The Daily - Trump 2.0 Arrives in Force

Episode Date: January 31, 2025

Since his inauguration, President Trump has exercised a level of power that has directly challenged the checks and balances that, on paper, define the U.S. government.The Times journalists Michael Barbaro, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan and Charlie Savage discuss Mr. Trump’s plan to institute a more powerful presidency.Guests: Maggie Haberman, a White House correspondent for The New York Times.Jonathan Swan, a White House reporter for The New York Times.Charlie Savage, national security and legal policy for The New York Times.Background reading: Mr. Trump’s “flood the zone” strategy has left opponents gasping in outrage.From Day 1 of hs second term, Mr. Trump has tested the limits of his authority.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday. Unlock full access to New York Times podcasts and explore everything from politics to pop culture. Subscribe today at nytimes.com/podcasts or on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bobarro. This is The Daily. Since his inauguration, President Trump has exercised a level of power that has directly challenged the checks and balances that, on paper, define the U.S. government. Today, I gathered three of my colleagues, Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Charlie Savage to talk about the absence of resistance and about Trump's plans to make a more powerful presidency permanent. It's Friday, January 31st.

Friends welcome back. Some of you welcome to the roundtable. Charlie Savage, welcome. Thank you. Maggie Haberman, as always a pleasure. Thank you, Michael. Jonathan Swan, welcome always a pleasure. Thank you, Michael. Jonathan Swan. Welcome back. Thanks.

I want to start by asking you to describe in a word, if you'll indulge this exercise the past two weeks, just one word. Intense. Surprisingly well planned. I know that's more than one word. Predicted. I knew one of you was going to say that. And that's because we have had a series of conversations

with you three that in many ways prepared me, prepared all of our listeners for what the last two weeks to a degree have looked like. And that's why we asked you all to come back. Let me just explain. During the campaign, the three of you embarked on a reporting project to understand what Donaldald trump second term would look like the norms it would challenge the presidential power it would seek to expand. And the ways in which it would test our democratic system of checks and balances you all came on the show to talk about it we call the series trump two point oh and.

the series Trump 2.0. And now that Trump is president and has unveiled such an aggressive and muscular agenda, it made sense to have you back to assess and explain what he's done so far and how it maps on to what you had foreshadowed in that previous conversation. So I guess, Jonathan, since you used the word, maybe we'll start with you, but where should we start with predictions versus reality?

Well, I don't want to sound obnoxious, but pretty much everything that we wrote is coming to bear. That's not obnoxious, just for the record. Thank you. So our first piece in the series was about the expansion of power, this idea of scouring the executive branch, looking for any pockets of independence and removing them. And we're now seeing early examples of Donald Trump doing that, firing officials who might be checks on him, ridding the executive branch of people

who may be disloyal to him. You have retribution as a theme that we came back to again and again and again and you're seeing that play out in many different ways. Some we didn't even imagine actually. I suppose he defied our capacity for imagination when he decided to pull security details from people he doesn't like who are under active death threats from Iran. But, you know, besides that, pretty much everything from his immigration agenda, to his plans for the Justice Department, introducing figures like Kash Patel, go down the list and immodestly kind of copy-paste our series,

and you're basically getting what you're getting in the last eight to ten days. Maggie, what has stood out to you as you contemplate what your reporting suggested this term might look like and what it's actually been in these first two weeks? As Jonathan said, we made clear that Trump and his allies were looking for ways to maximize the executive branch's power and that they believe this is constitutional, that they are arguing that certain checks on it are not constitutional and that they were prepared to take their chances in court and see what they could get away with. Now, there was one blemish to that, which was this memo that

went out from the Office of Management and Budget that froze congressionally approved funding for federal aid and grants across government and created mass confusion and ultimately was rescinded. So that was them testing the limits and not succeeding. That was the rare problem point for them. Everything else they have done, particularly as pertains to immigration, has worked the way they've wanted it to. Which is to say what? How is it worked? Which is to say that they have not been stymied by loud protests.

They have had some court challenges that they expected, but those have just kind of gone on in workmanlike fashion as opposed to the resistance that we saw in 2017. And they are hitting some numbers on arrests of migrants who they say have criminal records. And they are narrating that and making mugshots available and making public these numbers about the volume of people who they have arrested. And mostly, Michael, they're facing a pretty dampened democratic pushback, especially compared to what we saw in 2020.

Charlie, I want to ask you how much these actions that the president and those around him have taken over the past two weeks are testing the limits of presidential power and just the law. And Maggie started to hint at this how the rest of government both legislative and judicial branches The checks and balances are responding or not responding I think I would divide that into different categories of thing that the immigration actions that Maggie was just describing are mostly Within the parameters of what everyone agrees the statutes on the books already say,

with the big exception of the attempt to redefine birthright citizenship. And so that's making very aggressive use of powers, but it's not pushing for the most part at the limits of those powers in terms of, is this actually a legitimate thing you have the authority to do? The assault on the federal workforce, the mass firing of inspectors general, in the

firing of a member of the National Labor Relations Board, in the firing of various civil servants, including all the Justice Department trial lawyers who just were assigned to work on any of the Trump cases, for example, blowing through explicit legal protections for federal workers. All of these things though, he and his appointees just did. Why? Why do something that, assuming there are lawyers in the government

who are as smart as you, why do it? So I've argued that the way to understand this is it looks like they're inviting all these lawsuits, all these people who are getting fired are gonna sue because they're gonna say, you can't do that. Look at this law, you just violated the law. And perversely, that may be exactly what they want. You're gonna have to explain that.

This theory of expansive presidential power that Jonathan was referring to, this sort of revisionist understanding of the Constitution that kind of dates back to the Reagan administration. The president must have exclusive control of the Constitution that kind of dates back to the Reagan administration. The president must have exclusive control of the government and Congress therefore lacks legitimate authority to pass laws that create any kind of limitation on the president's ability to fire anyone he wants or creates any kind of pockets of independent decision-making authority anywhere in the government.

They were trying to stomp all these things out. And so how do you stomp them out? You fire the person in the face of this law, the person files a lawsuit, and then you get the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court to say, that law is unconstitutional and create a precedent that expands what executive power means. I just want to summarize that because it's a little bit of a complicated thought. It feels very important. You're suggesting that some of the actions the president is taking, especially when he seems to be getting rid of federal workers who would seem to have very clear job protections within the law, is that

he wants them to trigger a legal process that ends before a Republican appointee majority of the Supreme Court justices who then rule not in the favor of the workers but in favor of Trump and essentially redefine and expand presidential power in the process. But there's no guarantee that that's going to happen. But is the journey itself just worthwhile under the current ideology of this White House? It depends. I mean, Michael, I don't think in every single case that the Supreme Court is going to cede to Trump. But they do have a conservative supermajority, and that gives

a lot of hope to Trump and his allies. I also just want to, and Jonathan should answer this question as well, but I do want to make one other point. Flooding the zone is everything. They are taking so many different actions that it is incredibly hard for the media and for his critics to keep up. And so you lob 10 shots and maybe two work and for them that feels like a win, but Jonathan probably has a better answer. No, no, I agree with all that. The court pretty clearly directionally

is on the path of expanding executive power and having a broad interpretation of Article II power. So they feel confident that this court will, in many cases, rule in their favor that these efforts by Congress to restrain the president, to put these checks within the executive branch are unconstitutional. And by the way, they've telegraphed this. Like this is not new. For months before the election, his people were saying when we were talking to them that this was kind of the point was let it go through the court system. We like our chances.

This is a different Supreme court than existed in 2017. It's a different federal judiciary because Donald Trump himself transformed it. It's not that Donald Trump has profoundly changed. It's that the Washington he returns to has changed and the institutional guardrails have eroded. The court system is different. Congress is hardly a co-equal branch anymore. Well, let's talk about that a little bit more, Jonathan, since you queued it up. Congress could have acted in many of the executive orders that Trump

has signed. And I want to read you something that our colleague, Carl Hulse, the justifiable dean of congressional reporters in my estimation, wrote in the past 24 hours. He said, Congress passed a law shutting down TikTok and President Trump, once inaugurated, flouted it. Congress required advanced notification for firing inspectors general and the Trump administration ignored it. Congress approved trillions of dollars in spending on a multitude of federal programs and Mr. Trump froze it anyway. And he concludes, the new administration is quickly demonstrating it does not intend to be bound by the legal niceties or traditional checks and balances of this relationship with Congress. Basically, what he's analysis is saying is the president doesn't really care about what

Congress thinks right now, even when congressional law is being seemingly broken by his actions. Well, that's true. But the issue is the Congress is not really doing anything to push back, right? I mean, we have been on this path for some time. The two people who were the strongest oppositions to Trump in his first term in Congress were the Senate Majority Leader and the House Speaker, Paul Ryan. McConnell always maintained a difficult relationship with Trump. McConnell is not the leader anymore, and McConnell is actually somewhat marginalized. He can be an effective behind the scene player, but he is not representative of where the majority of the Republican senators are. Most of them are very much aligned with Trump.

If you have Republican majorities in both houses, and they are not going to object when the White House does that, and in fact are generally going to shrug, which is what we've seen, then of course Trump is going to take as much as these folks are going to give him. There's not a lot of pushback, and that's what Trump was counting on. I would expect, Charlie, and I think about you as someone who has spent a big part of your career thinking about checks and balances and institutional prerogatives, why aren't Republicans in Congress taking an opportunity just to establish kind of a

bare minimum of what Congress's role is supposed to be? And isn't there just a kind of a basic level of pride that a person has once they're elected to the House or to the Senate in what that institution is supposed to do? Well, we're not just talking about Congress here, right? We're talking about the Republican Party and how it has changed in the Trump era in a way that the Democratic Party has not. The Republican Party is not the party that existed in the 90s or the aughts, the Bush years, the Reagan years.

It's become the Donald Trump party. And he has successfully driven from that party anyone who might have the sort of institutionalist perspective that you're discussing, the sort of Liz Cheney's are purged, the John McCain's are deceased. There's been enough primary challenges of people who are insufficiently Trumpy that everyone lives in fear for their political career if they get on his bad side. I mean, when you talk to these Republican lawmakers privately, they all understand a vote against something that Donald Trump really cares about is a vote to end your

career. I mean, there's not that many people who are willing to end their career. So even though I know for a fact, there are a whole bunch of Republicans who, if it was a private secret vote, would vote against, en masse, many of these nominees that he's put up. They won't dare do it in a public setting under the gaze of Donald Trump. And there's actually something deeper that's happened in American politics that Trump has changed. A generation ago, if you were a member of Congress, you could kind of protect yourself

and defend yourself by raising money and having coalitions and whatever. All of that has been obliterated by Donald Trump's monopoly on the attention landscape. And if you get in their crosshairs, it doesn't matter what kind of a war chest you have, that will be squirted away in two days. You're finished. Your career's done. Right, which helps explain the congressional deference to these power plays. So just to summarize this, as the president has sought to pretty profoundly expand his power, Congress has basically said, God bless for all the reasons you just walked through, which leads to courts. And as you all established, it's a pretty open question of whether

and how the court might rule on something as meaningful as executive power. So that's where things stand. We are going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the confirmation hearings that have dominated the last 24 hours. So, Maggie, Charlie, Jonathan, I want to turn to another way that President Trump is exercising his power in this moment and changing the nature of presidential power, which is through appointments of loyalists who we expect would defer to him. That's something else you all had forecast in our original Trump 2.0 conversations last year that Trump did not want skeptics, did not want institutionalists, did not want those who would check his power or say no to him. Two of the most important appointees, Cash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard,

had their confirmation hearings over the past 48 hours. Charlie, I wanna begin with you. What would Cash Patel's confirmation to lead the Federal Bureau of Investigation mean for some of the norms and presidential power questions that we're talking about here. Well, it sure looks like he's going to be confirmed. I do not see any Republicans out there expressing opposition

at this point. And so, Cash Patel would be a very different FBI director than what we have seen. At his hearing, he said most of the right things about how he was going to follow the Constitution and not weaponize the FBI as a tool for Trump. I think there's a lot of skepticism

about whether that's true. He's the guy who has gone on a million podcasts over the last few years and written screed-like books with lists of enemies that need to be gone after, which includes a lot of Republicans and Trump, people who've been cast out of the circle. But the FBI is an extraordinarily powerful institution. So notwithstanding what Patel says at his hearing when he sort of cleaned up for the

cameras, if we get that Patel, then that's one thing. But if we get the Patel who's been on all extremist fringe podcasts by the hundreds for the past few years behaving like that person, the FBI is going to be a tool of political vengeance. Is there any reason to think we were not, Maggie, going to get that? Cash Patel, who appeared on those podcasts, talked about enemies lists, and would be pretty different from the FBI directors of the past, who saw their role as having a fair bit of independence from the president.

Look, I think that Cash Patel is going to see his role as different from FBI directors of the past, regardless of whether it's the version of the Senate hearings or the one on the podcasts. But the one on the podcast is the one who appealed to Donald Trump, which is why he appointed him in this role. And so I would take seriously what Cash Patel

has been saying about what he thinks the FBI should do and what should be done with people who he and Donald Trump perceive as Donald Trump's enemies. What is very striking is that Cash Patel is a loyalist who has been involved in producing a song with some of the people who were imprisoned in connection with the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol.

Producing a song. With Trump's voice overlaid over it. And Trump often brags about how it rose to the top of the billboard charts. One of Trump's- The director, the future director of the FBI, potentially, has been producing a song whose focus are those who attacked the Capitol on January 6th.

And as hostages, in their telling. And most of those folks, the vast majority of those folks, have now been granted clemency. That was one of Trump's first official acts. So what that does reveal is Cash Patel's mindset about how he sees the government against Donald Trump. I do want to make one point in fairness, Michael, and you started out asking about Trump wanting to rid the government of anyone who might not be loyal to him. And that's certainly true. And we've heard all kinds of questions being asked about loyalty.

It is a pretty capricious standard about who's getting chosen and who's not for some of these roles. But look, there were aspects of the federal bureaucracy that was trying to stymie Trump's agenda or that disagreed with things he was doing, or that tried to convince him otherwise in 2016, when he was a duly elected president. And so he does have reasons that he is unhappy with aspects of the government. This is taking things to an entirely different level.

Next up, Jonathan, we have Tulsi Gabbard's nomination to be the next director of national intelligence. Another pretty unorthodox choice, a convert, once Democrat, now Republican, who has expressed a lot of loyalty to Trump with pretty non-traditional credentials for such a big national security role. Should we see her in the same light as Cash Patel in the context of this conversation we're having about basically these folks getting these jobs and just expanding the president's power because no, no, she's a little different.

And by the way, she may not get confirmed. She's probably the most endangered of all of them. One reason being that she used to be a Democrat and Tulsi Gabbard is much more of an ideological choice. Donald Trump has always been extremely conspiratorial, had a dark view of the intelligence community, has been of the view that there is a deep state out to get him, and also has been much more sympathetic to people like Vladimir Putin and some of the autocratic leaders around the world. Tolsey Gabbard is much more in line with Donald Trump's foreign policy views than many other

senior members of his cabinet. Her views are closer to Donald Trump's than say Marco Rubio's views. Certainly much closer to Donald Trump's than his first term. People like Mike Pompeo, who was secretary of state and CIA director, Jim Mattis, Rex Tillerson. So she's aligned ideologically. She's got really powerful allies like Tucker Carlson. And Trump just likes her.

From all accounts, she's a very personable person. And there's a chemistry there. So she's a little different. I wouldn't put her in the same category as Cash Patel, who is a much sort of more precise instrument than Tulsi Gabbard. But you said she might not get confirmed. And I'm curious if any of you would explain if she's not going to be confirmed precisely why it will be.

I suspect it's not just because she was a Democrat, you know, five minutes ago. Clearly, I'm exaggerating. That's a part of it. But the other part of it is that Mitch McConnell and others might decide to take an ideological stand against her and feel safer doing that. To say, you know what, we're going to try and quixotically hang on to this vestige of the Republican Party as internationalist in outlook, hawkish on foreign policy. Use Russia as an enemy. Standing up to Russia, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe, you know, all it needs is four senators, you know, to oppose her. Maybe Collins-McCowski, McConnell, pick one more.

But she may get through as well, even though many, many more than four, I know this because I've talked to them, think she's completely unacceptable for that role, but are going to dutifully vote yes, nonetheless. For the reasons you described earlier, which is why take the risk to your own job. But if enough Republicans oppose Tulsi Gabbard to get in the way of her nomination, that would be the establishment of a line we haven't seen Republicans draw, and it would be a level of risk taking we haven't seen, would it matter?

Well, I don't know what defined matter. I don't know that it would have any impact on other confirmations. This actually might be the vote that senators choose to sink a nominee because they approved others who were controversial like Pete Hegseth, who was a 50-50 split and that tie had to be settled by Vice President Pence. A brief, but ultimately not especially meaningful rebellion is what it might be. Correct. Presidents usually get their nominees through, but this just might be the line they draw.

I'd just like to light a brief candle to the memory of Matt Gaetz. You didn't even get to the confirmation hearing. Eight days. Yes. That was a rebellion that was maybe more... It was the rebellion that made some of the rest possible and it was also what made Pete Hegseth such an important fight for Trump's folks. Charlie, I wanna end this conversation by asking you,

and perhaps others will expand on it, about a phrase you used in the episode we did with you all back in April. I had asked you what would be the state of our democracy if Trump carried out all the things that he planned to. And you had said it could represent a genuine challenge to, and maybe even over time, to a certain degree, the end of American style democracy. And you chose your words carefully.

American style democracy. It's obviously very early, very early, but given the blitz that we have experienced over the past two weeks, where does American style democracy stand? If that's a fair question. So what do I mean by American style democracy is not just that we have elections periodically to decide who's the leader, but we have a system of separation of powers with branches that do not have too much power concentrated within them, so that one branch doesn't become too powerful

to the exclusion of the others, especially the Congress versus the President, which the founders considered to be the check against tyranny of too much concentrated power in one spot. So the erosion of Congress's ability to place checks and balances on the presidency, to create pockets of independent decision-making authority within the executive branch, to shield some executive branch officials from being fired at will by the president on a whim, and therefore making them somewhat not completely subject

to his complete control. The seizure we're seeing over the power of the purse in various ways, there's still a freeze on foreign assistance money all around the world that Congress said should be spent and it's not being spent. There is obviously a huge vortex right now of power being sucked into the Oval Office and away from Congress and to some extent because of judicial deference and the creation of presidential immunity away from the judicial system as well. And so that sort of American style democracy I think is very much being eroded as we speak. Well, Charlie, Maggie, Jonathan, thank you very much.

We appreciate it, as always. Thank you. Thanks for having us. Thank you, Michael. We'll be right back. Today's episode was produced by Olivia Natt and Mujzadeh. It was edited by Rachel Quester and Brendan Clinkenberg. Contains original music by Dan Powell and Rowan Yamisto.

And was engineered by Alyssa Moxley. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Lansferk of Wonderly. Special thanks to Nick Pittman. Remember, you can catch a new episode of the interview right here tomorrow. Lulu Garcia Navarro talks with addiction expert Dr. Anna Lemke, author of the best-selling book Dopamine Nation, about why so many of us are hooked on what she calls digital drugs. We're essentially struggling with endemic narcissism where our culture is demanding that we focus on ourselves so much that what it's creating is this

deep need to escape ourselves. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bobarro. See you on Monday.