The NPR Politics Podcast - Trump Wants To Make The Presidency More Powerful. Here's How.

Episode Date: July 11, 2024

Often frustrated by Washington bureaucracy and red tape in his first term, former President Trump aims to make the presidency more powerful if he wins in November. Here's how he plans to do it. This episode: national political correspondents Sarah McCammon and Susan Davis, and senior national political correspondent Mara Liasson.The podcast is produced by Jeongyoon Han, Casey Morell and Kelli Wessinger. Our intern is Bria Suggs. Our editor is Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Listen to every episode of the NPR Politics Podcast sponsor-free, unlock access to bonus episodes with more from the NPR Politics team, and support public media when you sign up for The NPR Politics Podcast+ at plus.npr.org/politics.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Carolyn here in Siena, Italy, about to defend my thesis. This podcast was recorded at 2.19 p.m. Eastern Time on Thursday, July 11th, 2024. Things may have changed by the time you hear this message, but I'll probably still be celebrating my double master's in public diplomacy and international relations with a spritz or even two. Ciao. Enjoy the show. Well deserved. Congratulations. We need to do more podcasts with spritzes, I think. Or in Italy. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the campaign.

I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. And today, how would a President Trump try to run the country if he were to win a second term? Sue and Mara, this is something you've been reporting on, looking closely at what Trump says he would do and also how likely he is to be successful at those policies. Mara, Trump is promising to be a president who will try to get a tighter grip around the executive branch. But this idea, which is called the unitary executive theory. We talked to a guy named Stephen Groves. He was the deputy press secretary in the Trump administration. He works at the Heritage Foundation, and here's how he explained it. There's no independent authority that sits outside of the president. This comes into play often when there are debates about how independent the Department of Justice is, if at all, or the federal bureaucracy. Some on the left extol the federal bureaucracy as a check on presidential power.

Of course, under the unitary executive theory, that's nonsense. So what does that mean? I mean, what exactly is Trump promising to do? And how would he sort of shift the way that the presidential power, executive power is thought about and carried out? Well, a lot of the things that he says he wants to do, he could do even without some new kind of power. In other words, pardoning all the January 6th convicted prisoners or defendants, trying to deport 20 million people who are here in this country that are undocumented. Those things he can do. The other things he can do just because presidency is what you make of it. And some people push executive power against the limits and some don't. But a lot of the things he wants to do, he could try to do without extra powers. So Trump has made campaign promises before. I mean, how realistic are some of these things that Trump says he wants to do? I do think Trump campaigns unlike many other presidents because he does put himself so central to the role of fixing these problems that, again, I alone can fix it. I will do all these

things. You need me to do it. He also speaks rhetorically in a way that is often antithetical to how a lot of Americans see the presidency, sort of joking about being a dictator on day one or saying things like, I am your warrior, I am your retribution. One of the people we talked to, John Dickerson, who is a CBS correspondent, he also wrote a book about presidential power called The Hardest Job in the World. And he made the point that campaigning promises are very different than governing, and governing is very hard. The presidents can't just come in and fix stuff, get Congress to behave, make agencies snap into place. None of that is realistic.

Presidencies work when there is a team that is full of people who are motivated and execute and who have an idea, a clear idea of what the president wants. Donald Trump does not believe in any of that. The number one quality he looks for is loyalty. And look, I think that certainly Trump's critics on the left will say he's trying to blow up democracy. He could become a dictator. All of these things, horrible things will happen if Trump wins. And we posited that to Elaine Kamar, who studies governance for the Brookings Institution. And I think she offered an important perspective here that people need to hear. And it's a good reminder that regardless of what Trump says, how provocative his rhetoric is, there is still an American federal system and we are still a nation of laws. And she says,

even though he might try to push these buttons, don't forget there's guardrails. The problem with his plan for the bureaucracy, which goes to the heart of his desire to operate as a dictator and not a president, everything the bureaucracy does is in law. And to get rid of it, he has to change the law. And, you know, he might be successful at doing that, but it's going to be tough. There are checks and balances in the American system. So you can imagine Trump running a presidency for four years that is in constant fight with the other branches of government. That assumes, of course, that Republicans aren't in control of the other branches of government. What's the role of those other branches and how much will it

matter what happens, you know, down ticket in November? I mean, this is a huge question of how it would affect how Donald Trump could govern. Does he have a divided Congress or does he have a unified Congress? I will say now, obviously, it's a divided Congress right now. Democrats control the Senate. Republicans already control the House. Republicans are favored, as we sit here today, to take over the Senate majority. The House is a question mark, but it's at best a jump ball. So it is not an unrealistic outcome of this election that Donald Trump could have a trifecta of Republican-controlled Washington and a 6-3 Supreme Court. And when I asked K-Mark about that, she agreed that, look, if Trump had a Republican

majority, especially a large Republican majority, he could be, in her words, quote, unstoppable. One thing you have to think about second term Trump that is very different than first term Trump. He has remade the Republican Party in his image. The Republican Congress that was controlled when he was president the first time was led by old guard establishment Republicans. There was much internal resistance both to his candidacy and his presidency. That's gone now. This is a party that marches in lockstep behind Donald Trump. So his request for how to change the law, I think, would sail through a Congress if they had the votes for it in a way that it could not have done in his first term. And I think that is a

really important distinction between the two. And that would make the filibuster, which we presume there would still be enough Democrats to exercise it in the Senate, very, very important. The other thing that this brings up is Project 2025, which is a governing blueprint, a kind of legal blueprint for how he could get the things he wants to get done, done. And it was written at the Heritage Foundation, which with input from, I think, about 100 other conservative organizations, and it took his goals and explained how he could do them. Now, Trump has famously disavowed it. He says he doesn't know anything about it. He thinks some of the things they're talking about is ridiculous. But the point is that Project 2025 is a plan for Trump, not by Trump, but written for him by people who used to work for him and people who expect to

work for him if he gets a second term. So what Sue's point that there aren't going to be any barriers, there are no more Mitt Romneys or Liz Cheney's in Congress, but he also will have a more sophisticated understanding of how to operate the levers of power. He has this big think tank, Heritage, working for him trying to figure out how he can get done a lot of the things that he failed to get done in his first term because he just couldn't figure out how to run the federal government. Yeah, he's much more ready on day one than he was the first time. I mean, I think a lot of people are going to hear K-Mark's comments about, you know, the problem with the bureaucracy being in the way and say, look, he, as you said,

Sue, really controls the Republican Party and has demonstrated again and again his ability to sort of bring Republicans in line. And so, you know, I'm not sure how reassuring that might be for people who are afraid of another Trump presidency. I think it's also important to remember that those victories that Donald Trump had were done within the confines of a democratic system. Democracy doesn't mean that you always like the outcome of it. Some element of this country will be opposed to Donald Trump's agenda. But another point that K-Mark made that I think is important to remember is she said, look, when you're talking about countries that have real authoritarians, real strongmen, they take over the judiciary. They gut their parliaments or their legislative

branches. They shut down the free press. And those institutions still exist in this country. And yes, it is a 6-3 conservative court, but it was not put together in an illegitimate fashion. It happened through the traditional democratic process. So the outcomes may have some opposition, but to suggest that it's happening through an undemocratic, small d, way might not be the case. And when you talk to experts in how democracies die, that's usually how they do. They die in a democratic manner. In other words, a democratically elected leader uses democratic tools to weaken all of the institutions that could check him. Democracy isn't just an election.

Remember, our founders wanted a system of broadly distributed power with checks and balances so that if someone was elected with authoritarian tendencies, they would have called it monarchical tendencies, they couldn't do much damage. So we're going to find out how resilient our system is if Trump is reelected. Okay, we need to take a quick break. We'll have more on how Trump would govern when we come back. And we're back. Mara, we've talked about Trump's domestic agenda and how he might try to stretch the power of the presidency there. But can you

talk more about what this means for foreign policy, which, as you said earlier, the president has a lot more sway there? Yeah, the president is the commander in chief. There are very, very few checks and balances on the president. This is not about Donald Trump remaking the presidency to exercise greater foreign policy clout. He has that already. So if he doesn't want the U.S. to be part of NATO, he could decide if Russia attacks a NATO country that he's not going to abide by Article 5, which says an attack on one is an attack on all. And there's absolutely nothing anybody could do to force him to do that. So he has a lot of clout. He also has a lot of clout for tariffs.

You know, he wants to put a 10 percent tariff across the board for imported goods. He could probably do that by himself. If he wanted to send the military to Mexico to bomb the cartels, which he's talked about, he could do that. So, Sue, the president has a lot of power when it comes to foreign policy, as we just heard. But to the extent that it matters, what does the public want? Do Americans want to shake up the way that the president governs when it comes to foreign policy? None of this is happening behind closed doors. He is running very transparently, very clearly on what he wants to do, how he wants to manage the country and how he wants to change it.

But when Americans are asked that question, do you want to see a more powerful president? The resounding answer is no. We talked to John Geer. He's a professor at Vanderbilt University, and he runs their project on unity and American democracy. And they asked this question earlier this year based off of Trump's campaign. And it found that only 6 percent, which I would point to as almost the margin of error, said that they actually wanted to expand the powers of the presidency.

The vast majority of Americans said they like the presidency just the way it is. So there is this sort of tension here between what Trump is promising to do and what Americans really want. And Geer would posit that as this comes into more focus for a lot of Americans, again, like we are just now entering the season where a lot of regular Americans are really tuning into the election. He does think that this could be backlash for Trump, that it kind of goes against the way most Americans view the presidency, view democracy, view power, and it could ultimately be a net negative against him. Although, you know, a lot of polling results depend on how the question is worded. And, you know, if there is kind of a stigma to saying you want an autocratic president,

but, and remember, Donald Trump doesn't stand up and say, I want the president to be more powerful. What he says is I alone can fix it. I'm going to stop fentanyl from coming over the border on day one. In other words, he says, I will be effective. He doesn't say I will be more powerful. And that's what Stephen Groves thinks is part of Donald Trump's strongman appeal. It's interesting, though, because it's so kind of, I don't know how much typical voters sit around and think about, you know, the right percentage or the right proportion of presidential power versus the way things are today. And to your point, Mara, I mean, I think a lot of voters, especially when I've talked to Trump voters over the years, they hear Trump make these promises and these very sort of simple, understandable terms. And for those voters, that's very compelling.

You know, the one thing that I think we've all learned in the crash course on civics, that is the Donald Trump presidency and potential second presidency, is that norms are based on self-restraint. In other words, there are a lot of things that presidents can do, but they don't, because they don't want to stretch the limits of institutions. But Donald Trump has a very different view of that. And, you know, he is willing to tell his vice president to go up to Capitol Hill and don't certify the results of an election where he doesn't win. And that's why we're an uncharted territory. Mara and I didn't make this a story about the media environment, but Gere made this point, and I think it's worth considering in this context that we also are

living in a modern media environment that is very different and I think in many ways serves to benefit Trump in that part of what Trump says becomes true to the people who like him because they only consume media that reinforces what he says, that there's more siloed media, there's more bubbled media, and that suits his interests. So if he is elected president and spends four years telling you that this is the best economy you've ever had, even if that's fundamentally not true, a significant portion of the country will believe it. And that is a reality that supports what Donald Trump is trying to do. And this is the question, and obviously this is too far in the future, but if Donald Trump was elected president and pushed all these boundaries,

he has the potential to be a transformational figure in terms of how people view power and view the presidency. Because look, once power is expanded, it's rare that the next person that comes into office gives it back. Now, there are certainly circumstances by which that could happen, but he has the potential to really change the way people view their president and what he or she one day should be able to do. All right. We're going to leave it there for today. And if you missed yesterday's podcast, we did a huge deep dive on Project 2025. You can find that wherever you get your podcasts. We will be back in your feeds tomorrow with the weekly roundup.

I'm Sarah McCammon. I cover the campaign. I'm Susan Davis. I cover politics. And I'm Mara Liason, senior national political correspondent. Thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.