Hi, I'm Anna Marie Cox and welcome to With Friends Like These, where we usually talk about

the differences between us, but my guest this week is very much a friend like me.

We have maybe too much in common.

He is Dan Dresner, a per...oh, I should say Daniel W. Dresner, a professor at the Fletcher

School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a contributor to the Washington Post.

Also, you are the father of former toddlers, which is the area of expertise for this particular book.

That is correct. The book being called The Toddler in Chief, what Donald Trump tells us about

the modern presidency. And I'm super excited to talk to you in part because welcome to South

by Southwest, everyone. If you've always...if you've always wanted to go to South by Southwest,

welcome to a panel that was supposed to happen at South by Southwest. I actually am wearing

my cowboy boots just in honor of the occasion. That's touching. I on the other hand,

wearing a typical academic sweater vest. I'm leaning into my stereotype. That's okay. It would

have been a great look for the panel. I am a native Texan and you're a native academic, let's say.

Let's talk about the book. So people have probably heard of the Twitter thread that you started,

even if they have not yet heard much about the book. Tell us about this Twitter thread.

Right. So to put the Twitter thread in context, you have to go all the way back to April of 2017.

And I recognize that time moves differently in the age of Trump, so that seems like 4,000 years ago.

But if you go back to then, if you recall, when Trump was first president,

there was sort of this desperate desire on the part of some media commentators to...Falakorita

putting it normalized Trump in the sense of the belief that rather than Trump reshaping the

presidency, the presidency would constrain Trump. And there were a whole variety of arguments

out there about the ways that Trump would grow into the presidency. And in the first couple of

...