America’s Founders Feared a Caesar. Has One Arrived?
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
WNYC Studios and The New Yorker
4.2 • 3.3K Ratings
🗓️ 8 March 2025
⏱️ 37 minutes
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Summary
The Washington Roundtable speaks with Jeffrey Rosen, the president and C.E.O. of the National Constitution Center, a nonpartisan nonprofit, about how America’s founders tried to tyrant-proof their constitutional system, how Donald Trump’s whim-based decision-making resembles that of the dictator Julius Caesar, and what we can learn from the fall of the Roman Republic. Plus, how the Supreme Court is responding to the Trump Administration’s broad claims of executive power.
Rosen, a professor at George Washington University Law School, hosts the “We the People” podcast and is the author of “The Pursuit of Happiness: How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders and Defined America.”
This week’s reading:
- “Trump’s Golden Age of Bunk,” by Susan B. Glasser
- “Trump’s Disgrace,” by David Remnick
- “What Will Democratic Resistance Look Like?,” by Jay Caspian Kang
- “What Putin Wants Now,” by Isaac Chotiner
To discover more podcasts from The New Yorker, visit newyorker.com/podcasts. To send in feedback on this episode, write to [email protected] with “The Political Scene” in the subject line.
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| 0:00.0 | Okay, here's something we talk about. |
| 0:02.6 | Trump going after the law firms here in Washington that had lawyers that worked for the Democrats against him and worked for the investigators of his crimes. |
| 0:13.5 | He's trying to now punish the law firms, take away security clearances they had, and even ban them from coming into federal buildings, supposedly. |
| 0:21.5 | It just can't be more of a personal tantrum. |
| 0:24.5 | Yeah. |
| 0:24.9 | And the whole intent is pretty clear, which is, hey, any law firm out there that's thinking of doing this, this is what you have in your future. |
| 0:31.5 | I mean, look, petty and retribution, come on. |
| 0:33.9 | Like, let's talk about the Kennedy Center, man. |
| 0:35.9 | Forget about the lawyer. |
| 0:37.6 | I don't know. I thought it was, did you think it was the right thing for Hamilton to cancel its appearances at the Kennedy Center? |
| 0:44.3 | I think it's barely still called the Kennedy Center. How long is it going to be before it's the Trump Center? |
| 0:48.8 | Yeah. Well, I'm that gigantic bust of JFK in. It's gone. It's going to be on TV. Yeah, it'll be. And we. It's going to be on Zeebay. |
| 0:55.0 | Yeah, it'll be, and we know |
| 0:56.6 | whose bust's going to be there instead. |
| 0:58.0 | It's going to be gilded and sort of chiseled away |
| 0:59.6 | to resemble a different president. |
| 1:01.5 | No, I think it's, I think all of these |
| 1:03.3 | symbolic protests from artists |
| 1:05.6 | and others just saying we're, |
| 1:07.4 | we are not going to be complicit. |
| 1:09.5 | I think they all are important messages. And I think |
| 1:12.1 | they pack a punch. |
... |
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