From the 2016 New Yorker Festival: Imagining a Trump Presidency
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 24 October 2016
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
Any schoolchild can tell you that the three branches of government are regulated by a system of checks and balances. So how many of Donald Trump’s extraordinary promises could he keep if were he elected President? At the 2016 New Yorker Festival, the political consultant and Goldwater conservative Roger Stone, the security analyst Max Boot, the historian Sean Wilentz, and the New Yorker writer Amy Davidson imagined a world where Donald Trump is the Commander-in-Chief. Evan Osnos moderated the panel. Davidson is particularly concerned about the precedent set by Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court case that upheld the internment of Japanese-Americans during wartime as constitutional. The decision has never been explicitly overturned, a reminder that the use of executive power to discriminate against citizens based on ethnicity remains viable, even into the twenty-first century.
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| 0:48.8 | I'm Dorothy Wickenden. |
| 0:50.4 | On today's Politics and More podcast, the New Yorkers Evan Osnos and Amy Davidson join a panel of political consultants and historians to imagine a world where Donald Trump is president of the United States. |
| 1:06.7 | We've assembled a group of experts to talk about the first term of President Trump. |
| 1:12.4 | Yeah, I said it, President Trump. |
| 1:14.7 | Now, as of today, that might seem hypothetical. |
| 1:18.7 | Let's put it that way. |
| 1:20.1 | Our panelists met on the weekend that Billy Bush tape hit the news, |
| 1:23.7 | and Trump's fall in the poll was already starting to spiral downward. But as Harry Truman reminds us, |
| 1:30.1 | by way of Casey Stengel, it ain't over till it's over. And the way this godforsaken election has gone, |
| 1:36.8 | with videotapes turning up and Russians hacking and accusations of rigging, it would be a mistake |
| 1:42.8 | to pretend that a Clinton victory is an absolute lock. |
| 1:47.5 | So let's take a few minutes to consider seriously. |
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