From the New York Times, I'm Michael barbaro. This is a special episode of the Daily. Starting today, we begin a series of episodes leading up to election day that will explore what a second Trump presidency would look like and what it would mean for american democracy. Part one.

In 2016, I declared, I am your voice. Today I add, I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution. I am your retribution.

On the campaign trail, Trump has outlined a second term.

He says, you're not going to be a dictator, are you?

I said, no, no, no. Other than day one, we're closing the border.

That is far more radical, vindictive, and.

Unchecked than his first one.

We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections.

My colleagues Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, and Charlie Savage have found that behind that rhetoric is a highly coordinated plan to make his vision a reality.

This is the final battle. They know it.

I know it.

You know it, everybody knows it. This is it.

It's Monday, April 29.

All right, let's start. Maggie, Charlie, Jonathan, thank you for rearranging your lives, to be in the same room at the same time from the multiple places you all live.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks for coming down to DC for it. Pleasure.

Thanks for making me come down to DC for it.

This isn't normally how we do things. Three guests in the same room. But we think this is a big enough and important enough conversation to merit doing it this way. And the reason we felt this way is because all three of you have been engaged in a months long line of reporting about what a second Donald Trump presidential term would look like, what Trump 2.0 would seek to achieve, how different it would be from the first term, and how much more it might test the norms of our government and perhaps even the values of our democracy. So just to begin, why in your own minds did you undertake this project? And what were your biggest questions heading into it?

JonaTHaN it's an obvious reporting project. When you have somebody who's already served in government, you have this body of accomplishments, work, intentions, that he's half completed, fully completed, in some cases in the first term, and now he's running for office again. But what made it different, and why we were so intensely interested in this very early, is that Donald Trump's last year of his first term was very different from the first three years. And it was really a foreshadowing of what a second term would look like. And where I sort of begin in my mental map of, this is the first impeachment of Donald Trump in early 2020. We know from our reporting that he was sitting in the dining room adjoining the Oval Office watching these proceedings on television, and he's watching this assortment of people who sort of embodied in his mind the deep state testifying against him. And he's saying, who the f. Is this person? Who's this person? Who are these snakes? They're out to get me. And there were people in his government. And after that impeachment, when he was acquitted, this is a guy who wanted to take names and get rid of them.

This was a guy motivated by vengeance. So he brings back in his body man, former body man, Johnny McEntee, who's this young guy who had no government experience, and he basically says, come in. I want you in charge of presidential personnel, and I want you to get rid of all the snakes, get rid of all the disloyal people. And that sort of sets the train for this last 1011 months of government.

And one Maggie addendum to that, Michael. A lot of what they wanted to accomplish that year, they couldn't because of COVID COVID changed a lot of what they were looking at doing. Changed their focus, changed their focus. Now, they resumed, ultimately trying to focus on purging the government of people who they believed were opposed to Trump, but they were thrown from where they were initially heading shortly after the impeachment ended.

Because of COVID And obviously, that last year of the presidency and this new approach, all of this came to a head after the election and in the lead up to January 6, where Donald Trump, desperate to overturn the election, had to search outside the White House for lawyers who would tell him what he wanted to hear. That Mike Pence, your vice president, can unilaterally reject the results of the election. And for people who would tell him that you can order your department of homeland Security to go around the country seizing voting machines, those were the ideas that he was seeking out.

But he was stymied.

He was stymied because they hadn't accomplished what they set out to accomplish in terms of ridding the government of people who would be impediments. Those impediments were still there at the end, and they proved very decisive, including the ultimate impediment, which was his vice president.

Right.

And so what we found through our reporting is that he wants to make certain that in a second term, those people who were pushing back, particularly in that last period, are not there. And that, in fact, the people who are there are people who are going to be bringing him the means of achieving what he wants to achieve.

Well, what does he want to achieve? What do all of your combined reporting efforts reveal, top line about what Donald Trump would seek in a second term?

Well, the first thing we all agreed on in this project was we didn't want this to be some fan fiction sitting around, you know, smoking a pipe, trying to imagine what a second term of Trump would look like. We want it to be rooted in real reporting. And also where the sweet spot of this series was is we had reporting on what Trump himself has been saying privately in his inner circle. And the intersection of that with this very well funded and quite vast network of outside groups that are formulating policy. And so we focused very intently on things that Donald Trump himself cares about. And at the heart of that is power, centralizing power, clearing away guardrails. And that is why Charlie became such an essential partner for Maggie and I, because, you know, Maggie and I have the background with Trump. We have the sourcing in his world and the conservative movement, the outside groups. But what we don't have is what Charlie has, which is expertise in executive power and understanding the legal aspects of all of this.

Well, thank you for that, Jonathan. I could listen to you all day. No, I think the top line of all of this is Trump is someone who is interested in his own personal power, in removing any interior barriers, guard rails, or constraints on that power. He's far more interested in power as an into itself than in the details of policy. And yet he's surrounded by people who have their own policy agendas that align with him and are telling him, we will increase your power so that you can do these things. And therefore, it is a pulling together towards a presidency that would be unlike anything we have seen before.

So I just want to be very clear about this, because it's so central to the work you're all doing to understand what another Trump presidency might be like. He, you have found, wants more power for its own sake, mostly. And at the same time, there are people around him who hope to achieve certain policy goals, and they've identified that the best way to do that is for Trump to accumulate the power that he wants. So together, they've collectively determined that the way to accomplish all of this is to remove the encumbrances and the obstacles that stood in Trump's way the first time and make sure that they are not present in a second term. So let's talk about the details of how Trump and those around him might achieve all of this. Logistically, where do you all think we should start?

What he's going to look for is people who are much more ideologically aligned with him. And he's focused on a cabinet full of people who are going to find ways to enact the policies that he.

Wants and what would characterize the people he would be choosing in a term two cabin.

It is going to be people who he thinks are going to enact whatever his agenda in that moment is, who won't stymie him, unfortunately, foreign policy, who won't go out and oppose him on his views on NATO, for instance. Trump wants people who are going to help him get to a yes, not a no.

And to put a finer point on it, his biggest regret from his first term is personnel. It's the people he hired. You ask him who his biggest regret is, he'll just list names. Jeff Sessions, the first, attorney general, Bill Barr, the second, attorney general, John Bolton. All the generals that he appointed. You know, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Basically, the list of people that you see going out and saying that he's unfit to serve, that's the group of people that really surrounded him for the first two, three years of the administration.

Got it.

And many of them saw their job as protecting the country and the world from Donald Trump. In that last year, Trump cleared out several of these people that he regarded as disloyal or obstructionist and started to appoint people that he viewed as loyal, as people who were willing to implement his agenda. But in his mind, he hadn't gone nearly far enough.

Right. So let's assume Trump is able to get the cabinet that he wants and make the appointments that he wants. What would Trump likely turn to next?

Well, I think an important insight that flows out of what Maggie and Jonathan were just saying is about a layer of power and potential constraint or permission that exists less in the public eye. One layer below the cabinet official, which is the top lawyers at various departments and agencies. The lawyers occupied a unique niche in the government because they're about what is permissible. And if they say no, it's a real problem. And one of the things we wrote about early in our series was about how in the first term, one of the constraints was that lawyers, politically appointed lawyers, conservative, republican, federalist society lawyers that filled the ranks of the legal structure of government in the first term, had often acted to constrain Trump, had raised legal objections about things that he and the people around him in the White House wanted to do. They don't want any of those conversations to happen in the next term. They want lawyers who will say yes. And so they have been systematically vetting lawyers for a potential second term already. Yes. And they are eschewing the traditional. Jonathan was the first, I think, reporter to wake up to this.

A break between the MAGA movement and federalist society. Conserved a legal movement where the MAGA movement sees them now as too willing to say no, too willing to raise rule of law questions and wants a different kind of lawyer.

Yeah, I just kind of want to underscore how kind of stunning this is in many readers minds, particularly like liberal readers, the federalist society is this sort of dark, Darth Vader type entity run by Leonard Leo, big, bad Leonard Leo, in Trump world. Now, at sort of a lot of these, these are a bunch of squishes, just so you understand.

Squishes are those who are insufficiently backboned.

Oh, yeah, correct. The Federalist Society was, you know, the heart, the beating heart. I mean, Leonard Leo built the pipeline that delivered Trump's supreme Court, the Supreme Court that overturned Roe. But Donald Trump has had a falling out with Leonard Leo and his people, like Stephen Miller, who runs this America first legal group, which is doing some of this vetting of lawyers. He's not going through the traditional federalist society pipeline. And so it's a very different mindset. You know, you won't hear any of these people say, we need to break the law. And that's not what they're saying. But stretch, push the envelope, find creative ways to get what needs to be done done.

It strikes me that so far, everything we've been discussing is about clearing away guardrails at the higher levels of government, the cabinet, lawyers for the White House, lawyers for various federal agencies. But, Jonathan, you mentioned earlier that Trump is also really interested in getting rid of the people he described as the snakes. Right. The kind of lower level government workers he thinks of as being the heart of the deep state who testified against him during his first impeachment. So help us understand who exactly these snakes are and what the plans are for getting them out of Trump's way.

So just to kind of zoom back a little bit, the federal government, the way I think about it, is basically there's this rotating layer on top of about 4000 political appointees that get replaced every time a new president comes in. Below that is this mass of 2 million plus career officials who have pretty good protections. There are all of these procedures you have to go through in order to fire someone. They have lots of rights as an employee of the federal government to object to appeal. And that's by design. The design is a non partisan, professionalized workforce of experts. That does not change every time there's a new party in power, but actually develops expertise over a number of years. And these are the people who come up with rules to regulate stuff that's not sexy, but clean drinking water, our food, all of this stuff.

So anyway, what's Trump's plan?

His idea? It wasn't Trump's idea. It was a guy named James Shirk. But was, how do we fire more people? How do we get our own people in? And he came up with this idea shorthanded as schedule f. But it's an executive order that Trump issued in October of 2020.

In the first term, yes.

It didn't get much attention at the time because it was October, it was the very end, and they didn't really have time to properly implement it. It would allow them to reassign, they estimated, 50,000 people who they determined were involved in some way in affecting policy. And what this order would be allowed to do is effectively turn them into political appointees. So you are now schedule f. And so it would allow them to fire as many as 50,000 and replace them with their own people. Now, I want to caveat this a little bit, which is that in the view of some of Trump's closest advisors, who really are steeped in this, they don't believe that they will need to fire necessarily that many people and replace them. They believe that the threat of the order will have a chilling effect and will force these people into line and will make them stop trying to slow walk or obstruct. If you know that your head can be chopped off, you might salute a little quicker.

Is that legal?

Charlie, is this possible, what Jonathan's describing?

So it hasn't been tested. Biden immediately rescinded it when he came in. And so?

So we don't know if.

We don't know, but it'll be the trumpified Supreme Court that ultimately decides whether or not a president can do this. Right. This Supreme Court, at least the six conservatives on it, are part of a conservative legal movement that predates Trump, that has been interested for a generation or more in centralizing greater executive power over the government in the White House itself. And a huge component of that is increasing the president's power to remove people that do not do exactly what he wants them to do. So I think that this would be a good opportunity for them to put another brick on that wall. So I think they would probably uphold it.

If Trump is successful in carrying out this kind of remaking of government personnel at all the levels we've been talking about here, what kind of policy changes that either he or those around him want would logically flow from that.

So one of our major early focuses on what the policy consequences could be was in the area of immigration, obviously a core part of Trumpism. And while they did succeed in 2020, with the help of COVID in shutting down the border temporarily, they were unable to really achieve their broader agenda in immigration enforcement. And so they have laid out and developed a roadmap for a really radical crackdown on immigration at a scale that we've not seen in the modern era. To escalate the number of deportations from several hundred thousand a year to millions per year, to militarize the border, to use military funds to build gigantic camps along the border, to hold all these people, basically detention camps, detention camps, to try again to end birthright citizenship for people born in the United States, to undocumented parents, to extend due process free removals of people who have been here less than two years, and to essentially put the entire weight of the federal government around the single minded task of purging the country of people who do not have a legal right to be here.

I mean, that sounds like basically the first term's already very aggressive approach to immigration, basically on steroids. And I wonder how the personnel changes we're talking about might make that possible to accomplish.

So there were certain attempts to push through policies in the first term that raised legal concerns. The general counsel of the Department of Homeland security, John Mitnick, who is a very conservative, traditional federalist, society style republican lawyer, occasionally would say to the White House, to Stephen Miller or Trump's top immigration advisor, there's a legal problem with that. And not having someone there who would say there's a legal problem with that would be a tremendous effort in terms of we're just doing it and we'll let it be fought out in the courts, a judiciary that is much more Trump oriented now than it was for much of the term that Trump had before, due to his own appointments to the Supreme Court. We think that we'll get it through. And so just in the area of immigration and what it would mean domestically to have this kind of sort of police state crackdown necessary to achieve the goals they have is one area in which they have very openly, quite radical plans that they could very well achieve.

Am I right to imagine that combined with what you just said, Charlie, would be the implementation perhaps of that change to the civil service rules that would have sent the message, Jonathan, like you said, to lower ranking people, perhaps in homeland security, in the immigration world, that maybe you just saw something get implemented that you don't think is good or legal, you're going to be a lot less likely to complain about it, become a whistleblower, whatever. If you are suddenly worried that your own job status, which had previously been pretty safe, might now be on the line.

Yeah, I mean, that's explicitly the view. And it stands to reason that if you need your income to feed your family and to pay your mortgage, and you could lose your job, the threat of that would have an educational impact on the way that you do your job.

Yeah.

Politely said, yeah.

Yes.

Yes. Okay. How else, based on your all reporting, does Trump's orbit intend to knock down barriers in his way and ensure that there are those throughout government inclined to do his bidding?

We had some really interesting conversations with sources in Trump's orbit early on in this reporting, and one of the concepts that emerged was this idea of scouring the federal government for any pocket of independence, any elements within the executive branch that operated with any independence from the president. The idea being we need to eradicate that because we believe that executive power exists in the human body of the president, which is the sort of logical endpoint of something called the unitary executive theory. In shorthand, this is an idea that began in the Reagan administration. That is an interpretation of the constitution whereby executive power is vested in the president of the United States, and that it is illegal for there to be any impediments to that power within the executive branch.

Where this matters is that the way the government actually works and has worked for the past century, there is not total, unfettered control of the entire government vested in the president as a singular person. Congress has created by law various pockets of some independent decision making authority. They have said that the head of the EPA is the person who decides how much air pollution to let in the air, not the president in the Oval Office stroking his chin and saying, oh, this much mercury is too much. He doesn't know what to do. Congress says, we're gonna have an expert do that, or at least the person leading this expert agency. And in some places, Congress has gone beyond that and created agencies that it's empowered to do things, whether it's the Federal Reserve setting interest rates, Federal Trade Commission, Federal Communications Commission, regulating Internet and phone companies where they are allowed to issue regulations, but it's run by a commission that although the president appoints these people, he cannot remove them at will if they act differently than he wants them to do. But these are literally called, these are independent agencies.

Agencies. They fall under the executive branch, but they still retain.

They are exercising executive power. The Supreme Court has said it is okay for Congress, as part of its constitutional authorities, to structure the government in this way so that the president does not just sort of the dictator of all that happens.

And how does Trump want to treat these independent agencies?

And so Trump says on his website, we are going to bring the so called independent agencies under executive authority, under the president's authority. And that would mean trying to fire someone who has these job protections, a member of an independent agency's commission for who does something Trump doesn't like, and seeing if this new look Supreme Court that Trump has created will uphold what they're trying to do, and if they can get five votes on the Supreme Court, that's the end of executive independence. That's the end of independent agencies. That means that going forward, the president, in this case, Donald Trump, for a while, would exercise total control over these chunks of the government that for generations have some degree of checks and balances on what the president can order by dictat.

What's an example of an agency, independent agency, that frustrated Trump in the first term and how that agency might be changed if he got this level of power?

So a really good example of that is the Fed. Trump wanted them to lower interest rates, was constantly using public commentary to try to influence what might happen, tweet about it. They have not gone so far as to say what they would try to do about the Fed if Trump comes back into office. But that would be a great example of a so called independent agency where Trump wanted to see something different.

This is just a good example, Maggie brought up, of how to think about it, because if you are in office and you're running for reelection, you want the economy to be roaring. And a good way to make the economy do better is to lower interest rates.

Right. Unless inflation is really high.

So it may not be in the long term health interests of the economy to lower interest rates just because there's going to be an election in four months, but it may be in the short term interests of whoever happens to be in the Oval Office. And so we have Congress set up a structure in which the Federal Reserve is supposed to analyze the economy with an eye towards the long term economic health of the country and not the short term political interests of whoever happens to be in power. That's why there's independence there. But if it's unconstitutional to have any executive power that's independent of the president's control, then that would, by definition, be something that the president could direct out of his or her own self interest, even if it wrecks the country in the long term.

Right. It feels like the repercussions of this would be pretty far reaching. I'm thinking about how much Donald Trump has always not just wanted to raise or lower interest rates, but take away the licenses of tv networks that he disagrees with. And that would fall. And correct me if I'm wrong, Charlie, under the independent agency known as the federal Communications Commission.

That's right. Not necessarily that he disagrees with, but that publish air journalism that criticizes him.

I mean, do you think, Jonathan, that if President Trump were to achieve this power and the courts would approve it, that you could start seeing things like that happen?

Well, rather than speculate, I just go back to what he's telling us he's going to do. And multiple times he has said that Comcast, you know, owner of NBC, NBC, he has very strongly signaled that there will be repercussions if he gets back in and has, again, has said this out loud in public. He hasn't been specific about what exactly those repercussions will be. But, you know, I don't think it's a huge leap of imagination to think that Donald Trump might want to use the regulatory powers available to him as president to punish entities that he's already promised to punish.

So what we're already talking about is a very meaningful re envisioning and restructuring of presidential power.

That's correct, Michael. But there's one agency that looms larger in Trump's mind than any other in the government, and that's the Department of Justice. And it is an agency with which Donald Trump has a historically very fraught relationship.

Well, be right back. So what is Trumps vision for the Department of Justice in a second term, and how does it fit in with everything else that we have been talking about here?

I think the way to explain this in the simplest terms is that Donald Trump has never viewed the Department of Justice in the way that it has been viewed since the Watergate era. Firstly, it isn't an independent agency. It's an agency within the executive branch that has some degree of independence by norm, by norm, not by law. The idea being that a president should not direct, for example, investigations or prosecutions of people. Those decisions should be made independently Trump doesn't view it that way. Firstly, he wants the Justice Department for there to be no independence. And he's already said out loud that if he gets in again, he will appoint, quote, unquote, a real special prosecutor to go after, that's a direct, quote, go after President Biden and his family. So he's not making any secret about this. He's telling us what he's going to do. And he's got allies on the outside who are working on frameworks to justify getting rid of the independence of the DOJ.

Well, what mechanisms exist for a potential President Trump and his allies to achieve what Jonathan's talking about, Charlie, to essentially begin to wipe away the independence that was, as you said, by norm, by tradition, rather than by law within the DOJ? Is it just going to be him showing up and appointing the right attorney general, or do they have to justify it in other legal ways?

So let me start to answer that by picking up on your word. Begin, because I think it's important to note that this would not be something unique about a second Trump term, but an intensification of what we saw in the first term. So Trump did, in fact, pressure the justice department when he was in office to use the powers of federal criminal law enforcement to go after his enemies. He pressured and succeeded in getting the Justice Department to open investigations into people like Jim Comey.

Right.

Like Hillary Clinton, his enemies, Democrats or members of the previous administration's national security state, that he wanted to scapegoat for the fact that his campaign ties to Russia came under suspicion and they failed to find evidence sufficient to bring charges. And that enraged him. And so part of what the vision is here is, even if you, independent prosecutor, don't want to go ask the grand jury to indict so and so, because you don't think you have a good case, if I, the president, tell you to do it, you will go do that anyway or you removed. Right? This is the sort of direct control. I will appoint a real prosecutor who will do the thing that even the people who are quite loyal to me, like Bill Barr, were unwilling to do, are unable to do the last time. And that's the sort of direct use of federal law enforcement power for political purposes that a Justice Department that is no longer seen even as a norm, independent from direct White House control, would be capable of.

So a successful version of this for Trump would not just be the opening of investigations into his enemies, which he already did, as you just said, Charlie, in the first term, but the ability to force charges to be brought against people, whether or not sufficient evidence exists.

I mean, what else could it mean?

I want to pivot, Maggie, to the question of how a President Trump in the second term would handle one of the biggest issues facing him right now in the campaign, which is the charges against him. It has been implied that he would like a Department of justice to stop pursuing those charges.

So Trump advisors have said to me privately, very bluntly, that he has to win and that if he wins, this all goes away.

And how's that going to work?

Well, it would either be that he would tell his ag or his ag would do it on their own to drop the cases. You know, it depends on what stage those are at and whether a judge would agree. Then there's the theory of whether he would try to pardon himself, and he has privately said to people that the cases will go away. So I don't think this is a stretch of the imagination. This is how he's looking at it. But it does give him an impetus for trying to win an election.

I mean, Charlie, is it as easy as it looks from a distance for the president to ask what we imagine to be a loyal attorney general and those loyal deputies? Is it easy to imagine him achieving this very quickly?

Yes. With the nuance that there's different kinds of cases here, there's federal and state. So absolutely, the federal cases against him would stop the minute he becomes president. It wouldn't even necessarily take some radical new act by a radical new attorney general. The longstanding Justice Department interpretation of the Constitution, going back to Nixon, going back to Clinton, is that sitting presidents are temporarily immune from legal process because it would interfere with their constitutional responsibilities. His stop while he's in office, when.

We put all these plans that we've been talking about here together, and when we put together all your reporting, I think it's safe to say that we're looking at a greater pursuit of presidential power and intolerance for dissent within the executive branch than we've seen in quite some time. And so much of the conversation around Trump and the idea of a second term is whether it would undermine our democratic system or our values. And I want to just hit on that directly. Is something like the consolidation of power we're talking about here using, for example, the unitary executive theory. Is that just a realization of a longstanding conservative principle that the president should be more powerful, or is it a kind of assault on our existing understanding of our democratic norms? How should we be thinking about that?

I think this is a crucial point for putting this all into perspective that this is not just about Trump and the current moment. My entire career has been about writing about executive power. I wrote a book about the Bush Cheney administration's efforts to expand executive power, the subtitle of which, which I hate because the book publisher and post it on me, but was the return of the imperial presidency and the subversion of american democracy.

So you know something about this, right?

So the republican conservative movement has been trying to expand executive power ever since Nixon collapsed in the Watergate and Vietnam era. And then Reagan was trying to restore things in the face of a democratic congress in the eighties. And these ideas, like the unitary executive theory, start to arise, trying to get back to where Nixon was before he fell, to achieve conservative policy outcomes, even if liberals controlled Congress or in that era of the courts. And so this unilateralism has a deep pedigree. Building blocks have been put in place long before Trump arrives on the scene that he is now able to take advantage of and take to the next level. But he's building on a series of presidents that have taken things to the next level from their predecessors. It's too much to say it's the end of democracy, per se. American style democracy. American style democracy is not just, you vote for someone, and then that person can do whatever they want. It's a series of checks and balances. It's the prevention of too much accumulated, concentrated, unfettered power in any one person. It's separation of powers. We are suspicious of concentrated power.

Right?

So we have set up a system in which power is diffused. And, yes, you need a strong presidency, but within limits, limits that are not just about the rule of law, but about some degree of decision making checks, so that one person cannot just arbitrarily and capriciously careen the country in this direction or that direction. But it has to operate within a system. And what the conservative legal movement has set Trump up to do, and what he now wants to do, or the people around him are saying, sir, we can help you do, is to move into a more volatile situation, where whoever happens to be president at any given time can take us in a radical direction very quickly. We're out of NATO because I decided we're out of NATO. These precedents that have been assembled over the past generation or two have set Trump up to take things to the next level in a way that american style democracy, as we have come to know it, would evolve into something much more volatile.

Well, America's style democracy is the style of democracy that we're accustomed to Jonathan. So I just ask you the same question. Does this fully realized or even mostly realized vision of a second term make american style democracy less real? And therefore, is the country less democratic? Is this more authoritarian?

When you listen to Donald Trump talk about the kinds of leaders that he admires, he doesn't mention the chancellor of Germany or the president of France. He mentions Viktor Orban in Hungary. He mentions how he wishes his people would stand to attention the way they do to Kim Jong un. He talks about Xi Jinping and how he can, with the click of a finger, execute drug dealers, and he talks about how they can get things moving quicker. So his own views are that the president should be able to move really quickly, unilaterally, and get things done. And so the answer is, yes, of course. But I don't think Donald Trump ever was attached to or believed in the principles that Charlie outlined. There's no history in his life of caring about checks and balances and separation of power. I've never heard him once talk about how these are important elements of the american system.

The part that throws me a little bit, because here you are invoking this idea that he is drawn to authoritarian figures, and clearly we've established a desire for a more empowered presidency, is that everything we've talked about so far, and please correct me if I'm wrong, appears that it was kind of always there for the taking. If a president wanted it, they could imagine that civil servants were fireable. They could attempt to bring independent agencies closer to them. They could definitely appoint as loyal as imaginable a cabinet. And so all of those changes would seem to operate within the democracy, and yet they might still, in a sense, curtail what we see as the american style democracy.

Which is when Trump was elected, a democratic strategist said to me that the nation was about to find out how much of our system is norms and not laws. Which is your point? That this is an honor system? This has always been an honor system. There are people, to Charlie's point, who have tried to increasingly press their advantage in terms of executive power, but who have never taken the kind of leaps that Trump took and wants to take if he comes back into office. But it is, to Jonathan's point, it's not that Trump has some systemic belief in democracy. It's not that Trump has a particular interest in how the federal government works or doesn't work. He has an interest in what can Donald Trump do? And that's it. And so he has been given a bunch of rationales by lawyers or policy advisors who are close to him about how far he can take things. And if he is elected, he has promised that he will do that.

I mean, there are two other branches of government that could exert themselves in relationship to everything we're talking about here. One, we've already established, the Supreme Court and the judiciary are now heavily populated by Trump appointees. And I know many imagine that they will be more pliant than perhaps a different court. So I guess I really would like to focus on the idea of Congress and the legislative branch. If we get this version of a Trump administration, kind of Trump 2.0, how do we imagine congressional. Obviously, this is determined by which party controls it. Could hold some of this in check. Seems like it would be a very natural instinct for a Democratic Congress. Subpoenas could start flying. Members of this new administration would be dragged before to explain, why are you firing civil servants? Why are you treating independent agencies this way? Why are you doing this at the Department of Justice? That would operate as a check, correct?

Yeah.

Not necessarily, because I think one thing that's really important to bear in mind is Joe Biden's been president for the last three years. And for the first period of his presidency, Democrats controlled the House and the Senate. Now, they didn't have a supermajority, so they couldn't get everything that they wanted done, but they saw the experience of Trump. You know, Trump could presumably come back into power. Could we pass legislation to constrain him? No, such legislation was passed. And under Trump, okay, yes, if there's a democratic House, that's gonna stop some things, and there'll be much more oversight and scrutiny. But the composition of the Republican Party in Congress is different than it was in 2017. Trump, when he left office, made it his mission to drive out of the party disloyal people. So the composition has changed substantially. You're not gonna see as much pushback, not that there was a huge amount in his first term, but you're going to see even less.

Well, you're saying basically, the purge he wants to see in the executive branch has already happened in the legislative branch in Congress, partly through who he endorsed or tried to push out. And so that, as a barrier, has been.

Yes.

Removed.

Yes. I mean, that was a really important part of our reporting, is that erosion of restraint on the hill has been a really important factor that creates these conditions.

And so the only way you'd get serious checking and balancing from a legislative branch as if Democrats controlled one or both chambers, which is not a certainty.

Even that is too optimistic, I think, in that in the second half of Trump's term, Democrats had the House and they tried to perform oversight and issued subpoenas, and he didn't comply with any of them. He just stonewalled them. And then now what happens? Well, there's a long, drawn out court battle before a judiciary that was unwilling to move fast enough to do anything about it. And so there was stymied oversight. And then another factor that both Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney have talked about is during the second impeachment, they each independently claimed there were a number of their republican colleagues on the Hill who wanted to vote to convict Trump, who were afraid to do so, not because of their political careers, so much as their own physical safety in that of their family. That the specter of mob violence that Trump is able to summon, as made manifest on January 6, is also a disciplining force within the trumpified Republican Party.

I think we can't end this conversation without trying to understand how central what we're talking about in this room is to Trump's political appeal right now. I know he doesn't go out and give a speech where he talks necessarily, you know, applause lines about civil servants, but there is a vision of government that we're talking about here that I imagine does translate to his supporters. And how big an element is this of his appeal?

I think when you look at polling and you look at the way that people talk in focus groups and also the way that the Trump advisors view things, and I think the way he views things, it's not really so much his vision for government. It's strong versus weak. Everything he does, his visual messaging, his rhetorical messaging, is about projecting strength. And I think to that extent, there's tremendous appeal in the idea of a strong man. It's not just like democrats have bad policies, it's they're trying to destroy the country and they need to be defeated. You hear this sort of trope from old line establishment Republicans. I like Trump's policy, but I don't like his personality. There's this new kind of theory on the new right, which is like, no, Trump's personality is actually essential. He's the guy we need for this battle we're in. And actually, we shouldn't be trying to limit the federal government and reduce its size, because what suckers we are if we do that. No, we need to seize power and use the instruments of power to defeat our adversaries. It actually fits quite neatly with what we've been talking about today because what is strong but, you know, blowing through any obstacle or barrier or impediment to you doing what you want to do.

Yeah. Or person that is the embodiment of strength.

Well, to all three of you, Maggie.

Charlie, Jonathan, thank you very much.

Thank you. Michael.

Thanks, Matt.

Thank you.

Well be right back.

Heres what else you need. Tan today over the weekend, more than 200 protesters were arrested at college campuses across the country as administrators and police sought to rein in pro palestinian demonstrations and encampments. The arrests occurred at Northeastern University, Arizona State University, Indiana University and Washington University in St. Louis. In each case, officials said that the protesters had violated campus rules, defied orders to disperse or become dangerously anti semitic. Overall, police have arrested more than 800 protesters on college campuses since April 18, when Columbia University asked police to remove a pro palestinian encampment at the center of campus. Student protesters have since rebuilt that encampment and Columbia has said it will not ask police to clear it. Today's episode was produced by Rob Zipko and Carlos Prieto. It was edited by Rachel Quester with help from Paige Cowett and Ben Calhoun. It contains original music by Dan Powell, Alicia but Etube and Diane Wong and was engineered by Rohini Misto and Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderley. Special thanks to Efeem Shapiro and Maddie Maciello. That's it for the daily. I'm Michael Boboro. See you tomorrow.