100 Years of 100 Things: Presidential Power

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. If you're off for work for this President's Day, I hope you're enjoying your three-day weekend. If you're working the holiday, thank you for your service. If you're home with the kids who are off from school all week, well, good luck. For this President's Day, we begin with the latest episode of our series, 100 Years of 100 Things.

If you're new to the show, we are observing WNYC's 100 years as a not-for-profit radio station with a history series exploring 100 years of 100 different things. We're up to thing number 70 today. 100 years of presidential power. Obviously, the news hook is the aggressive way that President Trump is wielding or trying to wield executive power since his inauguration last month. He's not shy about declaring it.

On Saturday, for example, he posted a version of a line usually attributed to Napoleon, though nobody seems to really know if that's where it originated. Trump wrote, "He who saves his country does not violate any law." The Republican Congress seems to be fine with that. For some federal courts, however, it's a different story. Reading from a list of court orders so far as published by Forbes, we have these, for example, District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled Trump plainly violated the law by firing the government ethics watchdog Hampton Dellinger.

A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to temporarily lift a freeze on foreign aid, noting that the officials, "Have not offered any explanation for why a blanket suspension of all congressionally appropriated foreign aid was a rational precursor to reviewing programs." Baltimore-based Judge Brendan Hurson blocked Trump's directives restricting transgender health care and gender-affirming care for people under age 19. With Judge Hurson saying at a hearing that Trump's restrictions on the medical treatments, "Seems to deny that this population even exists."

Trump's executive order rescinding birthright citizenship for people born in the US to parents who aren't citizens or permanent residents was blocked for a fourth time in court. Those examples from Forbes and there are others as well, as and as we've discussed on this show. Vice President Vance in a tweet, seem to be sending out a trial balloon on the idea that Trump might even defy court orders, though so far Trump himself says he won't. You get the idea that the limits of presidential power are being tested and evaluated right now, perhaps like never before.

Well, it's the never-before part that we'll ask about in this episode of 100 Years of 100 Things with our special guest, historian Douglas Brinkley. Professor Brinkley teaches history at Rice University. He's a CNN presidential historian and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He has written many books, just a few of which are The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America, Rightful Heritage: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Land of America, Wheels for the World, Henry Ford, His Company and A Century of Progres, the Reagan Diaries Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, the book Cronkite, and The Unfinished Presidency Jimmy Carter's Journey beyond the White House.

Professor Brinkley, I know there are many things you could be doing on this President's day, thanks for spending some of it with us and welcome back to WNYC.

Douglas Brinkley: Well, it's a privilege to be on back with you.

Brian Lehrer: I guess we should start more than 100 years ago, in fact with President George Washington and other founders who wanted to avoid establishing a monarchy like they were rebelling against from Britain. In brief, how did they originally design the powers of a US President and the limits there?

Douglas Brinkley: It's very important to know that there is no exception or creation of executive power in the US Constitution, meaning it's really unconstitutional if you're going to look at it honestly to do executive orders. However, George Washington did one and that was the Neutrality act to keep the United States out of foreign wars. After that, president might do one for some very special project. Then came Abraham Lincoln with the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War. Sometimes that's referred to as executive order number one.

Whatever it did, it influenced Theodore Roosevelt to see that as an opening when he was stymied by Congress and the senate. From 1901 to 1909, Theodore Roosevelt started regularly using executive orders with the idea if Lincoln did it to free the slaves, I can use an executive order. Fill in the blank I will pick to save the Grand Canyon which the Senate wanted to mine for a zinc [unintelligible 00:05:34] copper and wrote they did not want the Grand Canyon as a national park.

Theodore Roosevelt used an executive order to save it and then that went to the courts and the Grand Canyon just kept going through courts. In the end, Theodore Roosevelt won that and it allows presidents to create public lands wherever they feel like it or can do without going to Congress. Maybe some of those later become a national park. In 1907, while Roosevelt's presence the official numbering by the State Department of EOs executive orders under Theodore Roosevelt.

Now we have numbered ones. By the time he got to his fifth cousin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, FDR was doing 3,000 executive orders. Since then, presidents do it more and more. Many executive orders, it depends how you look at the world or politics. Most of FDR's executive orders are admirable. Creating the Manhattan Project was an executive order for atomic power, but he also signed an executive order to do Japanese intern camps.

John F. Kennedy did the Peace Corps with an executive order. We can go on and on. Desegregation of armed forces by Truman an executive order. What's unusual about our time right now there used to be a tradition on executive orders, you don't do them on day one. Once you're president, you're supposed to use that as a healing day, unite the country, do a national prayer service and other type of functions. Trump's invented day one. Biden kind of started it. President Biden did, I believe, 19 on his first term. After Biden--

Brian Lehrer: Most mostly to reverse Trump, right?

Douglas Brinkley: Well, to reverse Trump. Day one you had zero from Barack Obama, zero from George W. Bush, zero from-- pick Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan. Our country doesn't do these day-one, executive orders, and certainly not the onslaught that we saw President Trump doing. Part of that might be that we're living in the age of widespread information, the fast time clock, everything's happening every second and the need to cram.

I think it's more to the point of a shock and awe strategy that you bring Elon Musk in. People are just getting used to the fact you won and you just tear through the bureaucracy of Washington DC and try to undermine institutions by signing all of these executive orders, that many will be challenged in the court and Trump will lose and others will make it through.

Brian Lehrer: Well, you've just given us a great 250-year romp of sort of an executive summary of the history. I want to go back and look at a few presidents in a few eras in a little more detail. Then come back to Trump in a little more detail. In the 18th century, the two presidents I see most often cited as expanding the powers of the office are of course, Lincoln, who you mentioned, but also Andrew Jackson. Jackson sometimes gets compared to Trump for his using his populist appeal to that end. Do you think there's a comparison to be made or any precedents that are relevant today that Andrew Jackson, the populist president, set in motion in the 1830s.

Douglas Brinkley: I do. In some ways, they're very different profile of an individual. Andrew Jackson his leadership came out of the military. He's the famous general at the Battle of New Orleans at the end of the War of 1812, worked with the Cherokee and Seminole wars. Considered the top original American military hero. Donald Trump had bone spurs and avoided service in the Vietnam War. From their military side there's nothing in common. Both started appealing both to what we call a populist base.

Saying that in Jackson's case, the original aristocrats who created the US Constitution were snobs and elites and they didn't take what the working people or backwoods people of Tennessee needed. He ran an insurgency to take on the banks, to take on the bureaucracy, and to open up so more people could vote. You have an Andrew Jackson, a figure that Trump admires. In fact, his first term, he went to the Hermitage in Nashville, Tennessee early in his first term and tried to make it an Andrew Jackson presidency. He was trying to uplift Jackson.

Well, as soon as he did that, Jackson sunk in presidential polls because we have gone through relooking at history and the extermination of native people, a genocide of indigenous people on the Trail of Tears, in particular, started making scholars disregard some of Jackson's achievements. He started tumbling down in the polls. This time around, Trump has put in a large portrait of Ronald Reagan into his quarters. He's kind of leaning into the being Reagan.

Early executive order, he changed Mount Denali, or Denali in Alaska back to its old name of Mount McKinley. Named after William McKinley, who famously was the tariff president, and Senator Lisa Murkowski now is suing to get the name returned to Denali.

Brian Lehrer: Which of course it was before anybody called it Mount McKinley. By the way, President McKinley never visited that mountain in his lifetime, as I understand it.

Douglas Brinkley: Exactly. There's no reason for it except that he started to understand tariffs and somebody told him about McKinley. He's done that in anything that he-- it's a sort of in a kindred spirit of changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. Donald Trump does not have a sense of presidential history. He has heroes or people he admires, and they've tended to be ardent military types. George C. Patton and Douglas MacArthur are probably more to his liking or as he said, people that he most admires more than presidents.

He has like to compare himself to Abraham Lincoln or at least say, "Boy, Lincoln was great. Maybe I'm up there, maybe I'm as good as Lincoln." Barack Obama saw his presidency as kind of a torch to be handed to the next person in a relay race and that it was all part of the chain of building of the United States. Donald Trump is imagining himself getting on Mount Rushmore. Why aren't I carved on that mountain? It's natural that somebody thinking like that with starting to learn a little bit about American history might gravitate to some of the policies he's doing now.

I think he just discovered the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 written by John Quincy Adams. In Trump's interpretation of it is an old interpretation. We own the Western Hemisphere and nobody's allowed to militarize this hemisphere. Hence China has some operations off of the Panama Canal. He thinks that that's infringement, thinks we're getting ripped off by Panama and he's threatening to undo it. With the Monroe Doctrine wind at his back, he's carving out a world where he sees spheres of influence, big power, UN doesn't matter. What matters is Russia, China, United States with Britain and Japan, and perhaps a Europe if they can get their act together.

Brian Lehrer: We've discussed Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln a little bit from the 1800s. As we enter the official 100-year time frame for this segment, FDR tried in various ways to expand the power of the presidency, sometimes successfully, sometimes not. I was reading on a Harvard history website about Roosevelt giving himself the power to censor mail.

Then launching the internment of Japanese Americans, which we all know happened, but who he identified by cracking open previously confidential census information. Those things sound a little like the issue in play right now about Trump's people looking at taxpayer information and the Treasury Department systems and things like that. How pivotal do you think FDR is to this history?

Douglas Brinkley: Well, very pivotal. He's the one. Keep in mind, in 1932, when FDR won, we were in the middle of the Great Depression and Herbert Hoover's presidency was just terrible. FDR won 42 out of 48 states. 42 out of 48. That is nothing like a mandate that Donald Trump got. This was really a squeaker election. In Congress, the Democrats are missing three seats. That's it. It's enough of a mandate in Trump's mind to seize power with using executive privilege and trying to-- he's following Trump the Supreme Court decision of immunity.

He also has told people he believes-- it almost can be tattooed onto Donald Trump's arm. Richard Nixon's line to David Frost, "It can't be illegal if the President does it." He really feels he has a very wide latitude. The trick words you're going to hear coming up is national security. He's going to say, "I can do this because of national security." It's like what Lincoln did in the Civil War that we had. It's why the border issue for Trump, he's going to continue to market it as it's almost a war at the border, as a way to enhance his own power.

I don't want people to think our, our times are like FDR's times. Back then you had like, I can't even tell you how much, 7,000 banks closing, nearly 25% unemployment rate. We were in a disastrous place. Donald Trump inherited a pretty good America. Certainly, our economy is doing as well, if not better than anybody else in the world. A lot of the danger of the moment that Trump's inflexing executive muscle about is really conservative ideology about cut government and help corporations. That's been in the playbook for the American right for a long time.

Brian Lehrer: Glorify certain kinds of identity while diminishing others, right?

Douglas Brinkley: Right. We always have a roller coaster. Used to be-- even Irish people treated them like dirt when they came to America. We've had alien and sedition acts and deportation acts. One executive order Dwight Eisenhower did was Operation Wetback, where he rounded up tens of thousands of agricultural workers that weren't here legally. They deported them deep into the heart of Mexico to get them out of the country. Donald Trump said, "I love that." Well, many Eisenhower scholars find it one of the lower moments of Eisenhower's presence

Presidents do things, every time's different. They try to meet the moment. I've never seen anything like a Rasputin figure like Elon Musk sitting by a leader. In Rasputin's case, it was with Tsar Nicholas. They're kind of guiding the President on what to do and what he knows. The amount of information he's collecting on people is quite staggering. I think Musk does many incredible things with his innovation and entrepreneurship. Where's the limit that's going to block him from just grabbing everybody's IRS records?

Brian Lehrer: When you say Rasputin, can you give people a little of the history? Because they may, "Oh, Rasputin--" kind of know the name but don't really know the story. What is the comparison that you're making?

Douglas Brinkley: Oh, well, Rasputin was this kind of a mystic, brilliant sage figure in Russia before the Russian Revolution who was with Tsar Nicholas and became really a co-leader of Russia because he had all these insights about tomorrow and the future. Think of him, if you like, as a really dark, psychologist of some kind. He just held more sway, would have a long beard, and dress strange. You go to big dinner in Russia and everybody dressed properly.

It would be like how Musk wears his ball cap and his jacket wherever he goes in the Oval Office. Rasputin would have a whole wardrobe all of himself. People feared him in government and all over the country because he's the one that was constantly in the ear of the Tsar. You see that with Trump there's a danger of having somebody like Musk at your side and giving him free reign.

They may be feeling this is necessary to finally fulfill the trimming of government or to do away with agencies. In Trump's case, there's revenge here or the real feeling that AI Musk understands it and it's the new American concern and so therefore I want him at my side. That story's just going to grow because DOGE and Musk have so much short-term power here right now that people are a little off-kilter about where the next act is going.

Brian Lehrer: Before we leave FDR, he was also the first president to go against George Washington's unwritten rule of two terms and no more. Roosevelt was elected, as I'm sure just about every listener knows, to four terms. Here's a clip of him after that precedent-breaking third election in 1940, seeming to argue the necessity of him staying in office because World War II was already underway in Europe.

George Washington: Even a neutral has a right to take account of facts. Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his mind or to close his conscience.

Brian Lehrer: Briefly, Professor Brinkley, why did Roosevelt run for a third term and how much debate was there actually at the time in terms of one man becoming too powerful?

Douglas Brinkley: Well, I think, once he won the second term in 1936, he tried to pack the Supreme Court. Instead of having nine Supreme Court justices he wanted it to be 15. That 15 never happened, but he went for it. It was the courts that shot him down. His own Democrats, particularly Southern Democrats, stopped Roosevelt from adding those pro New Deal Supreme Court justices who would have greenlit anything he devised. The frustration FDR had by--

Brian Lehrer: In defense of segregation, right?

Douglas Brinkley: In defense of segregation, and they just didn't want Roosevelt to be able to have that much power. The FDR kept list, and he knew which people in the Democratic Party were opposed to him. His own vice president, John Nance Garner, for two terms, didn't do what he could to convince politicians to get this done the Supreme Court. Roosevelt didn't like being flummoxed. He came up with innovative programs of the New Deal and yet an older Supreme Court, because of the justices, the nine started declaring some of these efforts not constitutional.

By 40, nobody thought he would run because nobody had done it. He kind of just nodded people off about it. You can forgive John Nance Garner to think FDR would tell his vice president after loyally serving for eight years, "Okay, go for it. I'm stepping down." Roosevelt liked power too much for that. He knew the world was a tinderbox. He was establishing a relationship overseas with Winston Churchill. The Second World War was going to occur. He simply decided to run again for a third term and did and won. Then it ran for a fourth term in 1944 in the middle of World War II, and then again won.

Anytime a president gets broken, things happen. In this case, a constitutional amendment became law where you can only do two terms. The odds of Donald Trump trying to run a third term It would certainly go to the Supreme Court and the Senate, and it would be such an effort that I find it highly unlikely. However, I would not be surprised to say Donald Trump Jr. runs for president. I'm not suggesting he will, but I'm saying Trump will look for a way to consolidate the Trump Mag movement. It might be JD Vance because he proves himself, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. There'll be whatever Trump wants for that act.

Brian Lehrer: Briefly, was the backlash to Roosevelt's four terms that led to the constitutional amendment barring that, just mostly a partisan thing because Republicans finally got control of the Congress, so they were able to initiate it. There are enough Republican states because you need, what, three-quarters of the states to ratify a constitutional amendment? Or was there a more broad bipartisan feeling like, "Yes, he was a great president, but let's not do that again."

Douglas Brinkley: It was more of the latter because there he was very sick. Remember, he ran in 1944 and won in November, but by April 12, 1945, he had died, only serving months in his fourth term. There's a feeling that at Yalta, in the big moment of the dividing of the bounty of World War II, that Roosevelt was sick, listless, dark circles under his eyes, fatigued. Wasn't the old president of vigor that people come to know?

Meaning he was quite diminished in capacity, much like Joe Biden had been the last couple of years. There was a really recognition that we eventually, after we got a do something about this or some popular person could stay on and not really be up to par and that it wasn't good. It could lead to an autocracy if you allow these presidents to keep going, going, going.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take a few Presidents Day questions and comments in this 100 Years of 100 Things episode number 70. 100 years and more of the rise of presidential power in the context of this President's Day and of President Trump's attempts to exert so much executive authority with historian Douglas Brinkley from Rice University and Vanity Fair and a CNN presidential historian. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, call or text. We'll continue in a minute.

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Brian Lehrer on WNYC, 100 Hundred Years of 100 things. Thing number 70, 100 years of the rise of presidential power with historian Douglas Brinkley. Interesting, Professor Brinkley, we've gotten a number of calls or texts with people who want to either add to or challenge your comparison of Musk with Rasputin. I'm going to take Mike in Weston, Connecticut to represent that group. Mike, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Mike: Brian, big fan. Listen to the show all the time, even when I'm at work or just driving to and from.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. I won't tell your boss.

Mike: I'm my own boss.

Brian Lehrer: Oh, good.

Mike: [laughter] That's working out well for me. Yes, I've never called before. The last time I called a radio show, it was Bob Grant's show and Matt Drudge was on it. That's how long ago that was. Anyway, to get to the point, I'm no historian and I know your guest is. Rasputin is a fascinating person, but I couldn't try to debate anyone about his role in history or anything like that. It occurred to me that someone might want to make the case that Jill Biden, a female version of Rasputin. What do you think?

Brian Lehrer: Jill Biden?

Mike: Yes. Well, okay. By the way, just for quick background, I am not a fan of Trump. Can't stand the guy I voted for Harris. Not trying to get any trouble going or anything like that, but I feel like Joe Biden got a lot of bad advice. Where did that come from? I don't know. Maybe we'll never know. Other people have posited that she might have played undue influence. Of course, she's his wife and everything, so I get that.

Brian Lehrer: Mostly on staying in the--

Mike: Anyway, he stuck around too long.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, stuck around too long. Mike, thank you very much. Briefly, Professor.

Douglas Brinkley: Yes, I get the analogy, it makes sense. I do think that probably the role of first lady of Joe Biden is going to be-- we talked about of why she didn't step up and tell her husband not to run. Why did she try to control and hide his agenda from everybody? In some ways, kind of took over for Joe Biden. It was not up to it. I don't think the caller's off base with that. As far as Rasputin, I was being a little bit, obviously a slightly tongue in cheek, but not much. It's just that Rasputin he thought of himself as a faith healer with all these ways to cure the world. For the imperial family of Nicholas II, he became their everything.

He really led to the final years of the Russian empire and decline Rasputin, because he was puppeteering, controlling Nicholas II. I'm suggesting that there's a danger for Donald Trump with a figure like Musk, who has the skill set he does for the modern world to be allowing the fox into the hen house of all of America's most sacred treasures, documents, private information, classified, declassified. He's roving around on that. That can become a big problem if it doesn't have some kind of barrier or parameter around it.

Brian Lehrer: Back to the President, obviously you've been weaving commentary about Trump into this whole conversation, which I appreciate grounding it in the present as we talk about history because that's of course why we're talking about history. Before we end squarely in the present with Trump, just mention Nixon again, which you did, and that statement that he made that if the president does it, it's not against the law.

Nixon of course got repudiated by the courts and then by Congress with post-Watergate reforms, limiting presidential power, enhancing congressional power. I want to touch on President Obama as he got frustrated by a Republican Congress and he increasingly used executive orders as he declared he would in this clip from January 2014.

Barack Obama: I want to work with Congress this year on proven ways to create jobs like building infrastructure and fixing our broken immigration system. Where Congress isn't acting, I'll act on my own.

Brian Lehrer: Can you talk about Obama and also maybe Biden in terms of executive orders? You mentioned Biden issuing a lot of day-one executive orders, which had not been customary largely to reverse things that Trump had done in his first term that Biden thought were unconscionable. Talk about Obama as the news focuses on how aggressively Trump is using them today. Obama seemed to say flat out there. I know there was coverage of this at the time and people look back on this as saying, "Hey, I'm going to use executive orders to the full extent that I can."

Douglas Brinkley: Yes, Obama's very important in the history of executive orders because once he became president, he decided to push forward on affordable health care, his big signature achievement. He got it through by really a close, close vote to get that passed. No Republicans and all Democratic Affordable Care Act or Obamacare. That created a reaction. Mitch McConnell, Senate leader, said, "We won't do business with Obama after this." That's first summer of Obama's presidency.

That's when the Tea Party movement was formed. There started to becoming Republicans not wanting to be in photo ops with Obama or do business with the Obama administration except on national security issues. Obama said, "I picked up the phone and the pen and I started writing executive orders." He did a lot of them on all sorts of areas of American life. Many are with us today. Some have fallen by the wayside, but it allowed Obama to feel presidential in order to win that second term.

It helped that Operation Neptune Spear in the beginning of Osama bin Laden happened. Obama's team got him and Zach gave him another credential. It made him still see like he wasn't a lame duck or being held in a headlock. The Senate and Congress allowed him to flourish as a successful two-term president, but he is one that recognized the innate power of following the president of, say, FDR. You do what you need to do using EOs and you see Trump doing that just on a much larger basis.

Brian Lehrer: Would it be accurate to say presidents of both parties try to expand their powers and the opposition party resists? It's not like one party's president more than the others are hoarders of power. Or do you think considering what Trump is doing, that that's a false equivalency?

Douglas Brinkley: It's not false. You have to add on today's US Supreme Court, which seems to be quite polarized in one direction towards conservative values and federal society ideals. Meaning they're allies of Donald Trump. Trump's making a gamble that a lot of what he does, if it goes to the court, they'll win on his side. Something that FDR would. Look, Obama didn't do that as much because the court still could come up-- was uncertain. In Trump's case, he's convinced he can get with the group in there now, pretty much what he wants done. Not all, but a lot of big things, so he's going for it.

Brian Lehrer: Here's Doug in Mount Vernon who has a question about executive powers and the negotiations over the war in Ukraine that are taking place this week. Doug, you're on WNYC with historian Douglas Brinkley.

Doug: Hi, good morning. My brother-in-law sent me an article by Timothy Schneider. It was a good article about comparing Trump's approach to Ukraine with the European approach in Munich and the similarities.

Brian Lehrer: Is that Timothy Snyder who wrote the book On Tyranny?

Doug: Yes, yes. The similarities are just striking. I was wondering, if Trump goes over to Ukraine, can he himself just say, "All right, we're not giving them any more weapons." Does he have the power as a president-- would Congress authorizes that? Does he have to go back to Congress to get permission to cancel any further aid or he can do that on his own?

Douglas Brinkley: He'll do it on his own. Trump's trying to end the Ukraine war. It's funny that JD Vance and other US Cabinet people they were at the Munich security conference. We all remember Munich stating for the word of impeachment to the Third Reich. There is a danger right now of that kind of repeat in history that Trump thinks, "Let's just get out of it. I'll cut a deal with Putin, that'll be the end of it. I solved it." Well, that didn't hold up with the Nazis in Czechoslovakia. Any deal they made, they later reneged on.

It's going to be a matter of how much trust really trusts Putin. It sounds like quite a bit. You can understand why our European allies might be shouting Munich, Munich, Munich right now, because they see a pattern that Neville Chamberlain fell into with Great Britain. This sort of trust that Germany will only do much in the late '30s, early '40s, when in truth they were into domination of Europe. Putin, if he gets a deal at Ukraine, well, a year from now, would you be surprised if he went into Lithuania and try to do something? That's where we're at right now.

Brian Lehrer: I want to ask you two last things before you go. One in the broad sweep of history is about media technology as enhancing presidential powers over time. When radio came in about 100 years ago and FDR used it effectively for his fireside chats, then television and JFK being so telegenic. Now social media, which Trump has used effectively. Can we say electronic media have enhanced the power of the presidency because it's been so useful to building personal followings that Congress as a big body or the courts can't compete with.

Douglas Brinkley: Oh, my goodness. Absolutely. We're living in an age of really media dysfunction. Whoever controls the media and the images controls the culture. There's just no doubt about that and Trump understands that. All these executive orders we're talking about, look at the drama. The Capitol arena with bands playing and sitting on a desk and making that-- I've never seen anybody sign anything.

Then Oval Office have been turned into a reality TV studio. Getting the image that I'm doing. This signing of the executive order, he's now made it into a theatrical moment. It's probably smart politics for him right now because not only is it controlling the media cycle, but it makes people look like he's doing things that really matter.

Brian Lehrer: In fact, I read somewhere that originally presidents were not supposed to communicate directly with the public through their elected representatives in Congress. Is that an overstatement statement?

Brian Lehrer: Yes, I think that's a little bit, but not much of one. It's a lot of showbiz going on here a lot. What's amazing to me about Trump is the way he has confused the world. Can you imagine them trying to understand Trump from universities in Pakistan, or Bangladesh, or in China for that matter. Some people would say it's a madman in charge of the United States. Others will say it's brilliant.

We don't know what he's going to do and he's reshifting balance of power in the world. It's a conundrum, but he's ours. Donald Trump represents a side of America. He's not getting good reviews with our alliances. I always find NATO to be of prominence. The main thing we need to do is keep NATO strength. I worry that one of the adverse effects of Trump's type of diplomacy right now is leaving our fellow NATO countries in a lurch.

Brian Lehrer: That's on the international stage. Final question from a listener who texts very simply, "Should we be concerned right now about autocracy?" We come back to the quote of Trump from over the weekend that I cited at the beginning of the segment when he posted on social media, "He who saves the country breaks no law." Should we be concerned right now about autocracy, in your historian's opinion?

Douglas Brinkley: Absolutely. Donald Trump's very attractive to being an autocrat. He doesn't respect Congress, Senate, the courts, or pick your part of government, FBI. He doesn't respect Justice Department. He thinks it's his tool. This is how autocrats begin. Now adding to that, Trump's massive ability to appeal to people through television and social media. The way that disinformation can be spread it makes him a very formidable person in our times.

Yet, I think less formidable if he didn't have Musk at his side because the AI problem or potential is vast and massive and it's coming on us. In that regard, having Musk around helps United States perhaps do some things with AI before China. There's some benefits here and there. I am concerned of Trump, always have been about his authoritarian bent and the way that he can demean people and gut them. Yet people that break the law but they're his pals, they get pardoned or they get to become part of an administration.

It's not a good way to run a country on the long term. It would only make any sense at all if our country was in some kind of dire, dire, dire straits. I personally didn't feel our country was doing that bad. After the pandemic, we're healing from it. Trump was able to sell fear. FDR, so there's nothing to fear but fear itself. Donald Trump's whole fear, fear, fear, "America's being destroyed, and I'm coming here to save it."

Brian Lehrer: Douglas Brinkley teaches history at Rice University. He's a CNN presidential historian and a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, as well as the author of many bestselling and award-winning books. Thank you so much for giving us this time on President's Day. We really appreciate it.

Douglas Brinkley: I really enjoy what you do and thank you what you do for our country. Take care.

 

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