As long as it may have felt, we are one

year into Donald Trump's second term as

president.

To follow the Trump administration in

the news is to be exposed to the full

muzzle velocity of this presidency, the

overwhelming procession of news stories,

wild statements.

>> You're gambling with World War II, the

Riviera of the Middle East.

>> You think President Trump is a fascist?

>> I've spoken about

>> That's okay. Can you just say

>> spectacular, outrageous, sometimes

terrifying events? It feels like so much

more is happening than the human mind,

than the entire media, than the country

can absorb. But how much has actually

changed? How much has Trump actually

gotten done? How many of these stories

that were so spectacular when they began

have followed through into durable

difference in how the government works

or what it does or how we live?

About a year ago, just a few weeks into

Trump's second term, I had Yuval Levan

on the show. Levan is one of the

smartest thinkers on the right, a real

conservative who thinks deeply about

institutions and the nature of the

presidency and how these things work in

the constitutional order. And at that

time, he was in some ways a very

measured voice. This was the moment of

Doge and Musk and executive orders and

and he was skeptical that as much was

actually happening as seemed to be

happening. So now after this truly wild

year, a truly historic year in American

politics and life, I want to have him

back on to see what he thinks has

happened and how his analysis of Trump

has or has not changed. As always, my

email

times.com

11, welcome back to the show.

>> Thank you very much for having me, Ezra.

So, we talked at least on the show last

year right after Trump took office and

this was in the the sort of early chaos.

It was Doge and executive orders and

this feeling that the entire presidency

was being reshaped. They could do

anything. You were a little less

alarmist and were were skeptical that

they were going to accomplish as much as

it felt like they might at that moment.

We're a year into this long second term.

Where are you now?

>> Well, yeah, it has been a long year in a

lot of ways and there's been a lot of

action, I would say, but I think that on

the whole, um, the view that they were

not well set up to accomplish an

enormous amount of durable policy change

is still more or less my view. I I think

that a year in, you're hearing two kinds

of stories. So, one story says there are

a lot of accomplishments. the the

southern border is much more secure than

it was uh a year ago. Uh woke left-wing

radicalism in in a lot of institutions

is back on its heels now. Uh the Iranian

nuclear program has been set back a lot.

The the war in Gaza is over and the

surviving Israeli hostages are home. The

big beautiful bill is law. Um

unemployment's low. The economy is

strong. It's a year of achievements. On

the other hand,

you can you can tell the story from the

point of view of a Trump critic that

says, you know, federal law enforcement

uh has been contorted in the service of

the president's uh grudges and

priorities. The administration has

intimidated all kinds of institutions

throughout American life. In this year,

there are squads of masked agents

pursuing immigrants around the country.

uh federal scientific research funding

is in disarray. Tariffs have increased

prices. These stories are both true at

the same time. But the common

denominator of these stories is that

they're both stories about a lot of

action. And I actually think that's not

quite right. And that there's an

important story to tell uh about the

absence of action in the past year too.

The absence of traditional uses of

presidential power and authority in our

system.

Um, there's been very little

legislation. It's true, the big

beautiful bill is law. Donald Trump has

signed fewer pieces of legislation than

any president in the modern era. Um, the

pace of regulatory action is actually

slower than the past five or six

presidents. If you look at the at the

numbers, um, the amount that they're

doing that amounts to durable policy

change is actually pretty constrained.

And so I think the question is how do

you reconcile the amount of activity

with the absence of durable action? And

to me that's the story of the first year

of this presidency.

>> Walk me through the numbers you ran

comparing federal spending in 2024 under

Joe Biden to federal spending in 2025

under Trump. Well, this is one of the

striking things is we spent the first

six months of the year uh watching Doge

uh take all kinds of actions intended to

reduce federal spending and restructure

uh the government. Uh but at the end of

the day, because there was no

legislative action to change spending,

there was no real change in spending. uh

the government was on a continuing

resolution for the entire year so that

we're still at Biden spending levels and

overall because the big beautiful bill

spent a little more on immigration

enforcement and on defense and because

appropriations were even for the year

the federal government actually spent 4%

more in 2025 than in 2024.

Um, and so a lot of times when you when

you see claims and descriptions and

assertions of what's about to happen,

it's worth kind of making a note for

yourself and saying, I should come back

to this in 6 weeks and ask, did this

actually happen? And a lot of the things

that everybody got very worked up over

this year, not all of them, to be clear,

there's a lot going on, and it's

especially true in immigration and trade

and a few other areas. But on the whole

um it's important to see that the way

the administration is acting which is

more narrowcast and focused on specific

news cycles in specific instances means

they have not gotten nearly as much

accomplished as they say and they've not

gotten as much accomplished as most

presidents do in the first year of a new

presidency. One example of this is the

National Institutes of Health, which

people might have heard about them

gutting spending for early in 2025,

right?

>> What happened there?

>> The story of of NIH spending is very

interesting because in most areas of

government, if you track it month by

month, um, in most departments, those

numbers looked identical in 2025 to

2024. Appropriations were the same, and

so spending out the door was the same.

There was a long government shutdown,

but at the end of it, all the money went

out. And so in the end it looks the

same. NIH looks very different. In the

first 6 months of the year, NIH spending

was far behind its 2024 levels and there

seemed to have been a decision made to

withhold spending, to redirect spending,

and I would argue even to to force a

confrontation over impoundment, the

president just ignoring Congress and not

spending appropriated money on NIH

money. And then in June or early July,

you see a sudden acceleration of NIH

spending. And clearly there there was

some kind of decision made that actually

no, the money has to go out the door by

the end of the year. They did that in a

way that deformed or distorted some of

that spending. So they they decided to

spend multi-year money all in one year

um in a a broad range of uh of federal

grants in order to be able to get the

money out the door so that 100% of the

appropriated amount would be spent by

the end of the fiscal year on October

1st. Um that's going to create problems

down the road. But in any case, a

decision was made. I think it's

unavoidable from looking at the numbers.

A decision was made to avoid an

empoundment fight and to spend all the

money. And by the end of the year, NIH

had spent 100% of its appropriated money

for the year.

>> Something you've said to me that I

thought about after is it Trump governs

retail rather than wholesale.

>> What does that mean?

>> I think there are a couple of ways to

see that. Um, there's a way of thinking

about what the president does that is

about just being in the center of every

news cycle. And Donald Trump is

extremely good at that and focusing on

the issue of the day sort of governing

there being the end of that story. But

broadly speaking, the role that the

president of the United States has is an

administrative role. It's a role that

uses that has an enormous amount of

power over vast terrains of American

life through regulatory action, through

administrative action by setting uniform

rules that govern entire sectors of

society. The Trump administration in the

past year has not been interested in

exercising those powers in the ways that

presidents normally do. If you look at

the the the regulatory studies center at

George Washington University tracks uh

federal regulations and they find that

economically significant rulem has been

slower than in the first year of the

Biden administration or the Obama

administration or Bush or Clinton.

There's been, as I say, much less

legislation and the president has not

had a legislative agenda. I don't think

there is a legislative agenda for the

next three years of this administration.

If you ask yourself, what do they want

Congress to do? It's actually very hard

to answer that question. Um, what the

president has done though is use the

power of the executive as a way of

exercising leverage to drive behavioral

change in particular institutions.

Um we saw this first actually with Doge.

Um a lot of what Doge did was take

control of federal grant making um in

ways that were hyperfocused that that

were grant by grant and they were

essentially trying to govern one by one.

Um I think on the whole and we can talk

about that the Doge experiment didn't

really work. What they tried to do

didn't succeed and it's mostly over. But

we've seen a second way of exercising

power. uh one by one like that and that

is through retail deal making in place

of uh wholesale policym. So that the

president has gone deal by deal one by

one trying to gain some advantage or use

some leverage to drive behavioral change

you know in the universities maybe to

change admissions or hiring uh in uh in

in law firms. He wanted to get some

specific concessions. He wants discounts

from drug companies and that's his

approach to reducing health costs. Uh

he's buying up segments of uh of of

chipmakers. This is a very unusual way

for the president to think about the

role that he has. And so dealm gives the

president more leverage, more freedom.

It allows him in a focused way to

advance his own priorities um and not go

through the usual processes of

rulemaking and legislation. It's a way

that gives the impression of a lot of

action but that in fact is very narrowly

focused and each of these deals uh

achieves something relatively small. It

can be significant, it can be important,

but it's not broad governance. A lot of

the institutions that are making these

deals see this as a way to get through

the next three years. They see it as a

way to avoid changes in regulations or

in law and therefore to protect their

freedom of action rather than to give

ground to the government and ultimately

these are just not ways of securing uh

meaningful durable change. You see that

with the deals made with the

pharmaceutical companies, for example,

where they they agreed to lower prices

on specific drugs and then they started

the year by those same companies by

raising prices in general. It leaves

them with a lot of room. It's not the

way the government normally achieves its

purposes, but it is very much the mode

of action of this administration so far.

One thing we saw in Trump's first year

was this assault really on the

universities

and picking particularly the Ivy League

ones, but not only them, off one by one

to bring them more into line with what

the Trump administration wanted them to

be. What has that achieved? How do you

see its status now? I think people are

seeing less from it. What what did it

all amount to? I think that's really an

instance where policy by dealmaking

shows some of its limits. Um the

administration has had a lot of

influence on a small number of

universities that it chose as targets

um and which it forced in into some

governance changes. Some of which will

be good for those universities and some

not but which the the administration

wanted. It forced them into them by

individual deals. Um the administration

tried to broaden that out into something

more like policy. It put out a compact

for higher education which it wanted all

universities to sign on to. And the the

response that compact received from a

number of elite universities right away

was basically well no let's do

one-on-one deals. There's a a

fascinating letter to the to the

administration from Brown University's

administration which basically said,

"No, the way to do this is just let's

have an arrangement between you and us

that helps you that helps us figure out

what you want and what we can do out of

that." The compact basically fell apart.

It did not succeed. No university uh

signed on and the the administration

returned to a process of dealmaking. And

what you find there is that the

universities prefer these individual

deals to changes in the higher education

act or changes in uh the regulatory

structure of the government's

relationship with them because they see

the deals as more manageable. They have

some more negotiating leverage. I think

that some of the some of what the

administration is trying to do would be

much better achieved by legislation. And

I actually think it's possible to

imagine a legislative change to the

Higher Education Act that would get some

Democratic votes. It wouldn't do

everything the administration wants, but

it would do some important things. The

White House has shown no interest in

that. And the universities in acting

defensively in this moment seem to

prefer those deals too, which I think

tells us a lot.

There's an interesting dynamic where

retail deal making fits the bandwidth of

the news and legislation doesn't.

>> People do not know a tenth of what was

in the inflation reduction act, the

chips and science act, the big beautiful

bill for that matter.

>> Mhm. that in legislation often much more

change is happening than people realize,

but you cannot fit it into the size of a

news story. You cannot even fit it into

the size of a dozen. And people's

attention spans and particularly as

we've gone down to social media, you

know, things are just flying by really

quickly. Whereas these deals, they cut a

deal with Nvidia, they cut a deal with

Japan,

>> right? They actually fit not maybe

everything in the deal but the sense

that something is happening that is

graspable right they made a deal with

this university they intimidated this

person they launched an investigation

here everything has the size of a news

story functionally I mean I have never

covered administration before where the

problem was not that we have a

communication problem where people don't

know how much we're doing right that is

what every administration Biden Obama

Bush right they all felt that way

whereas Trump in a way it's almost at

least in in your telling and I do want

to complicate this eventually but it's

almost the opposite that

the pace of events feels actually faster

in some ways than the the events

themselves.

>> Yes, absolutely. There there is there is

more there's more said than done.

There's more above the surface than

beneath the surface and it is very well

suited to a telling of the story. And

one one way I think about it is the the

president wants himself to be at the end

of every story on Fox News. And so

something's going on in the world and

it's it's this or it's that. It's

troubling. It's it's challenging. And at

the end of the story, Donald Trump has

solved that problem. And one way to

think about that is he he he wants to do

everything. He wants to control

everything. But it's actually a very

narrow notion of what the president can

do. and it's not using most of the

powers of the chief executive of the

American government. Uh but it's

absolutely true and it's not just

legislation but regulation too works

this way. There's never a moment when

you can sort of say we've done this when

you're when you're moving regulatory

action. there's a proposed rule and

there's comments and it's years and at

the end of the day you've done something

that's going to endure but it's not an

easy story to tell and it's very dull

and lawyerly and if you just instead

make a deal um with Brown University or

with Nvidia then you can just say that

day and there's the CEO and he says it

too and something big is going on and so

I think this approach of dealm has

definitely expanded the distance between

perception and reality

um and has created an impression of an

enormous amount of action when the real

amount is not zero by any means, but um

we're we're living in a less

transformative time than we think in

this way. But but deals and particularly

deals, events, the decapitation of USAD,

these these retail moments that are

graspable, that are in many cases

spectacular,

they do serve to

communicate things about how the country

works now, how this regime works. And

and and I do wonder if looking at

federal spending numbers or rules passed

understates that. Let's take Doge. I

always understood Doge's actual purpose

as the intimidation of the civil service

of the federal bureaucracy that there

was a view among many Republicans that

the federal bureaucracy was liberal and

woke and opposed to them and it hampered

them in in Trump's first term. And so

they made examples of a series of

agencies, the USAD and the Consumer

Financial Protection Bureau and people

at the Department of Education and and

so on. And both those were real, right?

They did change those agencies and and

functionally destroyed a few of them.

But it was also a message to everyone

else in the civil service uh as firings

were as everything was to either shut up

or get on board, right? You can be

cowed, you can be on the team, but

otherwise they're going to come for you,

>> right?

>> And that might have changed things at at

a cultural level which would matter. Do

you think that's happened?

>> Absolutely. I I I this is what I mean

when I say that they've used the power

of the presidency as leverage to drive

behavioral change, attitude change, but

they've used the the weight of the

government as a kind of cudgel to push

people around. And that's no small

thing. And I think it does create

cultural changes. I do think that if you

take a a a longer term view, and I don't

mean a generational view, but a a kind

of medium-term 5 10 year view, this way

of doing things does achieve less than

it seems to in in in the in the news

cycle. But absolutely, they're changing

the attitude of uh people who work for

the government. They're changing the

attitude of people who rely on the

government for funding or just for uh a

stable relationship that makes business

possible. I would say that the the

effect that's having um is to undermine

people's sense of the American federal

government as a predictable, reliable

player in various arenas in the at home

and abroad. And so it's not the

specifics of what the administration is

driving people to do. I don't think it's

actually going to be possible to go back

to the pre-Trump attitude toward the

federal government. a university

president who was forced by the

administration's actions in the first

half of the year to reckon with just how

dependent that university is on federal

funding and just how dependent that

funding is on the president's personal

priorities is never going to look at his

budget the same way again. Even if the

next president is very friendly to

whatever that university president wants

to do or be, it will always be in the

back of his mind that this can change,

that this could go away. And I shouldn't

make long-term plans that assume that

this relationship is steady. I think

that's true about a lot of other

countries thinking about the United

States too after the past year. the

assumption that the United States would

just play a kind of stabilizing role in

various environments is no longer

tenable and um yeah I think a lot of

people who have depended on the

government without thinking about it too

much now have to think about it more now

I'd say there's some good in this some

of that dependence uh was really as as

the president likes to say uh abusing

the government or using it um

universities should depend on the

federal government less than they do but

The downside of this, the cost of it is

much higher than the upside because the

sheer stability made possible by a

predictable, reliable federal government

was a massive invisible subsidy of

American life. It made it possible for

Americans to make assumptions about what

various institutions could do for them

that we've never really had to think

about. There's an engine of basic

research humming in the background of

our lives. There are ways in which other

countries treat Americans because of

what they expect our government to be

for them that we just take for granted.

And uh if we can't take that for

granted, the costs will feel and be very

real. So I'm not suggesting that

nothing's changed. But I think that it

we have to see that the way in which

this president has thought about his

role and his power is very different,

very distinct from how most presidents

do. I think it's short- termism. Um, I

think ultimately it it doesn't advance

the ball in the way that some of the

president's uh supporters think, but it

is changing things and some of that

change is very much for the worse.

>> The two places where I think there has

been tremendous policy change

are tariffs and immigration.

>> Yes.

>> And those would not show in the same way

on a tracking of federal legislation

passed or rules promulgated.

But how do you understand those areas

where Trump really has reshaped

>> what the government is doing in ways

that are affecting the real world in a

very profound way?

>> Yeah, immigration really does show up.

Immigration is the great exception to

the the administration's general

governing approach so far. And in

immigration, they have used the

traditional powers of the American

president alongside all kinds of other

things. There has been legislation. They

got new authorities and new money from

the from the reconciliation bill, the

the big beautiful bill uh earlier in the

year. There has been regulation. They've

been moving a lot of rules and rags and

guidance in the traditional ways. The

people running immigration policy in the

administration know the system extremely

well and they are operating through it.

Um they see the immigration bureaucracy

as in the service of their policy in a

way that isn't really the case almost

anywhere else in the domestic sphere. Um

and so in immigration absolutely they

have been using those powers and they've

driven a lot of change that will be

durable. Um I I I think that the the the

the changes at the border in particular

are likely to endure. Um they've

achieved a lot there. Changes in

domestic uh enforcement are going to be

a matter of the next president's

priorities and certainly may not endure,

but those, you know, changing what

they're doing here is going to take a

lot of work. Um, trade is a is a

complicated story. On trade, the

president has deployed powers that are

not normally at his disposal and it's

unclear how much of that is going to

endure. As we speak, the Supreme Court

has not yet announced um its decision in

the tariff case that it faces. That

could happen literally any day. And a

lot of what the administration has done

uh could be reversed at least

temporarily. It's worth looking at at at

tariffs through the lens that we've just

been using to look at at domestic policy

in general because tariffs too have been

used in a focused way in a narrow way uh

country by country but sometimes

literally company by company and Trump

has used tariffs for leverage in

individual instances to try to change

behavior uh as much as he's used it uh

for what we would traditionally think of

as uh as trade policy. But without

question, tariffs and immigration are

the two exceptions to that mode of

governance and there's been a lot of

action there.

>> You keep saying Trump is doing this,

Trump is doing that.

Is that the way you understand what is

happening? So you you take a normal

White House, right? The George W. Bush

White House, the Barack Obama White

House, the I would even say this is how

the Joe Biden White House worked despite

I think people later being less sure of

that. And there is a a a policy process

that that ladders up and there are

briefs delivered and and then it goes

all the way up and you have meetings

with the chief of staff and the domestic

policy director and the president and

the president's making decisions and and

and one thing that constrains how much

happens in a day is that the policy

process for significant decisions can

only absorb so much.

Is that what you understand to be

happening in the Trump White House? a

complex policy process lattering up to

the president? Is it something

different? Like how would you how do you

see the actual management structure of

all this activity?

>> I I think this has been very different

but not quite the effect has not quite

been what you suggest there. I think in

some ways it's actually made it narrower

not broader. But if you think about what

the White House generally does, its core

job

in in modern presidencies, the work has

been to organize and facilitate

presidential decision-making. That's

what most people in the White House do.

Their job is to organize information and

structure policy questions so that when

it's necessary, they can reach the

president as a discrete question for the

president to decide. many policy

questions get resolved before that. Um,

and there isn't really a need for a

presidential decision. That's part of

the job, too. When I started working at

the Bush White House at the beginning of

Bush's second term, the chief of staff

basically told me, "You work on domestic

policy. We're in the middle of two wars

that need to take the president's

attention, and if you're in the Oval

Office driving a decision, it probably

means something's gone wrong." Um, that

was the attitude in the second term.

That's part of how the White House

works. In this White House, the the the

basic logic of the operation is that it

moves decisions down into the

bureaucracy. The president decides or

sets priorities or has already said

something for years or on Twitter last

night. And what happens is we do it.

There are not a lot of people around the

president who are there to complicate

decisions, which is what a lot of people

in the White House normally do, uh, or

to bring in other sources of

information. Things really are driven a

lot by a a fairly narrow range of

priorities that are known to be the

president's priorities and goals. And

there's a very centralized policymaking

structure centralized in Steven Miller,

who's the deputy chief of staff for

policy. that that job, deputy chief for

policy, was created first in the Clinton

administration. It's existed ever since,

but it works very differently this time.

Steven Miller, I would say, is the most

powerful policy staffer in the history

of the modern White House. Almost

everything flows through him. And

>> he often seems to me to be the prime

minister.

>> Yeah. I mean, I think he he drives a lot

of action. He brings decisions to the

president in the form of ideas. The

president does say no. Sometimes it's

not that Miller's making policy by

himself, but he's the person who puts

things on the president's desk when it

comes to policy and also who takes the

president's rhetoric and tries to turn

it into policy by driving the system. I

guess one reason though I'm a little

skeptical of describing it so rationally

is that yes at some level Donald Trump

is a final decision maker and he does

say no to certain Steven Miller ideas

but if you listen to an interview with

Donald Trump if you if you watch him

speak if you read about or talk to

people who brief him

Trump is a very erratic mind is one way

to put it. uh somebody who used to brief

him once. Uh I've always remembered this

description. They described briefing

Donald Trump as chasing a squirrel

around a garden.

>> And I don't want to say he's manipulated

by his adviserss because I don't think

it's quite that.

But they do know which code words and

intuitions and ideas excite him.

And he moves towards his own excitement.

There's something uh very intentional.

he's like his own Twitter algorithm

and you know he brings conversations

back to his victories or to you know

renovating you know the the east wing of

the white house. There was reporting on

how once Rubio figured out he could

describe Maduro as a drug lord like a

crime kingpin that seemed to like

trigger for Donald Trump. And so you

look at the way people in the White

House and in the administration tweet

and sometimes it feels to me like a lot

of people vying for the king's attention

as much as anything else. And yes,

they're doing it based off of a theory

of what he wants, but he doesn't pay

attention to dull, drab things. You got

to got to do something big.

>> Yeah.

>> To get his notice. Well, I agree with

that, but I I think it feeds into a a a

fundamental difference about the

understanding of the president's role

where, again, I think where a lot of

recent white houses have thought of the

president's role as making difficult

decisions,

the the Trump White House sees it as

advancing tough change. And those are

different ways of thinking. So, it's

true, Donald Trump is all over the

place. He says a lot of things, but all

those things are about a fairly narrow

range of subjects, and it's reasonably

clear to the people around him the

direction that might appeal to him or

that he might want to take. And so, I

think there's there's more contending

with what's on Trump's mind and less

contending with what's happening in the

world than there ought to be in the

White House. A a a simple example,

normally senior uh appointed officials,

say cabinet members play a kind of dual

role where they represent the

president's views to the bureaucracy

that they run in their department, but

they also represent that bureaucracy to

the president. They bring the expertise

that's only available at the FDA or at

the State Department into the

decision-making process at the White

House. And so the secretary of state

just kind of ends up being a champion

for diplomacy and the secretary of

defense for military action because

they're kind of speaking for different

parts of the government. That's not

happening now at all. As far as I can

see, there are not debates happening in

front of Donald Trump in the Oval Office

or in front of Steven Miller. The the

process doesn't land on a an internal

debate within the administration about

policy direction. Decisions aren't

structured that way. But the process

here, the structure of decision-m is

very different from what I can see.

>> I did a conversation with my colleague

at at Times Opinion, Masha Gesson, and

their frame of reference is Russia under

Vladimir Putin and and the turn to

autocracy there. And something they said

to me is that there are democratic

metrics for what is happening in a

country, in a system, and there are

autocratic metrics for what is happening

in a country and a system. And in their

view, the democratic metrics here don't

really tell the story. I mean, we've

been talking about leverage a bit, which

I think bridges the the divide a little

bit, but I would say there's a lot of

things that look a lot to me, like

bribes and transactionalism and cabinet

meetings where people go around and give

very autocratic praise to the leader.

and you have ICE agents and masks and

now collisions on the streets and the

National Guard in cities and and this

reflects a little bit of the the story

you were talking about at the beginning

that that maybe liberals tell.

>> Yes.

>> But the thing I want to push on there is

that in that story there is a point to

all this that they are trying to build a

different form of not even presidency

but regime. They are trying to make the

whole system work differently. Um, and

in that respect, not going through

Congress is actually part of the whole

point because you do not want to be

bound by Congress and its slowness and

its deliberation and its laws. You know,

not going through rulemaking processes

is part of the point. You're trying to

create this executive who functions more

like an autocrat, an authoritarian, or a

king. What do you think of that? I think

there is some truth to that, but that

it's worth not being carried too far by

the analogy to Russian autocracy or

elsewhere. Um, because it's not, I

think, as thought through as that for

most of the people involved. Um, I think

Donald Trump doesn't actually know how

the American system usually works, which

is a strange thing to say. He's already

been president for 5 years, but I it's

not that he has a grasp of what that is

and he's doing something different. What

he's doing is what he takes the job to

be of uh uh the the chief executive of

the national government of the of the

world superpower. And his view of that

is, I think, directionally autocratic.

There's no way around it. It always has

been. Um I think there are some people

in the administration who have a more uh

expressly consciously

um transformative view of what they're

doing to the constitutional system. A

sense that the government we need would

have a much stronger president would not

be constrained by Congress would not be

constrained by procedural rules and

there is certainly some push in that

direction. Um, and it's very dangerous

and very damaging and those things

really are happening. I would only add

to that story one complication which is

that I think there it's not ultimately

succeeding so far because there is a

democracy underneath all that. What

they're doing isn't popular and the

elements of it that they are now leaning

into most seem to me to be the least

popular parts of what they're doing. the

the masked a agents on the street are

not popular. And more than that, I would

say there's a there's a there's a

disposition, a way of speaking and

thinking that emanates from this White

House that is cold and hard and sees the

world as just one harsh intense

confrontation after another. And that

picture of American life which is the

way in which the administration speaks

about the country is not attractive and

it's not ultimately effective. I think

first of all it's not right. It lacks

the kind of grace and humanity that you

ought to have when you have a lot of

power in a free society. But it's also

not smart. It's not politically

effective.

Think about what happened in Minneapolis

for example. Imagine if the president

wanting to uh to to build some support

for the agents on the street there said

something like, "You look at that video

and you see two people who have both

panicked, who are in a situation they

didn't expect, and they're both acting

in ways they couldn't have thought

through. And it was a tragic situation.

And what the officer did there was not

illegal. It was a reaction to a

situation he found himself trapped in.

There was a car coming at him. You could

speak that way. I'm not sure it's true,

but you could speak that way. What he

said instead was this was a a rabid

activist who was trying to mow him down

with her car. That's what immigration

enforcement is like and it's necessary

to shoot these people. That's

essentially what he said. That isn't a

winning argument. The president was

elected with by a coalition that was

about 49% of the electorate and he's now

spent a year bringing that down to 40%.

Rather than bringing it up to 55%. And I

think that has a lot to do with the

tenor that some critics perceive as uh

as as authoritarian, but that is at the

very least just cold and inhumane and

therefore in our country also ultimately

unpopular. I think in many ways I'm

probably closer to your side of the

argument here than the other, but but I

want to I want to voice the other

because I do think this goes to the core

of are we looking at democratic metrics

where you think about popular opinion

and elections? Are we looking at

autocratic metrics where you think about

power and suppression? Because

many many many people, myself being one

of them, have said from the beginning of

these deployments, they are creating the

conditions for a collision and a tragedy

between federal ICE agents, CBP,

National Guard, whomever, and

protesters, immigrants. They're doing

this in a a very aggressive way, and

they are creating the conditions in

which something is going to go terribly

wrong. And then it does. And it's not

like I think the order to shoot Renee

Good dead came from a higher up. I mean

things were clearly happening very fast

in the moment. But then you immediately

see Christy Gnome and Trump and others

come out with fullthroated support for

the agent.

And from one perspective whether or not

that is popular it is a signal. And the

signal to ICE agents, to CBP agents, to

the National Guard, and to protesters

is this is what can happen.

And to the protesters, get out of our

way or you might lose your life. And

that is from one perspective, even if

it's not popular, that is a

consolidation of power. Maybe people

think twice before being at a protest.

Now, um I've seen even just in the last

few days a few videos that feel to me

like escalation in the aggress in the

aggression of ICE agents talking about

these provisions they can use to to to

really jail and and um seems to me

almost disappear people who are in their

way.

And so if you were looking at this not

as is it good politics, but is it good

in quotes power consolidation,

maybe it is what they've not wanted, but

but it fits what their directionality

has been.

>> I agree with that right up until the

very end. So I I I agree with the

description you offer and I think that

is part of what they're trying to do. I

think you can see it in moments of

crisis in the immediate aftermath of

Charlie Kirk's murder. It looked as if

they're just getting ready to uh to

start to crack down on uh on on groups

on the left that they would now define

as domestic terrorists.

Where I don't quite agree is that I

don't think it's actually effective. I

it certainly is setting a tone. It

certainly is trying to have a chilling

effect on opposition. I think that's

right. Um, but

if if we think about the political life

of our country in in time spans longer

than a news cycle, maybe longer than a

year or two, um, are they succeeding or

failing here? I don't think that what

they're doing is building public

support. And so ultimately, I think the

Democratic metrics matter more, although

those um, authoritarian metrics tell us

something important. I think the

democratic metrics matter more because

they determine whether this is durable

change. I I I've I've spent now uh 25

years in Washington and I think one

thing I've learned is that it always

seems like the big question of the

moment is the question for the duration

that it's going to extend into the

future indefinitely and that this is uh

whoever is winning now is winning when

in fact it has turned out over and over

that what looked like winning for a

minute was losing. And both parties have

fallen prey to this. That's what the the

cultural transformation of that woke

moment in 2020 felt like. It's what the

Obama moment felt like. It's what the

the the the

post 911 moment felt like. And where in

retrospect, not a generation later, but

a couple of years later, an election

later, it turned out actually what was

going on there was not what it seemed.

And I think the administration is in the

process of rendering itself unpopular.

That is not to say that I don't worry

about the effect they're having on our

system of government. The the the

excesses of presidential power will have

lasting damaging effects. The weakness

of Congress, which has been exacerbated,

it didn't start this year, but it's been

made worse, will have lasting and

dangerous effects. Um I absolutely think

we're seeing very grave problems develop

before us but I think it's worth keeping

them in perspective so that we on the

one hand can see some ways forward and

on the other hand we can keep in reserve

some vocabulary of authoritarianism that

if things get worse we will need um to

say the sky has fallen before it has

just doesn't leave you enough to say

when you face a much more grave threat

and I think it's worth seeing that there

are ways in which they've been

restrained by the system, by Congress

and the courts. Um, and you know, we

should we should try to have some

perspective over what we're seeing even

though it's a very dramatic and uh in

some ways dangerous moment.

>> What are some of those ways they've been

constrained?

>> Well, look, let's think about Congress.

Congress, the story of Congress this

year um is not a happy story if you care

about Congress. The institution has been

pushed aside in a lot of ways, has been

ignored, has not had a lot to do. At the

same time, um the

the the Congress at this point is in the

process through its regular

appropriations of essentially undoing

the work that Doge did that members

disapproved of. Um undoing the changes

made to scientific research funding,

undoing some of the changes made on the

personnel side. The Senate has had a

very active year of resisting

presidential nominations that senators

didn't approve of. This hasn't really

been part of the of the narrative we

tell ourselves, but the the the US

Senate on its website publishes a list,

an up-to-date list of presidential

nominations withdrawn in this session of

Congress. And that number at this point

is at 54. 54 is a very high number. So

just about once a week now for a year on

average the president has withdrawn a

nomination that he had sent to the

Senate um the Senate has resisted

presidential appointments below the

cabinet level to a much greater degree

than we imagine and is pushing back some

uh with uh with appropriations. It's not

enough. The Congress is underactive.

As you know, if you get me started on

that question, I have a lot to say about

it. I'm a congressional uh supremacist,

but there has been some restraining

action. The courts have done a lot to

restrain the administration. Um the the

the administration has faced a lot of uh

of of federal cases against it. 573

cases as of yesterday were filed. Uh

about 230 of them are still in process,

but of the ones that have been decided,

the administration has lost 57%.

That's a very very poor record for the

federal government in federal court. Um

and a very small number of those losses

were then appealed to the Supreme Court.

The administration's had an interesting

strategy here of appealing only cases

that the solicitor general really

expects to win. Um they've appealed only

about 25 cases uh having lost something

like 200 cases. Um, and so the courts

have restrained the administration quite

a bit. And we, what we haven't seen in

either case is the kind of

confrontations that I certainly was

worried about last year, a year ago. We

haven't seen a big fight over

impoundment. I thought that would happen

and it hasn't. And we haven't seen the

administration openly defying the

Supreme Court. Now, that could happen.

The tariff case is an example of an

issue that the president really cares

about, for example, but it hasn't. And

that's worth seeing, too.

>> What do you make of the criminal probe

that got opened into Federal Reserve

Chair Jerome Powell and and his

response?

>> Yeah, I I think I think it's bizarre.

It's an example of uh what I described

at the outset as the the the first and

most significant problem we've

confronted this year, which is the

deformationation of federal law

enforcement in the service of the

president's own grudges and whims. I

don't know yet and I think we will know

uh where this decision came from. Um

who the president said that he didn't

know anything about it. That's possible.

Um but I think somebody at DOJ certainly

thought that it would please him if uh

if there was a case started against the

Fed chairman and I think it did please

him.

>> Does the head of the mafia always know

who's going to get whacked?

>> Right. Right. Um there's there's a

certain amount of plausible deniability

here, but what we're seeing here is the

the deformationation of federal law

enforcement. I I thought it was both

right and impressive that Chairman

Powell came out and said this is just

political. They're trying to get us to

change monetary policy and that's not

going to happen. Um I I I think it's a

case that won't go that far. I think Pal

will easily win that case. But look,

it's a form of intimidation. There's no

way around it. And they've used federal

law enforcement that way to provide

favors on the one hand and to intimidate

opponents on the other hand all year to

a degree that we have not seen before.

>> One thing I thought about watching it

was Powell is quite unique in that he

has a very potent independent power base

and that power base is the markets. If

the

markets actually believe the Fed is

going to be compromised,

you will see bond prices go wild. You

will see stock market turmoil. But it

made me think about how often something

like that is happening. Not always with

a criminal probe, maybe a threat of

firing, maybe, you know, forms of

leverage we we don't see or don't know

about, but the person does not have

independent power. They do not have the

standing to go release a video, and that

video will become headline news. and and

how much intimidation

has occurred out of our sighteline.

>> Yeah.

>> I mean, quite a lot.

>> Quite a lot. Right. There there's things

where we know, right? We we saw the FCC

and Jimmy Kimmel. I mean, there are a

couple stories that really break

through,

>> but there's a lot of quiet resignations

and that sort of deeper corruption of

the system.

Um,

and to your point about Donald Trump

maybe not knowing that this was coming

to me that that in a strange way makes

it worse.

And what I was saying earlier about the

way normal policy process would work is

you just would never you would never

want to surprise the president

with an attack on the Federal Reserve

that would lead the Federal Reserve

chair to release a video that might send

markets into turmoil. Right? Somebody

would want to know about that beforehand

and weigh the cost benefit of what

you're about to do. Right? You could say

the same thing, you know, maybe about

the Kimmel situation.

It's more the fact that people think

this is what the president wants and if

it turns out badly, maybe he doesn't

want it. He only wants it if it turns

out well. But the sense that that signal

has been sent out

and at all kinds of levels from what ICE

agents do to what you know, career um uh

and political pointy, you know,

prosecutors do that this is what they

think the White House wants. Whether or

not the White House told them to do it,

that seems very significant to me.

>> Yeah, I think there's no doubt about

that. I I would say the the PAL case is

maybe a little less obvious because

federal prosecutions don't generally get

uh presidential approval in advance. In

fact, the the DOJ is usually much more

independent than it is.

>> If I thought this was a legitimate

prosecution, I would feel differently

about it. But I think broadly speaking,

the one way to think about how

presidents run their administrations is

that the there has to be some way in

which a mid-level political appointee

can say to himself, "If the president

were in my job, what would he be doing?

If the president were the deputy

secretary of labor, what would he do?"

And that means that the administration

very often has the personality of the

president. You saw that. I think you I

think we could describe it very clearly

in the Clinton years, in the Bush years,

in the Obama years. Um it was harder in

the Biden years because it was just

never clear what the president's own

priorities actually were, what he cared

about. Uh and and you saw that too. That

administration was underactive for that

reason. But in this respect, the this

Trump administration is uh is like

those. It's just the president's

personality is very different. And what

that under secretary says when he thinks

what would the president do if he were

in my job often just isn't like what we

would expect of the person in that job

to do. And I think this is a

tremendously damaging problem. It it

creates enormously damaging precedence

in the uses of executive power. It it's

it's one reason why president of the

United States should not be the first

job you have in government. why our

presidents should be formed some by the

system of government we have before they

rise to that powerful a position. And

you know, Donald Trump is the first

president we've had who was not formed

by any of the existing institutions of

our government. He came in with a very

different view of what the role is and

was. And this time around, even more

than last time, his personality is

shaping implicitly the judgments of a

lot of people throughout the

administration. And I think we see the

effects and they're very damaging

effects. We've talked here about change

the administration is making that may

not be durable

institutions that they are intimidating

that might snap back into their older

form in a couple of years if you know

Trump is succeeded by a democratic

president and the system is held but I

think there's one institution movement

culture that that is changing which is

the right itself

what it means to be a 20some ambitious

young republic Republican or young

conservative or whatever term you want

to use for it. I mean, this is a world

you're much more imshed in than I am,

but we all know that Washington is run

by 20somes and 30somes.

And the ideological trends and movements

among young ambitious politicos in any

given moment do tend to seep out into

the system pretty quickly. So from your

perspective, you know, at a kind of

traditionally conservative think tank,

how do you see the right changing and

particularly the young right changing?

>> I think these changes are very important

and um people are are formed by the

political environment they enter into

when they kind of sign up to be part of

of a political movement or party. Um,

and you know, younger people on the

right today have really only known uh

politics under Donald Trump. Uh, you

know, Trump by the time this term ends

will have been the dominant figure in

our politics for longer than any

particular individual uh since Franklin

Roosevelt, right? Because he will have

been president not just for eight years

but in, you know, effectively on the

right for 12 because he will have

dominated the right even during the

Biden years. The effect of that is is

hard to overstate. And I do think that

the culture of um of younger people on

the right is shaped by an attitude

toward government, an attitude toward

the country, and an attitude toward the

left that's very different than it was

when I was uh a younger conservative.

It's not totally different, but it's

more hardered.

Um, it's, I would say, desparing, uh, in

a way that wasn't really my experience.

A sense that America is on the brink and

about to fall off the cliff. Um, and

much less possessed in its own

self-standing of any kind of commitment

to American constitutionalism. You know,

there was a lot of talk about the

Constitution on the Young Right when I

was younger on the right. Obviously, it

wasn't all perfectly earnest and you

know, people in power uh are never

simply what they say and all that's

true, but it matters what you say. It

matters how you understand yourself. And

I do think that uh younger people on the

right now are shaped much more by a

sense that presidential power can break

through the boundaries and the barriers.

Um and so are less interested in the

kinds of uh of constitutional ideas

about the role of government, less

committed to the American political

tradition, less committed to the market

economy. Um,

it's not obvious what of this lasts and

what doesn't, but important parts of it

will last. And there's also a a much

more marginal but still significant

fringe that is genuinely open to uh to

to racism and to anti-semitism

um in ways that I think are very

worrisome. I would say one dynamic on

the right that matters a lot now is a

kind of mirror image of a dynamic on the

left in the last 5 years or so which is

a generational tension within

institutions

um in which younger people are pulling

toward the political margin and older

people are struggling to keep the

institution focused on uh something more

like the political middle and the

younger people are winning. I think if

you describe what's happening in some of

the institutions of the right now, it

would be familiar to someone who had to

struggle uh in a left-wing nonprofit 5

years ago uh or maybe in leftwing

journalism too. That generational

tension uh is very real now on the

right. Do you see this as a a story of

continuity? Maybe people can look back

at Sam Townenous's recent biography of

William F. ly and you see America first

movements and John Burchers and I mean

there's always been this strain you know

Pat Buchanan and and David Duke and you

know running for governor in Louisiana

or is this something new? You describe

the the sort of nearapocalypticism

>> which I see too. You talked about

despair. I would call it a kind of like

cynical nihilism

or is this really something new? Is

something new taking over? the there

have always been elements like these in

the coalition of the right as there are

versions of them on the left. They're

more dominant now than they've been

before. And so in that sense, it's not

simply continuous. It's not one faction

uh fighting from the margins, but it's

the dominant faction of the right is

populist. Now, I would say more than

conservative. I think that the one way

to think about the difference is about

whether your politics begins from what

you care about most, what you love, or

whether it begins from what you fear and

what you hate. To me, as a young person,

conservatism was appealing and has

remained appealing because it's

fundamentally rooted and begins from

what we love in the world. It is a

defense of what I take to be best about

the world. And what is best about the

world is always threatened. It's always

uh challenged. It's challenged just by

the realities of human nature.

Sustaining it requires work. It requires

moral formation and political action.

And that's the work that conservatives

at their best do. We can serve the

preconditions for a flourishing life in

a free society. But if the reason you

have for entering politics first and

foremost is to combat the left, to

oppose what you don't like, then your

politics are going to be different than

that. Now look, to defend what you love

means fighting people who oppose it, and

politics is argument, and it it's it's

always contestation. But I think it

matters a lot whether fundamentally the

reason that drew you in uh is itself the

fight or whether the reason that drew

you in is a commitment to something you

love is fundamentally conservative is

about wanting to preserve uh the good.

And I I do think that that is the the

generational question for the right now.

A question that can only be answered by

the political fortunes of this

experiment. Now, I will say the the

kinds of of uh extremisms that you

describe are not the dominant core of

the right, but they matter. They're

bigger than they used to be. They're

more significant. And social media and

other things mean that they're much more

influential. And so it seems to me that

it's incumbent upon older people on the

right like myself to make the case to

younger people on the right that

ultimately we win by advancing what we

love in the world and by persuading the

country by persuading other Americans

that they should love it too and that

understanding ourselves as being at war

with our own society uh is not a recipe

for an effective politics or a good

life.

>> I think that's a place to end. I'll ask

our final question. What are three books

you'd recommend to the audience?

>> Well, so we talked a lot about uh the

the American system of government. So

I'll recommend a book each on on the

branches of our government. I think if

you want to understand what's happening

in Congress now, the book to read is

Francis Lee's Insecure Majorities. Uh it

was written about 10 years ago. Francis

Lee is a political scientist at

Princeton. Is a wonderful book about the

dynamics that explain what's happening

in Congress. Second, I would recommend

uh Lindseay Travinsk's book uh Making

the Presidency, which is a work of

history. Travinsky is a historian. It's

a book about John Adams and the way in

which he thought about the institution

of the presidency in the wake of

Washington. Really fascinating and also

has a lot to offer us in understanding

the contemporary moment. Finally, on the

courts, I would point you to a very new

book which actually isn't out yet, but

should be uh early this spring, I think,

but I've had a chance to read it. It's

called It's called The Last Branch

Standing, published by the legal

journalist Sarah Isker. Um I think it'll

be out in April. And if you want a book

that explains the Roberts Court from the

inside, it helps you understand how that

court operates and thinks, uh I haven't

seen a better one.

>> Ivalan, thank you very much.

>> Thanks very much, Ezra.

Heat. Hey, Heat.