The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 2 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 seems to sense that his power is ebbing. He raged over birthright citizenship after his arguments on it fell flat in the Supreme Court. He buffoonishly moved the goalposts on Iran to compensate for his war failures. He sustained many new losses in court, and his polling just took another huge dive. The through line to all this is as follows. Trump is trying to maximize presidential power like no one in recent memory. Yet on one front after another, he’s discovering that his powers have limits. One of the best out there at explaining how presidential power really works is Corey Brettschneider, author of several books on the topic. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Corey, good to have you on.
Corey Brettschneider: Pleasure, Greg. Always.
Sargent: So let’s start here. Trump has suddenly suffered a string of losses in court. A judge temporarily blocked his ballroom. Another judge ruled against Trump’s executive order ending federal funding for NPR and PBS. Still another rejected his claim of presidential immunity over January 6th, allowing a lawsuit by police officers to continue. Corey, it seems like the connecting line in all this is that Trump claimed all these excessive powers and has been told no. Is that more or less what happened? And what’s your take on all this?
Brettschneider: I think it remains to be seen what the Supreme Court is going to do, or what higher courts will do in these cases. But certainly for now, it does look like he’s being stopped—and he’s not being stopped by accident. These aren’t just one-off cases. He has, as you said in your introduction, really threatened democracy itself and been doing nothing less than assaulting the other branches, usurping—for instance—Congress’s spending power, its power to make laws by ignoring so much of what it’s done, ignoring prior court rulings and precedents in his executive orders. I know we’ll get to that soon.
But what’s happening, I think, is that lower courts have had enough, and you’re starting to see—as much as he’s brought a large assault on the Constitution—judges appointed by various presidents, various parties of those presidents, finally pushing back.
Sargent: I think another connecting thread here is that the lower courts are really stepping up. This is a really important thing that they’re doing. They’re doing a ton of really important fact-finding, which is illuminating a lot of difficult issues for people, which I find super helpful and very heartening to see. But they’re also slowing him down in a really visible way, aren’t they?
Brettschneider: Yes, I think the lower courts in many ways have been the heroes of the moment. On the shadow docket, the Supreme Court of the United States hasn’t been as good. I will talk soon about their hearing today about birthright citizenship, but they’ve really enabled a lot of this. I’ve been calling it on The Oath and the Office podcast a “self-coup.” We think of military coups as happening from the outside and as violent takeovers. But in Latin American countries, we’ve often observed chief executives, presidents, destroying the other branches and assuming a kind of dictatorial power. And that is, I think, what characterizes this assault on democracy by this president.
Now there is something slowing it down—although it hasn’t for the most part been the Supreme Court; it’s been lower courts and it’s been citizens. And I think those two things feed each other. What the lower courts do is they provide information to people like you and me—we’re able to get that information out there. And then when we see “No Kings,” it’s not in response to nothing; it’s in response to things that Trump has done that we learn about in part because the lower courts have taken a stand against him. So I think in the same way that citizens have been the heroes of the moment, it’s also been these lower court district court judges.
Sargent: Yeah, I think you’re making a profound point there and I want to close on it later. Another potential loss for Trump is looming right now on his effort to end birthright citizenship. He showed up at the Supreme Court on Wednesday to watch all this, but the conservative justices seem to reject many of his arguments. Corey, can you briefly recap what happened at the court?
Brettschneider: I was really heartened. I’ve been very disappointed in the Supreme Court, as I said, in the shadow docket—using its emergency orders to not even write opinions and to just allow so much of the assault on democracy to continue. And today my mood is lifted, because I saw conservative justices like Gorsuch really rip into the government’s position. And I can’t say enough: this is not a two-sides issue. The Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment couldn’t be clearer. If you are born in the United States, you are a citizen.
Now Trump’s team is saying the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction” carries with it some kind of requirement of parental allegiance for those children born in the United States. And I saw the conservative and liberal justices alike—especially Barrett and Gorsuch—just ripping into that idea.
Sargent: Well absolutely. And I think there’s good reason to think he’s probably going to lose here, don’t you?
Brettschneider: I put it at least at 6–3. I don’t see more than three votes for the president’s side. It was a ridiculous moment, an embarrassment—really—for not only Trump but his Solicitor General as well.
Sargent: Well, all this got Trump very angry. He’s very angry about a bunch of different things. Earlier this week, he started out by raging at the Supreme Court over the birthright citizenship case, calling the courts stupid. That, plus him showing up at the court, seemed like an effort to bully it into siding with him. His very act of showing up was an act of rage and hostility toward the court.
And then after things went badly for him there, he erupted again, tweeting this: “We are the only country in the world stupid enough to allow birthright citizenship.” That’s a stupid lie—just a dumb, harebrained lie. But he’s obviously very, very angry that his Supreme Court—the way he used to call his attorney general his lawyer—he’s basically saying his Supreme Court is supposed to be doing his bidding and they’re not. And that’s driving him absolutely bananas.
Brettschneider: Absolutely. In 2016, when he was running, I wrote a piece called “Trump versus the Constitution: A Guide.” And my point there was not just that he’s proposing thing after thing—including torturing the families of suspected terrorists, for instance—that are obviously unconstitutional, but that he really has no understanding of the way the system works. He doesn’t know what a constitution is. He hasn’t read it. He talks about having an Article Two that gives him the power to do anything he wants. He thinks that our system makes him a dictator and that because he was elected, he really is unlimited in his power.
And I have to believe—as much as he was intending to intimidate the court today—that for them it was an opportunity to face-to-face give a constitutional lesson to this president, to teach him that he’s not a dictator. In fact, he was almost daring them to oppose his dictatorship, and if they’re going to save face, I think they have to say what the Constitution says: that absolutely, you might not like it, but the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment—we fought a war about this—guarantees birthright citizenship.
Sargent: Now I don’t want to make the mistake of being too kind to this court, but they actually seem to do the right thing today, and I hope you’re right. I think they are going to take this as an opportunity to show some sort of independence. Now they haven’t been nearly as independent as they should be. They rolled over for Trump a whole lot, but this is a big one and I’ll take it, man.
Brettschneider: I’m with you, Greg. I think there are some moments where—especially for justices like Gorsuch, who have a professed obligation to the text and fidelity to the text, that’s their mantra—when the text is so clear, it would really ruin their credibility to read it in a way that in any way resembles what the Solicitor General and what Trump wants it to say, which is not what it says. And so that commitment to textualism, I think, is really helping here. We saw it in the tariffs case too, of course—they really refused to read the law at issue IEEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, as aggrandizing presidential power when in fact it did the opposite. It limited that power.
And so that gave me some hope, and I have hope here too. Like you, I don’t want to excuse the Supreme Court. They in many ways have brought us to this moment by enabling this president in horrific ways—worst of all, in its immunity decision, the Supreme Court essentially placed Trump above the law, above prosecution, the opposite of what a constitution is supposed to say. And hopefully it’s not too late for them to redeem themselves. I think they’re starting that redemption arc with these two cases.
Sargent: Well, let’s hope it keeps going. On another front entirely, Trump is seething at our NATO allies for failing to help him reopen the Strait of Hormuz after he refused to consult them before launching his war with Iran. The problem is his creation, yet he’s demanding that other countries bail him out of it after he’s spent the last year shitting all over them. He told The Telegraph that he might pull out of NATO, saying it is “beyond reconsideration.” Apparently meaning his deliberations are far along. Corey, does Trump have the power to unilaterally pull the United States out of NATO?
Brettschneider: Absolutely not. One thing I’m devoted to on my podcast is restoring the idea that the Framers were brilliant in realizing that the war powers that a monarch had had to be divided up. And let me say a little more about that. The monarch in England had the power to both initiate war and carry it out. And what the Framers said is that’s too dangerous. We’re going to give the power to initiate war to Congress, and it’s going to require deliberation. We’re going to need reasons for a war. The American people are going to have to hear that. And then, of course, they made the president commander in chief. And Trump has tried to usurp that—launching a unilateral war with no reasoning that we’ve been given. We don’t know what the goals are here. And it really is an action that flies in the face of exactly what the Framers were trying to prevent.
Sargent: Well, absolutely. And by the way, Trump is also now moving the goalposts on the Iran war. He doesn’t appear to be ending Iran’s possession of nuclear material. He told Reuters in an interview that he doesn’t care about it anymore because it’s so far underground. He said, quote, “I don’t care about that.” Now that leaves me wondering, Corey, what achievement he’s going to walk away from this war with.
There is none that I can see. He’s going to say he decapitated the regime and degraded the military. That last part is probably true, but we don’t even know who’s going to be in power long term. The nuclear situation is going to be basically where it was before the war.
Is he again bumping up against the limits of his power? Keep in mind, Corey, when he started this, he dismissed the word of advisers who said this could be more difficult than you think. They talked about the Strait of Hormuz. They said that Iran might be more willing than one might think to try to bring the global economy to its knees that way. He just dismissed it—because he had this faith in his own strength and power, his ability to just bomb his way to anything, or whatever the hell he thinks he was going to do. I think you’re seeing the limits of presidential power in a very graphic way here, aren’t we?
Brettschneider: Yes. On the one hand, he doesn’t have a sophisticated idea of power. He thinks—me, me, me. It’s a narcissist’s idea of power rather than cooperating and bringing the global community on board. And you also saw him domestically refuse to even give us any reasons, much less bring Congress on board. And so I think that does weaken him. On the other hand, I would say that as much as I hope that’s going to be the outcome, we’re in a dangerous moment. He is the commander in chief. He does control the military, and that’s both dangerous domestically as he tries to shut down civil liberties—and as he engages—as much as he talks and rails against endless wars, he might have begun an endless war with no end in sight. And as much as his narcissism brought him into this, it also might keep him in it. And there might not be a way out. The Iranians see his weakness. They might continue it, and to save face—that’s my worry.
Also, we’ve talked about the danger of this self-coup. There’s nowhere where that’s clearer than in the war powers. And courts—despite the War Powers Act, after Nixon, meant to rein in the war powers—have really refused to stop presidents. So this isn’t an instance in which we’re going to see the courts stop him. And I don’t think even Congress will stop him, as much as they’ve got an obligation. They certainly should be trying, and they’re failing terribly in their constitutional duty in their constitutional duty. But that’s what worries me. Both domestically and internationally, he’s making mistakes. He’s showing signs that might lead to his own demise. But he also might win. And as much as we hope that he won’t—this is not just any office. It’s an office with enormous power. And that’s the danger of the moment.
Sargent: Well, I will tell you one area where he’s not winning: it’s in the court of public opinion, so to speak. We have an absolutely crushing new CNN poll. It finds his approval on the economy at an abysmal 31 percent. Twenty-seven percent said they approve of his handling of inflation, which is the most important issue to most people right now. His overall approval is also in the toilet—it’s at 35 percent—and 65 percent say Trump’s policies have made the economy worse. That’s the highest of his presidency.
Corey, those are really terrible numbers, but it occurs to me that once again, this is entangled with his sense of presidential power. Remember, the whole idea behind the tariffs was itself an enormous abuse of power and a very clear authoritarian act—an effort to completely railroad Congress in its powered attacks and to usurp that power entirely for the presidency. He got rebuked on that by the Supreme Court. He’s now trying to scramble his way out of it. And all he ended up doing was throwing his weight around in confusing and haphazard ways that just ended up backfiring on him—hurting a lot of people in the process, for sure. But here’s yet another example of his sense of his own power being so crude and simplistic that he just stepped on another rake, and stepped on another landmine, really. Right?
Brettschneider: That’s right. And in his recklessness, he doesn’t care about anyone’s welfare except his own—he cares about his own popularity. What is scary at the moment is that I think he looks at Nixon, and we look at Nixon, and we see Nixon’s popularity as it began to dip. As we got the impeachment proceedings in the Judiciary Committee—you didn’t even need to go through impeachment in the full House and the trial in the Senate—he was embarrassed enough of his own wrongdoing, his own high crimes and misdemeanors, that he resigned.
And Trump looks at that and he’s shameless. He thinks this guy was a sucker. Why would he step down? And as his popularity dips—as hopefully in the next Congress he faces impeachment for his variety of high crimes and misdemeanors—no question that trying to create a dictatorship is a giant high crime and misdemeanor—my worry is he won’t step down, that he’ll just continue to dig in. And that’s what’s so dangerous, because he is commander in chief. He does have control of—let’s not forget—what was supposed to be an immigration force, ICE, that he’s turning into his own stormtrooper force to shut down civil liberties. And as he gets weaker and more erratic he also potentially gets more dangerous.
Sargent: Well, let’s recall, though, that he’s actually had to scale back the use of paramilitary forces in cities and things like that. I actually take somewhat seriously these moves to reorient ICE. I think we’re now reading that the plan for prison camps is being reconsidered. I don’t know what’s going to happen there, but very plainly, the enormous outpouring of energy from incredibly heroic, ordinary people across the country has really put a brake on one of the most authoritarian things that he has done. And I find that heartening. What do you think?
Brettschneider: Absolutely. What I talk about in my book, The Presidents and the People, is the idea that really it’s not going to be courts that save us. It’s not going to be Congress. It has been, throughout American history, citizens fighting back—the newspaper editors who put John Adams on trial after he had them prosecuted for criticizing him, Frederick Douglass and the commitment to a democratic constitution over and above a court and a president who tried to shut him down. And we can go on throughout civil rights history and see these examples. We are seeing it both with No Kings and, importantly, as you say, in Minnesota—the protests and the heroic people who really risked their lives. It worked. It took people to be murdered in front of all Americans, but it really is working.
My worry is that we can’t let up. As he gets pushed back in each of these instances, he does back down—he has backed down with ICE—but the moment he sees the opportunity to rise up again, to slap us back, he will, because he doesn’t view his own power as limited. He believes that the Constitution gives him absolute authority. Let’s not forget, this is a person who admires dictators and has said so repeatedly. That’s his dream, really. And his own narcissistic fantasy is the thing he cares about the most.
Sargent: Well, when he does that, we’ll just stop him again. Just to close on an optimistic note, I want to return to a point that you raised earlier about the interlocking of some different institutional aspects of the system in a way that’s positive. You mentioned that the lower courts, which are doing heroic work in fact-finding and really putting the brakes on some of Trump’s authoritarian abuses—we don’t know what happens with the Supreme Court on those—but even in the interim, the lower courts are putting up a real buffer and slowing him down. And that kind of works in a positive way with the people. And this is something you’ve written about, as you just mentioned. So the people get more material to work with.
And I think importantly, Corey, the people get encouraged when they see the courts putting the brakes on Trump. They actually look at what’s happening and they say, Our institutions aren’t folding. I’m not going to fold. I’m not in this myself—the people say to themselves when they see this kind of thing. Can you talk a little bit about that to close out—just how the good performance by our institutions in putting the brakes on Trump feeds positive tendencies and energies among the people at large? Is that an important dynamic, and what do you think of it?
Brettschneider: I’ll begin with this brilliant phrase—”No Kings”—that has brought so many millions out into the streets. And to break it down, what it’s really saying is: what’s happening here, what Trump is doing, isn’t just immoral—it’s illegal. It’s a violation of a constitution of we the people. And what the courts are doing—the lower courts, in each of these instances—is giving us examples.
When I talk about a self-coup in the abstract, even the rule of law, or ideas like free speech and equal protection, can sound abstract. But when you start to see his shutdown of political opponents—Comey and James and the courts blocking that, when you see them restoring funding to groups like PBS and NPR, when you see his usurpation of power resisted—even if in the end the Supreme Court is going to take his side—we get energy by seeing that we’re not making it up. We’re not dreaming this attempted dictatorship.
And that’s what the fact-finding courts especially are great at showing us. And then you and I are kindred spirits in that we’re amplifying, each week, each day, what’s happening and using those lower court rulings to tell that story. And the energy that comes from it is fantastic. I am feeling so hopeful having gone to No Kings and seeing all of this.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what the big story I take from this is: we’re not out of it yet, Corey.
Brettschneider: Absolutely. The fight’s just beginning.
Sargent: Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, check out Corey Brettschneider’s podcast, The Oath and the Office. Corey, pleasure to talk to you, man. Hang in there.
Brettschneider: Love to, Greg. Happy to do it anytime.