Latest news with #MatterofOpinion
Yahoo
15-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
What's the Matter with Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi?
A few weeks into 2025, Ross Douthat, The New York Times' idiosyncratically conservative columnist, interviewed Marc Andreessen: Netscape co-founder, venture capitalist, general Silicon Valley gadabout, and, lately, fixture in Trump-adjacent Washington, where he has reportedly been interviewing candidates for top agency positions and promoting rollbacks of Biden-era cryptocurrency guardrails. O tempora, o mores. In the course of the interview (the audio of which is available in full as an episode of the paper's Matter of Opinion podcast), Andreessen laments the pressures of a socially conscious press, college students, social media activists, and activist shareholders. He evokes a genuinely paranoid fantasy that tech workers were once on the verge of a violent labor uprising: Workers of the world, you have nothing to lose but your keyboards! He appears to claim that, at some point in the years 2016 to 2020, 'the federal government radicalized hard under Hillary.' It's unclear what he was referring to. The Times, in any case, removed the offending quote in its print edition. Andreessen is far from alone in his embattled posture. A set of increasingly vocal, increasingly right-wing tech billionaires has come to share with some segments of the left (or, as we shall see, the former left) an almost obsessive concern with the hypocrisies and shortcomings of modern liberalism. Some of these figures, like PayPal billionaire Peter Thiel, have long been associated with the political right, and Thiel's 1998 attack on 'multiculturalism' in elite universities, The Diversity Myth (co-written with current Trump 'crypto czar' David O. Sacks), presaged today's great national DEI freak-out. Others were more ambiguous, political agnostics in the vast, squishy center of American politics who have only more recently drifted into the embrace of a newly dynamic right unbound by its stodgy past. Andreessen himself long supported Democrats, but he grew incensed by the Biden administration's mild skepticism toward and willingness to regulate cryptocurrency, eventually embracing a belief that the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and the deep state were engaged in a deliberate program to 'debank' conservatives and cryptocurrency investors. Mark Zuckerberg, who had previously cultivated a studiously apolitical public image, killed all DEI initiatives at Meta (blaming them on his departed female COO, Sheryl Sandberg) and went on the Joe Rogan show to propose a need to bring 'masculine energy' back to the workplace. Elon Musk was once a darling of liberals and environmentalists, but his various musings on 'free speech'; his chummy social media interactions with online Nazis, 'race realists,' and other such strange creatures; and, of course, his spectacular embrace of Donald Trump have disabused the center and the left of any notion that he might be on their side. This rightward turn has drawn noisy criticism. Yet the tech barons, platform operators, and publishers had already found a new set of friendly voices in the media. As it turned out, there was a pool of ready-made scribes, who, like them, had soured on the Democratic Party, on speech codes they perceived as a regime of censorship, and on the perceived excesses of DEI, and who were eager to take advantage of the new, growing platforms that billionaires like Thiel, Musk, and Andreessen acquired or funded. Owned: How Tech Billionaires on the Right Bought the Loudest Voices on the Left, a new book by the journalist Eoin Higgins, is an attempt to understand how a collection of unimaginably wealthy, increasingly angry titans of technology and finance were able to acquire loud allies among journalists who had, until relatively recently, been largely associated with the political left. Higgins previously covered this beat in his work for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting and for his own newsletter, The Flashpoint. Some of that work is repurposed here, but the book expands on it, taking a broader look at the sociocultural and political currents that have brought new alignments of writers, audiences, and funders. His two main subjects are the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, although a number of other new-media all-stars and hangers-on make appearances, most notably Free Press founder and former Times columnist Bari Weiss, who, while lacking Greenwald's or Taibbi's superstar-journalist quality, comes across as a much cannier operator with a longer and more strategic view of her project. Greenwald and Taibbi arrived at their journalistic celebrity through different paths. Greenwald, a civil libertarian and (usually) strident critic of U.S. military and intelligence policy, cut his teeth as a blogger and Guardian columnist before rocketing to international fame by acquiring and publishing the Edward Snowden National Security Agency leaks and founding The Intercept with backing from billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Taibbi started as a kind of new gonzo journalist—will no one free young men from the curse of Hunter S. Thompson?—but became famous and respectable through excellent and trenchant reporting for Rolling Stone, particularly on the 2008 financial crisis. Neither writer was ever a doctrinaire leftist, but it is fair to say that, even when criticizing Democrats and liberals (for example, for continuing the war on terrorism and the use of drones, or for favoring banks over homeowners during the Obama years), their critiques appeared to emerge from positions further left. But over the course of the first Trump term and subsequent Biden presidency, they gradually, then swiftly, drifted into the inchoate, mercurial world of 'heterodox' thinking and writing—a sprawling and capacious complex of pontificators, with tendencies that range from fairly standard Silicon Valley sci-fi libertarianism to fantasy-genre monarchism to hard-right ethnonationalist neofascism. Both of these main characters became uncomfortable in the liberal media around the time of 'Russiagate,' a sprawling, incomprehensible liberal conspiracy theory that blamed Trump's 2016 victory on Russian state malefactors. Both were deeply skeptical of the theory, while major left-leaning outlets like MSNBC, where Greenwald had once been a greenroom fixture, went particularly big on it. Ironically, however, both Greenwald and Taibbi took an almost conspiratorial view of the media's commitment to Russiagate, treating the dissemination of the theory as a media conspiracy in and of itself, with Taibbi going so far as to compare it (with caveats, to be fair) in scale to the 'WMD affair heading into the Iraq war' rather than as desperate wish-casting by liberals for some explanation, any explanation, for the election of Trump. Both men found friendlier audiences at Fox, where Greenwald became a regular guest of Tucker Carlson, and eventually as far abroad as the hair-sprayed Technicolor studios of Newsmax. In the years that followed, both men took positions of reflexive hostility to mainstream media and contemporary liberal values. During the pandemic, for example, Taibbi criticized the legacy press for its 'censorship of ivermectin news.' In the Biden years, he grew increasingly critical of any attempts to prosecute Trump for various crimes, arguing, as many conservatives did, that such attempts were inherently politically motivated and would set up cycles of revenge prosecution. Both men evinced growing concern with 'cancel culture': Taibbi created a regular feature on his website called Meet the Censored, in which he interviewed supposedly canceled writers and public figures, and Greenwald lamented that one of his own passion projects, a documentary about the tennis player Martina Navratilova, had been derailed at least in part by the unreasonable objections of trans activists. These positions brought both men into alignment with a tech elite who increasingly saw value in an unfettered, (mostly) uncensored, alternative online media. Both publish primarily on Substack (Taibbi has over 500,000 subscribers, and Greenwald over 300,000), the newsletter platform that received substantial funding from Marc Andreessen's firm Andreessen Horowitz. Greenwald has also built an impressive audience for his System Update news show on the Thiel-funded, right-wing YouTube alternative, Rumble—a friendly arena for figures with contrarian viewpoints, a maximalist view of free speech, and a reflexive anti-liberalism. Taibbi, along with Bari Weiss and the reporters Lee Fang and Michael Shellenberger, among others, benefited from a more direct relationship with the tech oligarchy. Shortly after Musk took possession of Twitter in October 2022, he turned over the company's records to these writers, encouraging them to report on the supposedly scandalous practices of the prior regime. Taibbi was first to take up the gauntlet and began to write about the so-called Twitter Files. Rather than initially publishing these revelations as traditional articles in a periodical or newsletter, Taibbi and company struck an unusual deal directly with Musk to report about the billionaire's now-personal platform on that platform, an awkward hybrid format in which the writers revealed and commented on screenshots of internal Twitter company documents in long Twitter threads: disclosing Twitter's internal debates over whether to suppress a New York Post story sourced from Hunter Biden's hacked personal laptop, and showing the company deciding to ban Trump from the platform after January 6. It was a questionable journalistic decision, but it drove a huge number of new subscribers to Taibbi's Substack—at least until Musk got upset about users clicking away from Twitter and throttled outgoing links, to Taibbi's public idiosyncratic figures on the right have long benefited from the largesse of conservative millionaires and billionaires who fund think tanks and institutes and support conservative media from Fox News to The Federalist. But while the ascendant tech industry elite have invested strategically in alternative media and platforms—from Andreesen's early-round support of Substack and Thiel's fundraising for Rumble, to Sacks's podcasting platform, Callin—their direct subsidy of new contrarian media is harder to find. The story of tech in new media is more the tale of investors strategically seeding a friendly ecosystem than it is of rich men simply buying friends and allies. (If anything, the most salient example of a tech billionaire intervening directly in the media was an act of destruction: Thiel's bankrolling of the lawsuit that crushed the left-wing Gawker Media empire.) In this regard, the title of Higgins's book, Owned, strikes me as a bit of a misnomer. Neither Greenwald nor Taibbi, once beloved and now often despised by the left, seems to have sold out to the tech titans so much as to have converged organically on the same modes of thinking and habits of mind. Greenwald and Taibbi were, after all, already famous and well-off, at least by the standards of a consolidating media industry that mints few superstars and depends more and more on the underpaid labor of freelancers. They had both written for top publications, and both had already benefited from the largesse of a less conservative billionaire, Omidyar, who in addition to funding The Intercept, funded a never-launched Taibbi vehicle called Racket. Both men had legions of adoring readers. It's possible instead that, in their overtures toward the right, both sought a way to recapture the feeling, the spirit, the frisson of having once been enfants terribles—of reporting on secret documents, as Greenwald did, or partying in Moscow or naming Goldman Sachs a 'great vampire squid,' in Taibbi's case. These were great shots across the bow of the establishment, rude and necessary eructations in a media clubhouse where the biggest newspaper in the country sat on revelatory and necessary stories—exemplified most damningly by The New York Times' decision to hold back blockbuster revelations of massive domestic spying by the NSA at the behest of its contacts in the government. Such opportunities often come only once or twice in a lifetime, in a career, and there is something sad in desperately chasing the high of another hit. It is also hard to do. As Higgins outlines, Greenwald's two great scoops—the Snowden leaks and the Brazilian Lava Jato scandal—effectively fell into his lap when sources sought him out, and Taibbi was generally more of a commentator than a straight reporter. As their interests and emphases have increasingly turned to the various depredations of speech codes and cancel culture, the opportunities are simply not there. Neither content moderation nor HR departments are—or ever have been—real corporate or political power centers, and no matter how many times Ivy League presidents are hauled before Congress, there is no NSA of woke to be discovered or revealed. As for Bari Weiss, she, like Taibbi, took a flyer on the Twitter Files, using revelations from the documents to pump subscriptions to her newsletter, which she rebranded from Common Sense to the Free Press and began to build out as something closer to a journal of news and opinion, with a growing stable of contributors. (Notably, according to Higgins's reporting, Musk gave her access at the behest of Andreessen.) But, Higgins writes, 'unlike Taibbi, Weiss used Musk rather than being used by him and spun the Twitter Files into an independent career move.' She openly broke with Musk when he banned journalists from Twitter for reporting on his personal decision to ban the @ElonJet account, which tracked the movements of his private planes, and in so doing gave herself credibility as an independent voice. Her status has since only grown, and even Greenwald, who had long clashed with Weiss over his admirable consistency on Palestinian rights and her support for Israel, has mostly sought out a rapprochement. While Taibbi and Greenwald have largely remained one-man enterprises, Weiss has built something that looks a good deal more like a traditional media pining for the excitement and relevance of a lost, revolutionary, mythic personal past seems likewise to stalk many of the tech moguls who populate Owned and who appear to long for a media full of pliant mythmakers, what tech investor Balaji Srinivasan calls 'a 'full stack narrative' of tech coverage.' Where at one time they might have stayed up all night coding or devising exit strategies for investments, now a figure like Andreessen is 'an up-all-night group-chatter and Signaler,' corresponding with 'everyone from Nate Silver to the economist Tyler Cowen' and doing online battle with journalistic detractors like Taylor Lorenz. Once lauded as the new Carnegies of this current great technological and industrial revolution, tech billionaires seem uniquely piqued by criticism of any kind and especially upset not to be considered the heroes and saviors of humanity itself. In that same interview with Ross Douthat, Andreessen recalls with a fondness verging on nostalgia the love affair that Bill Clinton and Al Gore had with big tech, and Barack Obama's infatuation with tech, entrepreneurship, and venture capitalism, until, in Andreessen's telling, sometime in the early 2010s, 'radicalized' young people began showing up in tech companies' employ, their heads full of wild Harvard notions about equality, fairness, diversity, and the problematic rich men who ran the industry they worked for. There is nothing quite so menacing in this second Trump era as powerful men with a bottomless need for external affirmation. Tech billionaires' forays into media appear to be driven as much by a need for adulation as by a desire to influence politics. One need only spend a few agonizing minutes scrolling through Musk's cringy, embarrassing X timeline to sense that this is a man who would pay every cent of his $300 billion fortune for just one person to laugh organically at one of his bad jokes. There is nothing quite so menacing in this second Trump era as powerful men with a bottomless need for external affirmation. Higgins deliberately and explicitly offers no prescription, no pat and upbeat concluding chapter full of chipper solutions. He's right not to. The 'loudest voices' of new media are loud indeed, but the fortunes in the tech world are even vaster and louder, and it is hard to imagine a way to argue or engineer our way beyond them. If there is to be a way out of this morass of ugly grievance and misdirected rage, then it may simply be that the combination of enormous ambition and desperate need for validation will burn fuel like a rocket and then burn out like one. It is an increasingly common observation that, after more than eight years of crying that Trump is not normal, the resigned attitude of much of the country and the lackadaisical response of Democratic Party leadership to Trump's return suggest that, on the contrary, he and his political tendency have become if not normal then, at least, expected. Perhaps that is a form of hope against hope as well. The loudest voices of contrarian dissent have become what they hate the most: mainstream.
New York Times
28-02-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Your Questions Answered, and a Big Announcement
This week, your beloved 'Matter of Opinion' hosts gather for the last time to respond to listener feedback, reflect on the state of American politics and look ahead to a new show. If you're curious about how Carlos prepares for an episode or how the history books will remember Trump or what's next for this feed, this is the episode for you. (A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)
New York Times
21-02-2025
- General
- New York Times
What Role Should Religion Play in Our Lives?
How many times has your soul been saved? Probably not as many times as Michelle Cottle's. On this episode of Matter of Opinion, Michelle Cottle, Carlos Lozada and Ross Douthat discuss Ross's new book, 'Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious,' and explore the role religion should play in our lives and society. (A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication in the audio player above.)
Japan Times
19-02-2025
- Business
- Japan Times
Does humanity have a future in the virtual and AI age?
Last month, I interviewed Marc Andreessen, the venture capitalist and leading figure of the nascent tech right, for the "Matter of Opinion' podcast; And soon after, I interviewed Steve Bannon, the vintage MAGA populist. Both conversations contain enough material for several newsletters, but both are especially useful for illustrating a point I pressed in a recent column: that there is a surface unity in U.S. President Donald Trump's coalition on the issues of this executive-order-dominated moment, from anti-wokeness to deportations to reshaping the administrative state, but profound philosophical tensions underneath. And the tech-populist tension is potentially one of the deepest, with implications that extend far beyond one presidential administration. To Andreessen, joining with Trumpism and the right is an opportunity for Silicon Valley to slip free of both the ideological shackles imposed by woke progressivism and, more important, the regulatory shackles that the Biden administration wanted to impose on rapidly advancing frontier technologies, artificial intelligence above all. To Bannon, the idea of Silicon Valley unbound is, first, a variation on the kind of neoliberal globalism that Trump campaigned against in 2016, and second, a potentially dystopian path to a post-human future, where the elite aspires to a cyborg existence and machine intelligence makes ordinary human beings increasingly obsolete.
New York Times
14-02-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Don't Be Fooled, ‘Trump Is a Weak President'
How much is President Trump testing the Constitution? And what are the other branches of government doing about it? This week on 'Matter of Opinion,' David French and Jamelle Bouie join Carlos Lozada and Michelle Cottle to discuss how the courts and Congress could respond to Trump's latest actions and whether the Constitution is strong enough to withstand the challenges. Below is a transcript of an episode of 'Matter of Opinion' that has been condensed and edited for clarity. We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player below or on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts. Carlos Lozada: David and Jamelle, I'm especially excited that you're here with me and with Michelle today because I want to know what you think about a term that has been everywhere this week. 'Constitutional crisis' is in the air in our politics. Do you remember how in the first Trump term, every week was infrastructure week? I'm going to dub this our first official constitutional crisis week. Are we in a constitutional crisis? What are the opposing visions at play? And is this 230-plus-year-old piece of parchment up to the challenge? Does that sound like a plan? Michelle Cottle: So good. Jamelle Bouie: Yes. David French: Love it. Lozada: So first, the scope of the problem here. David, you recently wrote that President Trump is launching a constitutional revolution and that defenders of the Constitution are facing a 'legal Hydra.' So tell us about the heads of the Hydra. What are the different elements of this revolution in a practical sense? French: One thing that people have been talking about is this 'shock and awe' moment at the start of the Trump administration. It can feel overwhelming because there's so many different things coming in at the same time. From birthright citizenship, to aid cutoffs, to ending D.E.I. programs. It's extremely difficult for one person to keep up with all of these different elements, much less formulate informed opinions about each different piece of it. Each different piece of it is being litigated, but I think it's a mistake to focus on all of the different pieces, as important as each individual element might be, to understand the core of what's happening. That's why I use the term Hydra. You have one body but many heads. The one body is this Trump move to radically remake the presidency in the constitutional order. To place the presidency at the unquestioned head of the constitutional order with the other branches decisively subordinate to it. All of these different heads are advancing different aspects of a very similar underlying legal idea. In this arena, say, citizenship or immigration, I'm asserting total control. In this arena, whether it's about diversity, equity, inclusion, or something else, I'm exerting total control. Area after area after area of the federal government, he's trying to exert total control. And that's the common thread that runs through it all. Lozada: Jamelle, you wrote that calling this a constitutional crisis actually understates the magnitude of what is going on. So to you, what is the nature of the crisis? Bouie: I'd say the nature of the crisis, along the lines of what David is describing, is an attempt to kind of unbound the presidency from the Constitution. I don't think this is so much an attempt to remake the system and make the president the unquestioned head of a still recognizable constitutional system. I think this is an attempt to unbound the presidency entirely. For me, the key thing happening here is the administration's insistence that it can simply freeze whatever spending Congress authorizes and appropriates, which cuts directly against Congress's explicit power over the purse. It represents an unusual vision of what the presidency is, as something akin to a sovereign. And sovereignty in the political theory sense is that the sovereign is the entity that has the full and total authority over the polity. In the American system, sovereignty belongs with the people. But what Trump seems to really be asserting is that he is actually, in the presidency, sovereign over the entire government. That's simply something that cannot exist within the Constitution. The Constitution is explicitly anti-that. And so establishing that, to my mind, means that you're establishing something that is no longer constitutional government, whatever we're going to call it. Cottle: Building off what Jamelle is talking about, one of the things that I find most unsettling but not terribly surprising is the way that the Congress, led by Republicans in both chambers, has basically rolled over for this. I find this particularly rich with someone like Senator Mike Lee of Utah, who, in the run up to the 2016 election, was on an Article I crusade. He wanted to take back Congress's power of the purse. And he's a smart guy. He comes from a family where his dad argued cases before the Supreme Court. He knows this stuff, and yet now he's pushing legislation to repeal the Impoundment Act so that the president can do whatever he wants with what Congress has appropriated. It's a complete 180, and he is not the only fella out there pulling this stunt. Suddenly his team's in charge and he's willing to forgive everything as long as he thinks it's going to benefit the Republican Party. I am completely disappointed in what is happening. And yet this is sort of what we saw in the first administration as well. Lozada: The abdication of Congress's role is, I agree, really remarkable. Congress appropriates the money. The executive is bound to spend it. But it's not just Senator Lee. The Speaker of the House said this week that there's a presupposition in America that the commander in chief will be a good steward of taxpayer dollars. Period. He agrees 'wholeheartedly' with the notion that Trump can unilaterally make these decisions on spending. When you have a 'constitutional crisis,' it's the President trying to push something through in the face of opposition with a recalcitrant Congress. Here he has congressional majorities — not huge, but he has them — and he could conceivably try to make some of these changes through legislation. But he's not even trying to do that. French: That's exactly right. He's not doing it through legislation. What's so difficult about this is that he's busting through constitutional doctrines. Core members of this team, like Russell Vought, have been out there saying essentially that a couple hundred years of precedents have to be swept away. JD Vance, for a long time, has openly said presidents can defy the Supreme Court. And Trump's breaking through this for the equivalent of a bag of fake magic beans. All of this power that he's trying to exert through executive orders, the next president will possess that same power and can immediately eradicate executive order after executive order. Now it is very hard to unwind some things. For example, if Trump unwinds U.S.A.I.D. completely, unilaterally spooling that back up again would be hard. But you begin to see how that Trump vision is not necessarily a vision of permanent policy change, because he's advancing a lot of vaporware. If you're looking at the hierarchy of federal laws, executive orders are among the least consequential in that hierarchy, well below statutes, well below regulatory reform. He's blitzing through the constitutional order for the sake of this vaporware. Let's think practically. If he succeeds in asserting and gaining and grabbing this much power, the next president can be the next bull in the china shop. Are we going to be constantly unwinding and rebuilding agencies? Are we going to be constantly legislating by proclamation and then unlegislating by reverse proclamation? This is not how you run a country. It's creating not just power for Trump in the short term. It's creating inherent instability in our system over the long term. Cottle: Jamelle, I want your take on this, because my strong sense is that there have been people in Trump world — for instance Bill Barr during the first administration wanted a very strong executive — who think in terms of theory. But my sense is that Trump likes instability if it serves what is his only goal, which is to maximize his personal power. He doesn't think in terms of what this means for the Constitution or what this means for the next president. His only goal is to amass as much power so he can do whatever he wants to do, and if that seems to work in the short term for some of his people, that's great, but that's not what he's worried about. Bouie: Yeah, I think that's a fair view of Trump's perspective. I would note when I'm feeling dark about all of this, I think maybe there's a reason they're acting like there's no one coming after them. [David laughs.] This reliance on perceived executive authority — I'm glad David made the point that executive orders exist at the low point of the hierarchy for things that have legal force. One of my gripes with a lot of the reporting around the president's executive orders is that they're talked about as if they are royal decrees, and they're not talked about recognizing the limited force that they have. But that's an aside. The main point I want to make is that Trump is a weak president. He was in his first term and he is in this term. Why is he not going through Congress? Because Trump does not possess the actual skills and abilities necessary to broker any kind of congressional deal or compromise, even with members of his own party. There's a very famous book, Presidential Power and the Modern President, by a very famous political scientist, Richard Neustadt. The point he makes is that the president's power is, in a lot of ways, simply a power to persuade, a power to cajole. Precisely because the president isn't like the general of the entire federal government. The president is like one constitutional actor among many and has a limited sphere of authority. But Trump has never been good at this. I always like to note that there is exactly one major piece of legislation that came out of the Trump administration's first time. It was a big tax cut that was mostly negotiated by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell. Trump signed the bill and that was it. So when it comes to something like this Department of Governmental Efficiency, a stronger president might say: I want Elon Musk to do a total reorganization of the executive branch so I'm going to have him make recommendations and then I'm going to go to Congress and say, these are our recommendations. I'd like you to turn this into law. At that point the White House would work with congressional majorities to try to put together legislation that could get through both chambers and pass. That is what a normal and competent president would do. And that's significant because if you do it that way, it's a lasting and effectively permanent change. But because Trump doesn't have these skills and because he's surrounded by people who are, frankly, high on their own supply like Tony Montana at the end of Scarface, in their vision, can simply assert this power and steamroll over everyone who says that they can't do it. This works for as long as other political actors — and I include judges in that — are cowed by the notion that this represents the undivided will of the people. But that's a very tenuous thing on which to rest any kind of assertion of power, in part because the undivided will of the people is not a thing that exists. It's a mystical thing that you make up to make a political point, but it doesn't exist in a practical sense. Cottle: David, taking a step back from blaming Trump for being a weak president, for years now, predating Trump, people have been complaining that Congress has been abdicating its responsibility for all kinds of things. In part because they don't want to be blamed for tough decisions on, say, foreign affairs or immigration. So they have happily handed over a lot of their responsibility to the president, well before Trump. It's not just that Trump is a weak president. It's that Congress hasn't wanted to take responsibility for legislating in a really long time. I remember complaining at the beginning of the Biden administration that they were doing a lot of executive orders because there was no way they were going to get anything through Congress on certain issues. So in addition to blaming Trump, I'd like to just take a step back and slap Congress again for putting us in a position where it's what people have come to expect. French: Oh, Congress deserves so much blame here. Congress deserves blame, but also Congress is rationally responding to incentives. And by rationally responding to incentives, they're placing a lot of our constitutional order in jeopardy. Here's what I mean. We live in a nation right now where the congressional districts are heavily, heavily gerrymandered. And through the voluntary ideological sorting that we're undergoing, we're living in very gerrymandered America. We're living in a reality where a very low percentage of members of Congress really have to worry about the opposing party. So what do they have to worry about? They have to worry about the base's political checklist. Essentially an ideological and political purity test is what they undergo every two years in the House and every six years in the Senate. In that circumstance, compromise becomes fatal to your political career. In the words of Madison, ambition must be made to check ambition, and that seems to be not working because how you become powerful, how you become somebody in the world of Congress now isn't through legislation and governance. It's by becoming a kind of pop culture political figure. The ambition is oriented away from governance and more toward what my friend Jonah Goldberg calls the 'parliament of pundits.' It's more toward punditry. That culture in Congress is eviscerating and disrupting the Madisonian order. If you talked to the founders and you said, wait a minute, I can see some parts of the 1787 Constitution that really empower the president a lot. And the anti-Federalists would point to things like pardon power. Look at how powerful that is. His commander in chief authority, that's huge. What can we do about that? And the Federalists would say: Look, Congress is the check. It's Article I. It can impeach him. But if that is the prime check on the president and it becomes subordinate to the president, that is a structural problem. It's a structural problem created by our modern moment and by our culture. Remember that former G.O.P. congressman, Madison Cawthorne? Cottle: [Laughs.] How can we forget? French: How can we forget Madison Cawthorne? Well, a lot of folks made fun of him when he said: I'm hiring more communications people than policy people. And I thought when I saw that — Lozada: He understood. French: He knew the assignment! That is how you become somebody in Congress now. It's not through governance. It's through comms. It's by standing strong, whatever that means, even if it has nothing to do with legislation. Bouie: I want to build on what David said there. When the Federalists -— I don't like the Federalist/anti-Federalist language because it's just a big propaganda coup for the Federalists. The anti-Federalists didn't call themselves anti-Federalists — but for the sake of brevity, when the Federalists would respond to anti-Federalists about, say, the President's commander in chief power, they explicitly said — Madison said this and Hamilton said this — this was the line: 'the purse and the sword.' The executive has the sword. Congress has the purse, and so because Congress has the purse, you don't have to worry too much about it. Ultimately Congress won't requisition an army. They can just not do it and that solves the problem. And so to the question of are we living in a constitutional crisis, you can have a workable system of separated institutions and shared powers without impeachment. It's not great. It would be better if there was some direct mechanism of executive accountability that worked. But impeachment barely worked anyway before Trump. It doesn't work now, but you can still muddle along. If Congress is just going to say: Hey, looks like our spending decisions are just advisory, they are just sort of recommendations and you don't have to follow them. Then effectively there really is no executive check anymore. Effectively, the executive branch does have legislative power. Montesquieu would have described it as despotism, a word I like because it sounds sinister and that's what it is. Cottle: David is going to tell us the courts are going to save us. French: I'm not going to tell you the courts are going to save us — Cottle: David! What?! French: Because the courts cannot save us. Lozada: Well, David, I'll quote you. You said, 'The Supreme Court has rejected MAGA arguments again and again and again.' French: Yes. But — Lozada: So why won't they save us now? French: Well, that is quite true. It is a fact that when Trump went to the Supreme Court, he was usually losing. And it is also true that during his first term, he complied with court rulings and yielded to the Supreme Court. What's interesting, though, is that he wasn't yielding at the very end. If we remember, at the very end, he was blowing through everything in his attempt to stay in power. So when I say that the courts can't save us, I'm not saying the courts don't have an indispensable role to play here. We've already seen an avalanche of injunctions being handed down, but at the end of the day, that's going to depend on voluntary compliance from the executive branch. Cottle: Which JD Vance has said we don't need, right? French: We're having some district court rulings and then instead of that normal language of: Oh, this is bad. This is wrong. We're going to appeal immediately. We're beginning to see: They have no right to do this. They have no right to direct the executive branch. You have JD Vance tweeting, 'If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the Attorney General on how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal. Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.' And the weird thing is, even his examples are flawed. We've just been through a war on terror where the courts had lots to say about how the military conducted its operations. For example, regarding military tribunals and things like that when we're talking about prosecuting terrorists. So when he says judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power, who defines the legitimacy of that power? Judges define the legitimacy of that power. This is Constitution 101. For example, no less a relevant person on the authority of the judiciary, Brett Kavanaugh once said at a speech at Notre Dame, a critical aspect of Marbury versus Madison that is often overlooked is that 'the court not only has the power of judicial review of legislation, it also has the power to reject the president's interpretation of the Constitution.' That is fundamental to our separation of powers, that's fundamental to the whole concept of judicial review, and that is where they're already threatening to go in response to district court judgments. So will they maintain that kind of resistance up through the courts of appeal and the Supreme Court? That remains to be seen. That's why I say courts can't save us. I think courts will step up, by and large, as they are doing, and do their duty, but the system still requires compliance. Cottle: So it sounds like that's when we hit an indisputable constitutional crisis. If the president just refuses to abide by what the courts have ruled. French: You remember that old Homeland Security color coded system? What was it? Yellow, orange, red? I would say yellow is defying a temporary district court order. Orange is you're defying either a final order of a district court or a court of appeals. Red is when they defy the Supreme Court. That's a red flashing alarm, but it's going to be a graduated process. Bouie: I keep on saying I want to put a finer point on stuff David says, and I do. Part of what the administration is arguing, what people like Vance are arguing, the underlying premise is that the U.S. has a system of extremely strict separation of powers. Such that each branch can have no interference from the other branch, but that's not really the case. It's not the case structurally. Who confirms presidential appointees? The Senate does. The Senate is exercising a kind of executive power when it's approving the president's appointees to his cabinet and to other Senate confirmable agencies. Who structures the Supreme Court? The Constitution only says that there shall be a Supreme Court and gives us some guidance on what its original jurisdiction is, what its appellate jurisdiction might be, but like the actual structuring comes by way of Congress. Congress decides, you know, how many justices there are, whether the court has clerks, whether it sits in a certain place. All these things about the court are determined by Congress. So this is Congress exercising some of the judicial power. You see this throughout. Each branch, although separated, has its competency, that doesn't mean that they are completely untouched by other branches. In fact, when you think theoretically about separation of powers, which emerged as a doctrine in the 18th century, around how one prevents absolutist government, separation of powers necessarily includes some method of accountability for each branch. Branches cannot simply exist untouched by other branches. The administration's claim and JD Vance's claim that separation of powers means a district court judge can't alter or tie down the president's legitimate authority, theoretically, it just doesn't work. Of course they can, or else it wouldn't actually be a system of separated powers. But I wanted to add a quick thing in the constitutional crisis point, and that is I find myself not being thrilled about framing a constitutional crisis as a discreet thing that happens once you trip a set of wires. I think It might be useful to think of constitutional crises as something akin to sicknesses or infections in a body. An infection can be mild, it can be acute. An infection can leave you just feeling miserable, it can bring you to the point of death. It progresses in stages, but whether it's late stage or early stage, it remains the case that you are ill. And I would say that the American constitutional system is ill and has been ill for some time. What we're in now is the acute portion of that illness. And it wasn't foreordained. It didn't have to unfold this way. But because steps were not taken to improve the health of the patient prior, now we're at a point where the patient is in critical condition. Cottle: We need massive antibiotics. Lozada: If we don't necessarily want to live with a continued four-year constitutional crisis every week, then what needs to happen now? What are the remedies? Jamelle, you wrote that, 'The president's opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was and that whatever comes next will have to be a fundamental rethinking of the system.' What kind of rethinking do you have in mind? Bouie: If there's one original error or problem that was overlooked in the construction of the constitutional system as it exists, it's that the American constitutional system was designed at a point where the modern political party, the mass political parties as we understand them, didn't exist. We take for granted these days that checks and balances don't really work as well as they should because if the president's party controls both Congress and the White House, they're not going to want to restrain the president too much. But that runs explicitly counter to what the framers [of the Constitution] thought they were doing. They figured people would be so jealous of their offices and the authority that comes from them that they would restrain any encroachments from the executive and the judiciary and vice versa because of the power of the office. But partisanship circumvents that and creates a link between people across branches such that I, as a legislator, have an interest in the president succeeding. I, even as a judge, maybe share the ideological perspective of the legislature, or of the president and have an interest in making sure everyone succeeds. It short circuits checks and balances. I don't have a blueprint here, but I think one of the major things that Americans need to think about is: How do you structure a representative government with political parties in mind, recognizing what they do, how they operate, and how they make Madisonian style checks and balances unstable? Lozada: David, does that line up with how you see things? French: I think Jamelle's diagnosis is dead on. We have checks and balances that were not designed for party primacy. They are not designed for a world in which Mike Johnson, for example, could look at two career paths. One that says, I'm going to magnify the power and majesty of the office of Speaker of the House by asserting independent authority. Or, I'm going to say sir, yes, sir, as loudly as I possibly can to Donald Trump. And that's my fork in the road. That's my branch. Madison would have said: Well, the obvious choice here is he's going to choose to magnify his own power and authority. But Mike Johnson knows that if he doesn't say 'sir, yes, sir' to Trump, no matter the power and majesty he possesses right now as Speaker of the House, it's going to be over the instant he asserts his independence. He will be turned on by his own colleagues like he's a wounded member of the pack. I think Jamelle's diagnosis is absolutely true. And I think this is a broadly held diagnosis for people who are thinking intentionally about the Constitution across a big part of the American political spectrum. Where we go from here is a question mark. I have some discreet ideas about things that could be done, but we're at this moment where I do think we actually need constitutional reform. I think constitutional reform, in some ways, might be more urgent now than it's been in a very long time, and it's at the very moment where the high bar that we have put over constitutional reform is probably higher than it's been in a hundred years. And so, at the very moment where we need reform, the barrier to that reform is higher than it's been in a very long time. Cottle: Well, I think this is what makes people disheartened: the rise of political parties. George Washington warned about this. French: Oh, yeah. Cottle: John Adams, Alexander Hamilton. This is not a new concern, but especially these days when we have such a polarized, political-party-driven system, and the very people who we would rely on to do this are the ones who the system has been supporting. So you're basically asking people to risk their own power in order to put the public good and the constitutional health above it. And I'm not sure anybody thinks that is a possibility in the current situation, which I think is why people are cynical and tuned out. Lozada: David, setting aside the high bar, setting aside that the last moment when you want to engage in serious constitutional reform is when the country is precisely so polarized. When you need it most is when you can least trust the outcome. Putting that aside, what reforms do you have in mind? French: I've got a few in mind but I'm not saying this is my four-point plan to solve America's constitutional issues. The bottom line is, if the American people want a more despotic president, and if do unto others five times worse than they've done unto you becomes our core political ethos, the things that I'm proposing are just fingers in the dike. So, a few things. One thing I would like to see is a constitutional amendment to make it easier to amend the Constitution. Cottle: I love that. French: Not where it's just a majority vote and the Constitution's amended, but make it easier to amend the Constitution. Give people more of a sense that the structure of their government, if you achieve a reasonable consensus, is possible. So another thing that I would also say is expand the House by a lot, which would have a couple of knock on effects. Effect number one: it would really begin to dilute the power of the gerrymander. As it is right now, if you took a look at the state of Tennessee with our number of congressional districts, you can gerrymander a congressional delegation to where a 60-40 state — 60 percent red 40 percent blue — becomes essentially 80-20 in its representation, which has an extreme, polarizing, destabilizing effect. And then another one is: take the pardon power out of the hands of the president. Don't remove pardon power entirely, but take it out of the sole hands of the president. I think we're just now beginning to see how influential that power can be to the very existence and health of the rule of law. This is something that Jamelle and I might be the only people in the last decade who've quoted the same anti-Federalist guy who calls himself an Old Whig. That was his pseudonym. And he specifically centered around the pardon power in a prescient way. And then another thing is we need to really sharpen the president's commander in chief power. The vagueness of it in the Constitution combined with the abdication of Congress to the president has meant that not only does has the president exercise unilateral authority to essentially declare and prosecute wars over the last many decades, the vagueness of that authority may have critical domestic implications given there's a legal argument being made that the influx of illegal immigrants is an invasion. And what is an invasion but an act of war? And what does that do? Unlock commander in chief powers. So those are just a few things. But if America is so fused in this negative polarization, you can have reform after reform and we're still going to be dealing with that. Bouie: Last month I was at Williams College, teaching a class on the constitutional amendment. And David's amendments are the ones that when students asked me how I thought we should amend the Constitution are mine as well. I'd throw in maybe writing into the Constitution explicitly that the president can be criminally liable for actions taken in office just to repudiate Trump v. U.S. But I think that's a good, solid nonpartisan set of things to deal with the structure of the presidency in particular given the events of the last ten years, and certainly the last few decades. I want to say though, and this is maybe a little counterintuitive, that I think we have a notion that broad constitutional change can only come through a kind of bipartisan, nonpartisan consensus. But when you look at the moments of constitutional or constitutional-ish change in the United States, those are partisan projects. For instance, Reconstruction was a partisan project of the Republican Party and a particular faction within it. And I would like to suggest that when thinking about Constitutional reform in the future, I don't think we should shy away from the notion that this may have to be a partisan project. That it has to be a project argued by a particular party in election cycle after election cycle, to build a political majority to do it on a partisan basis. To me, that seems like the only way you're going to get to meaningful constitutional reform. By leaning into the fact that we are a partisan and polarized society. Lozada: What's interesting to me about this conversation is how much of it has focused on Congress as opposed to the efforts by President Trump. Just about every modern president, except maybe Jimmy Carter, has tried to expand his authority. I'm looking over here at Arthur Schlesinger's The Imperial Presidency published in 1973. So there are some aspects of this that are normal. All presidents try to interpret the constitutional authority more and more expansively. Trump is an extreme case. He's doing it in that kind of 'Hydra' approach that David mentioned. But David, you also talked about the vagueness of the president's authority. In some ways, that's built into the Constitution. Article I refers to the legislative powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress. But Article II just refers to executive power without clearly defining its limits. So that's part of the eternal fight. The whole debate reminds me of this book called Constitutional Faith by Sanford Levinson. It was published in the late 80s, but I only recently read it. The idea is that we think about the Constitution as this sacred text in our civic religion. That image is supposed to suggest the Constitution serves a unifying and integrating purpose, that it brings us together like a faith. But of course — and this is the point the book makes — if you look at the world's major religions, you see how their sacred texts are a source of enormous and constant dispute, a source of fragmentation as much as integration. How do we interpret the meaning of the sacred texts, who gets to interpret the meaning? Constitutions, like our sacred religious texts, can bring us together, but they can prompt our biggest fights. And I think that's part of what the Trump administration is doing. In some cases, fighting over interpretation. In some cases, ignoring the sacred texts altogether. But this feels like a moment of that kind of doctrinal dispute in our secular, civic religion. And I think that's one of the outcomes of the Trump era, writ large, that is forcing us to look at basic bedrock principles, even if our fixes can sometimes be incremental. French: I think we're in a period of doctrinal dispute among what you might call the MAGA intellectuals and doctrinal indifference slash disregard from Trump. So he doesn't care about doctrine at all. This whole conversation about constitutional structure for [Trump] is like the sound of the teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. It's 'wah, wah, wah, wah.' That's all this is to him. But, for the people who actually have a vision, like a Russell Vought, a JD Vance, others, Trump is the vessel through which they pour their vision. And this is one of the appeals of Trumpism. It's not just pure pro-Trump. It is also now pro-Trump plus anyone anti system, so long as they're willing to bend the knee to Trump. That's how you get your Tulsi Gabbard and your RFK Jr. pulled into this MAGA coalition. And I think one of the keys about Trump is to realize the guy isn't unpredictable. He's manipulable. And they have figured out how to pull some of these strings. Lozada: Well I think we can stop there for this first installment of many constitutional crisis episodes. David, Jamelle, thank you so much for joining us this week. I really appreciate it. Cottle: Please come back. French: Thanks for having us. Bouie: Yep, our pleasure.
