The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 21 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Donald Trump is losing control of events to a degree that appears new, and he’s furious about it. He unleashed a series of wild Truth Social tirades over the war, at the news media, and at Democrats. He’s reportedly been very angry over gas prices, and he’s even imagining himself in the role of a Jimmy Carter-like figure. Meanwhile, Republicans are starting to sound alarm bells over prices and fear they could get killed in the midterms, according to another report.
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.
David Sirota: Thanks so much for having me.
Sargent: So Donald Trump just exploded on Truth Social over media coverage of the war. He said this:
“I’m winning the war by a lot. Things are going very well. Our military has been amazing. And if you read the fake news, you would actually think we are losing the war. The anti-America fake news media is rooting for Iran to win, but it’s not going to happen because I’m in charge.”
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?
Sirota: I have, I have. And I think he’s sort of shocked that he doesn’t have control, certainly of world events. But I do think he’s gotten used to the idea that he gets to call the shots—he and he alone—not in a co-equal branch of government. I think he genuinely sees himself as an elected king. And I think that’s underneath all of this, a big part of what we’re experiencing right now.
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.
Sargent: Yeah, and I think you really got at a critical point there by saying that he really genuinely thinks of himself and himself alone as being the kind of only arm of government that actually exists—not just that matters, that actually exists. He shows up at the Supreme Court to try and lord it over the justices. When it comes to birthright citizenship, it looks like he’s going to lose there. But him sitting there glaring at the justices as if they are showing impudence by exercising their role in the constitutional scheme is really the thing to pay attention to here. He simply does not think that Congress or the judiciary should have any say in anything.
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.
Let’s use the war as a great example here. Donald Trump wakes up one day and essentially starts World War Three. There is no authorization. There’s no public sales pitch about why this war should happen. Congress—the Democrats have had to fight to try to get a couple of votes on this war. But people might be asking, well, why doesn’t Congress want to be more assertive here? And I think underneath this particular fight is the idea that members of Congress aren’t really looking to go on record as to whether they support a war or not.
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.
Sargent: Yes, and the Republican Party has supported him in his waging of this war without congressional assent or congressional debate of any kind. And for that reason—because Republicans don’t want to have to go on record—Democrats have been trying here and there to force votes on the war.
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.”
Note again this effort to maintain the illusion of absolute mastery. Just to focus on the politics a little bit for a second, David—it seems like he knows that once the perception seeps in that he’s not the master of events, something will crack in his political mystique, because he’s very much sold himself as the sole controller of everything to a certain fairly large chunk of the country, right?
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.
Now, I want to be clear—I’m not putting a lot of faith in the Republican Party here, but I do have at least some basic level of—maybe it’s hope—that the worse things get here, the more pressure there will be on members of Congress, including in Trump’s own party, to break with him. Like, ultimately at some point you have to believe that the average House member, the average senator, even in the Republican Party, who wants to get reelected is going to go home and realize: I am not going to get reelected unless I make some kind of break with the White House right now on various sets of policies.
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?
Sirota: So after Watergate there was an attempt by Congress to grab back power from the so-called imperial president. It was seen as an out-of-control executive branch. Congress passes stuff like the War Powers Act, Congress passes stuff like the Budget Impoundment Act—essentially saying the president doesn’t get to make all the decisions.
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.
Ultimately, inside Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese’s Justice Department, they cook up something called the unitary executive theory. So they basically realize—instead of fighting with Congress over what powers have you delegated to the White House or to the executive branch, let’s start saying any laws that try to constrain the executive’s control over the federal government are unconstitutional, on the grounds that Article 2 of the Constitution says the executive power is vested in a president.
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.
Sargent: I want to just jump in and point out that two of those post-Watergate reforms—on the war powers and on budgeting—those are two of the very biggest things that Trump is violating right now.
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.
Ultimately, you get to Trump saying, I can hold back on spending money that Congress has already appropriated, the whole DOGE situation. You have Trump saying, I can wake up and start a war and don’t even have to get any authorization for it.
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.
As the Journal put it: “Images of the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis, one of the biggest international policy failures of a presidency in recent times, has been looming large in his mind, people who have spoken to him said.”
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.
Sirota: I think it underscores the idea that simply wielding executive authority in a unilateral way isn’t necessarily a sign of strength. I mean, this is actually sort of the weird dichotomy here—it’s that Trump is doing a lot of things unilaterally, but it doesn’t necessarily mean they are strong policies strengthening the United States or projecting strength. I think it projects a guy frankly out on a limb.
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.”
David, I think that’s interesting because they’re admitting essentially that this is slipping out of Trump’s grasp and that they’re the ones who are going to bear the brunt of it, which is really sort of a weird but welcome bit of poetic justice if it happens.
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.
This is arguably politically a worse situation for the Republicans than it was for Jimmy Carter, in the sense that Carter could argue, Listen, there are a lot of things going on here. Gas prices are high because of an oil embargo, etc., etc. I didn’t wake up one day and start World War Three. So Carter could at least try to make an argument like, This is a convergence of different factors.
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.
Sargent: Right. Voters are going to say: Why didn’t you stop this guy? We’re going to put someone there who will stop him. And so this whole Republican project of essentially turning everything over to the ultimate imperial president, Donald Trump, screws them—which is great to see, really.
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.
I don’t know how long this war is going to last. I hope it ends as soon as possible. But I think if it’s continuing to go on, the Democrats will have—if they win the Congress—budget authority, they will have the War Powers Resolution. I mean, I think we are headed into—if that happens—a real confrontation over what the executive can do and what it can’t do.
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?
Sirota: So one thing that our series Master Plan, the second season, goes into is that ultimately Congress’s power of the purse has been pivotal in so many of these fights through history. The Vietnam War did not end in a real way—Nixon was not brought to the negotiating table—until Congress finally passed legislation saying no more money can be spent in Southeast Asia.
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.
So I think ultimately, if you want to see a stop to ICE invasions of cities, if you want to see a stop to Trump’s military adventurism across the world, it is going to require Democrats using that power of the purse. And I might add, Democrats [must not be] intimidated by the old argument that we saw, of course, during the Iraq War, and we’ve seen in every war, where the president will say, you’re undermining the troops, you’re hurting the troops by not funding the war, not funding the military. Maybe I’m an optimist—you can call me crazy—I don’t think those arguments land as much anymore.
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.
Sargent: Well, there are two really big things that show that you’re right. One is that Democrats actually opposed this war right at the outset in a way I don’t think we’ve seen before. And point two, public opinion was opposed to this war at the outset in a way we haven’t seen before. So there’s an opening.
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.
So is there an opening here to start saying, We’re seeing the imperial presidency fail before our very eyes? This experiment is a disaster—say that, right? We need a president who operates more within the system. Is there some way for Democrats to kind of do what you’re saying—exert power, but also say that stuff, like engage in real public communications around this idea?
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 think the big question—and we should come back and talk about this if there is another Democratic president—is that the next Democratic president is going to face a big question. Use the power that has been rightly or wrongly concentrated in the White House to pursue aggressively an agenda, or use the presidency to try to relinquish some executive power to restore a balance. And I’m of two minds on this.
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.
And what I’m really getting at here, Greg, is the idea that, look, I don’t think the Constitution got everything right, right? I think there’s a lot of stuff in there that’s wrong. I think one thing they did kind of get right was, let’s make the power a little bit diffuse. Let’s separate it so that when a president does something, the president has to effectively go to the public to build some kind of consensus around it, some kind of stability. So you’ve got to go to Congress, pass laws, you’ve got to get them validated by the courts—in other words, the genius of that is we want there to be public consent to what is happening. And what destabilizes the country is any president not seeking that consent at all. It makes it hard to do business, right?
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.
Sargent: Yeah, it’s going to be a really complicated set of calculations for Democrats. I can see them kind of using their power over the White House and Congress—if they get it back soon—to put a bunch of checks in place against the next imperial president. But of course they’re going to want to get stuff done too. It’s tricky.
Sirota: Exactly.
Sargent: Well, that’s going to be the topic for our next discussion. David Sirota. Folks, check out David Sirota’s podcast—it’s Master Plan, Season 2, “The Kingmakers.” That’s what we’re talking about here. David, great to talk to you. Thanks so much.
Sirota: Thanks for having me.
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