Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
If you listen to Trump’s language, you can see that he actually did think he could rule as an autocrat who single-handedly decrees how all events will go. There’s a reason he thought this. Trump and the people around him intended his second term as the culmination of efforts to concentrate quasi-unlimited powers in the presidency. So it’s urgent that this be seen to fail. Journalist David Sirota of The Lever narrates a podcast called “Master Plan,” and its second season is all about that vision of the presidency. So we’re talking to him about all this now. David, nice to have you on.
Sargent: So Donald Trump just exploded on Truth Social over media coverage of the war. He said this:
David, note that line—I’m in charge. I think Trump’s been asserting he has quasi-absolute control really a lot lately. Have you been noticing that?
The culmination really of this idea that the president is the only branch of government—and not just the executive branch, but he individually is the executive branch—who gets to determine everything that goes on in the country in the way that he wants. And I think it’s an incredibly dangerous idea, but I think we have to understand it again as a culmination of a trend and not just something Donald Trump created. Donald Trump is wielding powers that were given to him—and to the presidency—over many years.
Sirota: I think that’s exactly right. But I would say that that is an idea that has been sold to the country for a very long time—both, by the way, through our media and through sort of political and policy decisions. I think we have come to this idea that the only thing that matters is the presidential election. The only thing that matters is who’s the president. The only thing that matters is the executive branch. And I should say, I think Congress has in many ways receded from using its power because for a lot of members of Congress, it’s just easier not to use their power.
I think the crazy thing, if you chart the trajectory of this, is it seems like the lesson from the Iraq War debacle is not that Congress should stop wars—it’s that members of Congress should simply not have to vote on these wars to create political problems for them back home. And it’s a really scary deferral of power to the executive branch.
And this unsurprisingly infuriates Trump. He erupted at Democrats on Truth Social, calling them “Weak and Pathetic,” and saying: “The Democrats are doing everything possible to hurt the very strong position we are in with respect to Iran.” Trump added this: “I read the fake news saying that I am under pressure to make a deal. Not true! I’m under no pressure whatsoever, although it will all happen relatively quickly.”
Sirota: A hundred percent. And I certainly think that we’re seeing a lot of things get out of Donald Trump’s control. The economy, the inflation, job loss—you’ve got obviously the war situation. You have a situation where consumer confidence is extremely low right now. And Donald Trump has done everything from tariffs, to allowing mergers, to trying to force artificial intelligence down the economy and the country’s throat. So I think what Donald Trump rightly fears is that the perception that things are out of his control could end up fracturing his political coalition.
Sargent: Well, I want to get to that in a bit. But first let’s just do the big picture. Let’s step back. You’ve been narrating this series, “Master Plan,” on the decades-long project to concentrate power in the presidency. In a nutshell, how does Trump represent the culmination of that project?
Then there is a backlash to the post-Watergate backlash, where the Reagan administration comes into power and sees the backlash to Watergate as too constraining of the executive branch. It starts fighting back on things like the Budget Impoundment Act. It starts ignoring, in a lot of ways, the War Powers Resolution from the Vietnam era.
It’s a radical theory, but Reagan’s administration starts bringing it into court. And this is the doctrine that Donald Trump’s officials have been bringing into court. This is the doctrine that a lot of conservative Supreme Court justices have endorsed as well.
Sirota: Yes, exactly. So that’s a direct through line to Trump. This idea that was started in the Reagan administration—that the Reagan administration and conservatives started saying we do not have to pay attention to the War Powers Resolution, we do not have to pay attention to the Budget Impoundment Act.
Sargent: I want to dwell a little bit on Reagan for a second, because for the American right, Jimmy Carter represents everything the president should not be. The Reagan revolution emerges from the aftermath of that presidency. And now The Wall Street Journal reports that Trump has been looking at high gas prices due to his war and privately having nightmares about becoming another Jimmy Carter.
David, that’s kind of funny since to the master thinkers behind the Trump presidency, high gas prices and Jimmy Carter represent everything they think of as weakness and failure, right? Everything they constructed this theory to get away from is now kind of coming back at them, and Trump is slipping into sort of the same pitfalls that the dreaded Jimmy Carter did.
Sargent: Politico reports that the Energy Secretary’s admission that gas prices might not fall sufficiently until next year “sent alarm bells ringing for Republicans in battleground districts.” One person close to the White House tells Politico: “The rhetoric around this stuff matters way less than the reality. If we don’t see the $3 gallon of gas, we’re going to get killed.”
Sirota: And I think what’s compounding their problem is that there’s a direct line between the actions that Trump has taken, the inaction of the Republican Congress to stop him, and the economic problem you just identified—high gas prices.
Trump can’t really make that argument. I mean, he started a war. The Strait of Hormuz closed. The Republicans didn’t do anything to stop the war. Gas prices—it’s a very simple story for people to understand. Look, I won’t put it past the Republicans to come up with some argument to blame something else, but I have to believe it’s such a straight, simple story that most people already implicitly understand what happened.
Sirota: My hope is that if the Democrats win back Congress, they will start making an effort to assert congressional authority in a real way. There are ways for the party in Congress to certainly stop some really terrible things from happening, but also assert real power when it comes to the budget, when it comes to war powers.
Sargent: Democrats are going to have to start defunding some stuff, whether it’s Trump’s maniacal use of the military abroad or the use of heavily armed militias in cities. Don’t you think the power of the purse is going to have to really be reclaimed by Democrats in Congress and exercised hard?
During Iran-Contra, the Reagan administration tried to ignore a law like that, the Boland Amendment, which said that money cannot be spent on proxy wars effectively in Central America. Reagan’s administration tried to ignore that and they got burned badly. But they tried to test the outer limits of whether the executive could ignore a law like that, and they were brushed back. I think it remains sacrosanct, Congress’s power of the purse, which is the ultimate power that it has, I think, in these battles, as you allude to.
I don’t think that the average person buys the idea that if Congress says we’re not going to fund a war, that means Congress is harming the troops. I would like to believe we’ve advanced beyond that jingoistic sort of misinformation. And I think Democrats are going to have to, if they want to stop this stuff, stand up to those arguments.
And that brings me to the final question. To pull all this together, the backlash that the Trump administration is facing right now is aimed at the very areas where Trump is trying to exercise the most imperial power—tariffs, the pissing all over our allies, the mass deportations with heavily armed militias, the bombing of Iran and other war-making such as the blowing up of people in the Caribbean without congressional approval, etc.
Sirota: That’s my hope. And I think one thing you can take heart in is I do think the so-called No Kings rallies, at their heart, is a message of we don’t want a king. Now, I would admit, I wonder whether what’s really being said there is we don’t like their king, we want our own king. I mean, I do wonder if we’re really taking seriously the idea that we don’t want a king. I think the midterms are important because it will be after the midterms—if the Democrats win—they will have a chance to test-run using legislative power, congressional power, more assertively, not executive power.
I don’t think it’s tenable to have every time Republicans get into office they push the limits of executive authority, and then Democrats get into office and just give back or there’s like a stasis—they try to give back executive authority or don’t use it as aggressively. That’s not great. But I also understand the idea that we’re destabilizing the country by concentrating so much power in the executive branch and saying policies are going to shift wildly every four years based on this or that president governing purely by executive authority.
Like, think about being a business trying to make decisions when Donald Trump can wake up any day and impose tariffs. I mean, there are so many different ways that the way of governing that Donald Trump is pursuing destabilizes the country. And so for a Democrat who is a president, how to govern aggressively in a way that doesn’t destabilize the country the way Donald Trump is destabilizing it—that is going to be the big challenge.
Sirota: Exactly.
Sirota: Thanks for having me.
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