't, you can't do that. Look at this law. You just violated the law. And perversely, that may be exactly what they want.
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Michael Barbaro
You're going to have to explain that.
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Jonathan Swan
This theory of expansive presidential power that Jonathan was referring to, this sort of revisionist understanding of the Constitution that kind of dates back to the Reagan administration. The president must have exclusive control of the government, and Congress therefore lacks legitimate authority to pass laws that create any kind of limitation on the president's ability to fire anyone he wants or creates any kind of pockets of independent decision making authority anywhere in the government. They were trying to stomp all these things out. And so how do you stomp them out? You fire the person in the face of this law, the person files a lawsuit, and then you get the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court to say that law is unconstitutional and create a precedent that expands what executive power means.
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Michael Barbaro
I just want to summarize that because it's a little bit of a complicated thought, feels very important. You're suggesting that some of the actions the president is taking, especially when he seems to be getting rid of federal workers who would seem to have very clear job protections within the law, is that he wants them to trigger a legal process that ends before a Republican appointee. Majority of the Supreme Court Justices who then rule not in the favor of the workers, but in favor of Trump and essentially redefine and expand presidential power in the process. But there's no guarantee that that's gonna happen. But is the journey itself just worthwhile under the current ideology of this White House?
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Maggie Haberman
It depends. I mean, Michael, I don't think in every single case that the Supreme Court is going to cede to Trump, but they do have a conservative supermajority, and that gives a lot of hope to Trump and his allies. I also just. And Jonathan should answer this question as well, but I do want to make one other point. Flooding the zone is everything. They are taking so many different actions that it is incredibly hard for the media and for his critics to keep up. And so you lob 10 shots and maybe two work, and for them, that feels like a win. But Jonathan probably has a better answer.
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Advertisement Speaker
No, no, I agree with all that. The court pretty clearly, directionally is on the path of, you know, expanding executive power and having a broad interpretation of Article 2 power. So they feel confident that this court will, in many cases, rule in their favor that these efforts by Congress to restrain the president, to put these checks within the executive branch are unconstitutional. And by the way, they've telegraphed this like, this is not new. For months before the election, his people were saying when we were talking to them that this was kind of the point was let it go through the court system. We like our chances. This is a different Supreme Court than existed in 2017. It's a different federal judiciary because Donald Trump himself transformed it. It's not that Donald Trump has profoundly changed. It's that the Washington he returns to has changed and the institutional guardrails have eroded. The court system is different. Congress is hardly a co. Equal branch anymore.
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Michael Barbaro
Well, let's talk about that a little bit more, Jonathan, since you queued it up. Congress could have acted in many of the executive orders that Trump has signed. And I wanna read you something that our colleague Carl Hulse, the justifiable dean of congressional reporters, in my estimation, wrote in the past 24 hours. He said Congress passed a law shutting down TikTok, and President Trump, once inaugurated, flouted it. Congress required advance notification for firing inspectors general, and the Trump administration ignored it. Congress approved trillions of dollars in spending on a multitude of federal programs, and Mr. Trump froze it anyway. And he concludes the new administration is quickly demonstrating it does not intend to be bound by the legal niceties or traditional checks and balances of this relationship with Congress. Basically, what his analysis is saying is the President doesn't really care about what Congress thinks right now, even when congressional law is being seemingly broken by his actions.
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Maggie Haberman
Well, that's true, but the issue is that Congress is not really doing anything to push back. Right? I mean, we have been on this path for some time. The two people who were the strongest opposition to Trump in his first term in Congress were, were the Senate Majority Leader and the House speaker, Paul Ryan. McConnell always maintained a difficult relationship with Trump. McConnell is not the leader anymore. And McConnell is actually somewhat marginalized. He can be an effective behind the scenes player, but he is not representative of where the majority of the Republican senators are. Most of them are very much aligned with Trump. And so if you have Republican majorities in both houses and they are not going to object when the White House does that, and in fact are generally gonna shrug, which is what we've seen, then of course, Trump is going to take as much as these folks are going to give him. There's not a lot of pushback. And that's what Trump was counting on, I would expect.
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Michael Barbaro
Charlie, and I think about you as someone who has spent a big part of your career thinking about checks and balances and institutional prerogatives. Why aren't Republicans in Congress taking an opportunity just to establish kind of a bare minimum of what Congress's role is supposed to be? And isn't there just a kind of a basic level of pride that a person has once they're elected to the House or to the Senate in what that institution is supposed to do?
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Jonathan Swan
Well, we're not just talking about Congress here, right? We're talking about the Republican Party and how it has changed in the Trump era in a way that the Democratic Party has not. The Republican Party is not the party that existed in the 90s or the aughts, the Bush years, the Reagan years. It's become the Donald Trump Party. And he has successfully driven from that party anyone who might have the sort of institutionalist perspective that you're discussing, the sort of Liz Cheney's are purged, the John McCain's are deceased. There's been enough primary challenges of people who are insufficiently Trumpy that everyone lives in fear for their political career if they get on his bad side.
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Advertisement Speaker
I mean, when you talk to these Republican lawmakers privately, they all understand a vote against something that Donald Trump really cares about is a vote to end your career. I mean, there's not that many people who are willing to end their career. So even though I know for a fact there are a whole bunch of Republicans who, if it was a private, secret vote, would vote against en masse. Many of these nominees that he's put up, they won't dare do it in a public setting under the gaze of Donald Trump. And there's actually something deeper that's happened in American politics that Trump has changed. A generation ago, if you were a member of Congress, you could kind of protect yourself and defend yourself by raising money and having coalitions and whatever. All of that has been obliterated by Donald Trump's monopoly on the attention landscape. And if you get in their crosshairs, it doesn't matter what kind of a war chest you have that will be squirted away in two days, you're finished. Your career's done Right.
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Michael Barbaro
Which helps explain the congressional deference to these power plays. So just to summarize this, as the president has sought to pretty profoundly expand his power, Congress has basically said God bless for all the reasons you just walked through, which leaves the courts. And as you all establish, it's a pretty open question of whether and how the court might rule on something as meaningful as executive power. So that's where things stand. We are going to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about the confirmation hearings that have dominated the last 24 hours.
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Maggie Haberman
With Schwab Investing Themes, it's easy to invest in ideas you believe in, like online music and videos, artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and more. Schwab's research process uncovers emerging trends. Then their technology curates relevant stocks into themes. Choose from over 40 themes. Buy all the stocks in a theme as is, or customize to better fit your investing goals. All in a few clicks. Schwab Investing Themes is not intended to be investment advice or a recommendation of any stock or investment strategy. Learn more@schwab.com thematic investing. Carol I'm Carol Rosenberg from the New York Times. Right now I'm sitting alone in the press room at the US Navy base at Guantanamo Bay. I've been coming here since four months after the 911 attacks. I've probably spent around 2,000 nights at this Navy base. It's hard to get here. It's hard to get news from the prison often. You know, I'm the only reporter here. The New York Times takes you to difficult and controversial places, and that takes resources. You can power that kind of journalism by subscribing to the New York Times.
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Michael Barbaro
So Maggie, Charlie, Jonathan, I want to turn to another way that President Trump is exercising his power in this moment and changing the nature of presidential power, which is through appointments of loyalists who we expect would defer to him. That's something else you all had forecast in Our original Trump 2.0 conversations last year, that Trump did not want skeptics, did not want institutionalists, did not want the those who would check his power or say no to him. Two of the most important appointees, Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard, had their confirmation hearings over the past 48 hours. Charlie, I want to begin with you. What would Kash Patel's confirmation to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation mean for some of the norms and presidential power questions that we're talking about here?
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Jonathan Swan
Well, it sure looks like he's going to be confirmed. I do not see any Republicans out there expressing opposition at this point. And so Cash Patel would be a very different FBI director than what we have seen at his hearing. He said most of the right things about how he wasn't. He was going to follow the Constitution and not weaponize the FBI as a tool. For Trump, I think there's a lot of skepticism about whether that's true. He's the guy who has gone on a million podcasts over the last few years and written screed like books with lists of enemies that need to be gone after, which includes a lot of Republicans in Trump, people who've been cast out of the circle. But the FBI is an extraordinarily powerful institution. So notwithstanding what Patel says at his hearing when he sort of cleaned up for the cameras, if we get that Patel, then that's one thing. But if we get the Patel who's been on all extremist fringe podcasts by the hundreds for the past few years, behaving like that person. The FBI is going to be a tool of political vengeance.
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Michael Barbaro
Is there any reason to think we were not Maggie, gonna get that? Kash Patel who appeared on those podcasts talked about enemies lists and would be pretty different from the FBI directors of the past who saw their role as having a fair bit of independence from the president.
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Maggie Haberman
Look, I think that Cash Patel is going to see his role as different from FBI directors of the past, regardless of whether it's the version of the Senate hearings or the one on the podcasts. But the one on the podcast is the one who appealed to Donald Trump, which is why he appointed him in this role. And so I would take seriously what Kash Patel has been saying about what he thinks the FBI should do and what should be done with people who he and Donald Trump perceive as Donald Trump's enemies. What is very striking is that Kash Patel is a loyalist who has been involved in producing a song with some of the people who were imprisoned in connection with the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. Producing a song with Trump's voice overlaid over it. And Trump often brags about how it rose to the top of the Billboard charts.
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Michael Barbaro
One of Trump's, the future director of the FBI potentially has been producing a song whose focus are those who attacked the Capitol on January 6th and as.
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Maggie Haberman
Hostages in their telling. And most of those folks, the vast majority of those folks, have now been granted clemency.
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Michael Barbaro
Right.
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Maggie Haberman
That was one of Trump's first official acts. So what that does reveal is Kash Patel's mindset about how he sees the government against Donald Trump. I do want to make one point in fairness, Michael, and you started out asking about Trump wanting to rid the government of anyone who might not be loyal to him, and that's certainly true. And we've heard all kinds of questions being asked about loyalty. There's a pretty capricious standard about who's getting chosen and who's not for some of these roles. But look, there were aspects of the federal bureaucracy that was trying to stymie Trump's agenda or that disagreed with things he was doing or that tried to convince him otherwise in 2016 when he was a duly elected president. And so he does have reasons that he is unhappy with aspects of the government. This is taking things to an entirely different level.
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Michael Barbaro
Next up, Jonathan, we have Tulsi Gabbard's nomination to be the next Director of National Intelligence. Another pretty unorthodox choice. A convert, once Democrat, now Republican, who has expressed a lot of loyalty to Trump with pretty non traditional credentials for such a big national security role. Should we see her in the same light as Kash Patel in the context of this conversation we're having about basically these folks getting these jobs and just expanding the president's power because she's not going to be much independence.
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Advertisement Speaker
No, she's a little different. And by the way, she may not get confirmed. She's probably the most endangered of all of them. One reason being that she used to be a Democrat and Tulsi Gabbard is much more of an ideological choice. Donald Trump has always been extremely conspiratorial, had a dark view of the intelligence community, has been of the view that there is a deep state out to get him, and also has been much more sympathetic to people like Vladimir Putin and some of the autocratic leaders around the world. Tulsi Gabbard is much more in line with Donald Trump's foreign policy views than many other senior members of his Cabinet. Her views are closer to Donald Trump's than, say, Marco Rubio's views, certainly much closer to Donald Trump's than his first term. You know, people like Mike Pompeo, who was Secretary of State, and CIA Director Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson. So she's aligned ideologically. She's got really powerful allies like Tucker Carlson, and Trump just likes her. From all accounts. She's a very personable person and there's a chemistry there. So she's a little different. I wouldn't put her in the same category as Kash Patel, who is a much sort of more precise instrument than Tulsi Gabbard.
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Michael Barbaro
But you said she might not get confirmed, and I'm curious if any of you would explain if she's not going to be confirmed, precisely why it will be. I suspect it's not just because she was a Democrat, you know, five minutes ago. Clearly, I'm exaggerating.
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Advertisement Speaker
That's a part of it. But the other part of it is that Mitch McConnell and others might decide to take an ideological stand against her and feel safer doing that. To say, you know what, we're going to try and quixotically hang on to this vestige of the Republican Party as internationalist in outlook, hawkish on foreign policy.
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Michael Barbaro
Views Russia as an enemy, standing up.
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Advertisement Speaker
To Russia, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe, you know, all it needs is four senators, you know, to oppose, maybe Collins, Murkowski, McConnell, pick one more. But she may get through as well, even though many, many more than four. I know this because I've talked to them, think she's completely unacceptable for that role, but are going to dutifully vote yes nonetheless, for the reasons you described.
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Michael Barbaro
Earlier, which is why take the risk to your own job. But if enough Republicans oppose Tulsi Gabbard to get in the way of her nomination, that would be the establishment of a line we haven't seen Republicans draw. And it would be a level of risk taking we haven't seen. Would it matter?
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Maggie Haberman
Well, I don't know. Define matter. I don't know that it would have any impact on other confirmations. This actually might be the vote that senators choose to sink a nominee because they approved others who were controversial, like Pete Hegseth, who was a 50 50. And that tie had to be settled.
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Michael Barbaro
By a brief but ultimately not especially meaningful rebellion, is what it might be.
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Maggie Haberman
Correct. Presidents usually get their nominees through, but this just Might be the line they draw.
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Jonathan Swan
I'd just like to light a brief candle to the memory of Matt Gaetz. You needn't even get to the confirmation here.
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Maggie Haberman
Eight days. Eight days.
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Jonathan Swan
That was a rebellion. That was maybe more of.
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Maggie Haberman
It was the rebellion that made some of the rest possible. And it was also what made Pete Hegseth such an important fight for Trump's folks.
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Michael Barbaro
Charlie, I want to end this conversation by asking you, and perhaps others will expand on it, about a phrase you used in the episode we did with you all back in April. I had asked you what would be the state of our democracy if Trump carried out all the things that he'd planned to, and you had said it could represent a genuine challenge to, and maybe even over time, to a certain degree, the end of American style democracy. And you chose your words carefully. American style democracy, it's obviously very early, very early. But given the blitz that we have experienced over the past two weeks, where does American style democracy stand, if that's a fair question?
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Jonathan Swan
So what do I mean by American style democracy is not just that we have elections periodically to decide who's the leader, but we have a system of separation of powers with branches that do not have too much power concentrated within them so that one branch doesn't become too powerful to the exclusion of the others, especially the Congress versus the President, which the founders considered to be the check against tyranny, of too much concentrated power in one spot. So the erosion of Congress's ability to place checks and balances on the presidency, to create pockets of independent decision making authority within the executive branch, to shield some executive branch officials from being fired at will by the president on a whim and therefore making them somewhat, not completely subject to his complete control. The seizure we're seeing over the power of the purse in various ways. There's still a freeze on foreign assistance money all around the world that costs.
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Michael Barbaro
Something like 70 billion.
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Jonathan Swan
Right. Should be spent, and it's not being spent. There is obviously a huge vortex right now of power being sucked into the Oval Office and away from Congress and to some extent because of judicial deference and the creation of presidential immunity away from the judicial system as well. And so that sort of American style democracy, I think, is very much being eroded as we speak.
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Michael Barbaro
Well, Charlie, Maggie, Jonathan, thank you very much. We appreciate it, as always. Thank you.
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Advertisement Speaker
Thanks for having us.
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Maggie Haberman
Thank you, Michael.
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Michael Barbaro
We'll be right back. Today's episode was produced by Olivia Natt and Mooj Zaidy. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Brendan Klinkenberg. Contains original music by Dan Powell and Rowan Misto and was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Runberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderlay. Special thanks to Nick Pittman. Remember, you can catch a new episode of the Interview right here tomorrow. Lulu Garcia Navarro talks with addiction experts Dr. Anna Lemke, author of the best selling book Dopamine Nation about why so many of us are hooked on what she calls digital drugs.
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Advertisement Speaker
We're essentially struggling with endemic narcissism where our culture is demanding that we focus.
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Michael Barbaro
On ourselves so much that what it's.
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Advertisement Speaker
Creating is this deep need to escape ourselves.
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Michael Barbaro
That's it for the Daily I'm Michael Bavaro. See you on Monday.