We have never, never

come close to seeing a president do this many unprecedented things

in this many unprecedented areas that will echo for generations

to come.

I'm Jim VandeHei, CEO of Axios.

And I'm Mike Allen, co-founder of Axios.

Jim, why the unprecedented presidency matters is, you know that future

presidents are going to take what he's done, pocket it and go one step further.

Every future president will use these precedents

the way that they want to, to expand their own power.

So I always tell my Republican friends or my Trump friends, if you like, that,

you damn well better like it when AOC does it to you.

You and I just recently wrote down three very specific things

And just imagine that a president or a presidential

candidate had declared this previously, or even put it in these words now.

One: Presidents and their family members, unlike other U.S.

citizens, shall be granted lifetime immunity from federal audits

and criminal investigations for past tax returns.

He did that. His Justice Department did that.

It’s doing it for his family. That's number one.

Presidents and their family can maintain active ownership

of global business empires, profiting from government decisions

that benefit them and benefit their businesses.

In this case, to the tune of billions of dollars

And three: Presidents while in office, can maintain massive personal crypto

and stock portfolios that they can benefit from when they leave office.

President Trump just doesn't care.

And so he feels none of the constraints that every other president

you and I have covered has felt. His predecessors

always thought, we can't do that because of the midterms.

We can't do that because of the presidential election.

Here it’s how much you can get how fast.

So President Trump is now worth 6 billion according to Forbes.

That's gone up $1 billion each of the last three years.

If you go Trump and family Bloomberg says 8 billion.

And that's just going to keep going up.

And that's like again, like that's not the way it's been.

Everyone's like well isn’t everyone a crook in Washington?

Doesn't everyone profit... - Or cash in after.

- Most presidents would be it would would be ashamed if they did

a lot of these things and and President Trump just feels differently about it.

But people just need to be thinking about do you want your president's steering

policy, making decisions, intervening with companies in a way that benefit them?

And you always have to look at it through the lens of imagine

it's not somebody on your team, somebody you like,

it's somebody on the other side benefiting from policies

you don't like working with companies or individuals that you find unsavory.

And how about the insurance policies that President Trump is building in?

You know, he plans to pardon

a lot of the people around him. Wall Street Journal had a great story by Josh Dawsey.

He's saying the president said in a meeting that anyone who would come

within 200ft of the Oval Office would get a pardon.

And the funny thing about this is, and it's very Trumpian, very Trump maximalism.

A few months ago, he had joked about the same thing.

Only then he said ten feet.

So it keeps growing.

Yeah. And he's not joking, I think.

And he has the power to do that.

Like presidents can pardon anyone and he can pardon people retroactively

and going forward. And he intends to do that.

And people should assume they'll do that.

And again, like, is that what you want the political opposition in your mind doing.

The next category is retribution.

We've never seen a president use the levers of power, particularly

the Justice Department, blatantly to go after anybody who's criticized him,

anybody who tried to prosecute him, anybody who's kind of

on their hit list of people they don't like, and they do it in public.

They don't try to hide it. They do it in the courts.

We've never seen it before.

In this retribution tour, not only is President Trump put pressure

on federal prosecutors to go after his former enemies, but

people have been pushed out and fired because they weren't doing it fast enough.

So the president went after Letitia James the New York Attorney General

who had brought civil charges against Trump.

James Comey, Trump's own FBI director who had investigated his campaign over

Russia ties, indicted twice, the most recent over the charge

that he made threat against Trump in seashells.

Comey came out and said, I'm still innocent.

And it's not just individuals, right?

They've used the Justice Department.

They've used the tools of the presidency to go after universities,

to go after media companies, to

go after law firms and some of its direct, some of its indirect.

But it's been very, very clear that he wants

media company deals only done if they're favorable in their coverage of him.

He wanted universities who he felt were too woke to have to cut deals

with them and change everything

from how they thought about DEI policy to some of their curriculum.

And we've just not seen presidents at this scale, this velocity,

using the tools of the presidency to go after individuals, to

go after individual sectors, to go after individual companies.

And that is a precedent that if someone else wants to use,

they can say, hey, he did it. Yeah.

And that's the private sector.

That's the amazing part of this.

So when you look at universities, when you look at media,

when you look at law firms being pressured, squeezed, punished.

Thanks so much for watching. Behind The Curtain.

We're going to take a moment to hear

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The reinvention was trying to bring a company into the trends of the future.

The third category is pay me capitalism.

This one in some ways like just I'm never surprised anymore

that conservatives go along with what Trump does.

But the idea that they're okay with him cutting deals with US Steel

or taking shares of companies. - They would have said

that was socialism. - That it is socialism, right?

When you have when you have the state taking stakes, picking winners and losers

inside of an industry and then helping them and then giving them

benefit protection or giving them government protection.

- In some cases saving them. - In some cases saving them.

But man, that's a dangerous road to go down.

I mean, even Democrats have been really hesitant to get too involved

in trying to dictate which companies should win, which company should lose.

But he's routinely doing it, and sometimes there are genuine reasons

for the government to help a specific industry.

There's reasons things like the CHIPS

Act covered an entire industry and anybody could utilize it.

In this case, what's different is he's basically going in and taking stakes

or dictating deals with specific companies.

Right.

He's calling in NVIDIA and cutting deals with

with the CEO for his company that worked at his company's benefit.

Well he has competitors. - Taking a stake in Intel

looking at do you rescue Spirit Airlines? Which wound up not happening.

And the most fascinating one for a year

OpenAI have been raising the idea of could the government

take a stake in us, looking at it as a way to sort of buy protection,

like send the signal that the public could benefit from

AI. That got a cold shoulder for a year, but now, twice in a week, President Trump

has said, like, I might look at this idea. - And he probably will do it.

Like he's been very clear that he would want to.

And you could say, well, whatever these companies,

they took all of our information.

They turned it into to LLMs,

therefore, they should share the wealth.

But then how are you going to define what an AI company is?

Is it OpenAI? Is it Anthropic? Is it Google?

Is it a Microsoft?

Yeah. What's your cut on this. On what is your cut off.

And then what percentage are you going to take in each of these companies?

In the case of OpenAI and Anthropic they don't make money.

Right.

So they might be they might end up being worth trillions and trillions of dollars.

And they both will IPO and probably will be worth north of $1 trillion.

But it's also possible that one or both of them go belly up at some point,

because they're part of a bubble. We have no idea.

And that's the danger when you have the federal government

interfering in industry, especially with specific businesses,

they have competitors.

I think most businesses just want to know that, hey, we have a sort

of a set of rules that we're going to be playing by for,

hopefully a durable amount of time so that we can make decision planning.

If you have to worry about whether the president's

going to come in and take a share of your company

or start to dictate what you're going to do in terms of your behavior,

either internally here in the US or externally when you're dealing with China,

kind of a big deal.

Yeah.

When we talk about the unprecedented presidency and we talk about things

that have been never done in 250 years, you can think about it,

the Obama test, right.

You say to a Republican, what if President Obama had talked about this?

What if President Obama had done this?

There would have been a revolt. - A revolt.

Then the final category,

which might be the most important, is this idea of expanding executive power.

And maybe you're yawning and like, oh, I don't wanna talk about executive power.

Executive power matters.

The White House is becoming way more powerful than Congress,

at the expense of Congress, at the expense of judiciary.

And so, one of the most fascinating charts that I've seen is this line that shows

the number of laws signed by President Trump, which is going

down, down almost historic lows, but then the number of executive orders

historically high.

And that's because he doesn't like the nuisance of dealing with Congress.

He wants to just do executive orders and make decisions on his own.

And then he takes things like tariffs, which the Constitution outlines

to be in the hands of Congress, and says, the hell with it, I'm going to do it

my way. I'll go to court. I lose the Supreme Court.

I'll find a workaround, which he's doing now.

Same thing with spending.

Like one of the first things

that you weren't in civics is Congress has the purse strings.

Not in this administration where he's making those decisions.

And Axios asked Speaker Johnson

on stage, you've ceded this authority.

You fine with future speaker, probably Hakeem Jeffries.

Like having that authority?

Also, other places, that President Trump

has expanded executive muscle.

The Fed used to be totally independent.

Now he is putting his thumb on the scale there.

He's reined in the watchdogs that had been deployed across government

inspector generals, and he's gotten rid of a lot of civil servants,

like all the time that you and I have been covering politics.

presidents knew

there's only so much they could do, because for all the political appointees,

they have, the vast part of the government outlives them.

That's another place.

President Trump is saying, why not?

There's a reason that we fled England.

There's a reason that the that the United States was created, the idea of

we don't want so much power vested in the hands of one person,

and in this case, one person in one institution.

And Trump did not start this. I want to be very clear.

President Obama took executive orders to a different level.

Joe Biden used executive orders on things like wiping away

student debt that undoubtedly should be in the hands of Congress.

But Trump, like everything, takes it and just put it on steroids.

And while people need to worry is just keep this trajectory going

and imagine you get somebody that you don't like

on the other side, a socialist on the other side.

And they use the tools that Trump has used of government

to really sort of solidify the power of the federal government

over every part of society, over every industry.

That's not an inconceivable trend.

And that's why I think precedents matter.

I think that's why it's sort of this division of power is always mattered.

It's always been messy, always been slow.

But 250 years in, it's kind of worked. - And President Trump is just

getting started 500 days of this term down close to 1000 left to go.