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no bull and the aftermath.

Many of the dilemmas that presidents have faced before trucked like crises of

confidence and credibility gaps and other things that people used to worry about

with respect to the presidency could be traced to this sort of layer constitutional

order in which the old one still is there and presidents are sometimes pulled

and hauled between that old constitutional order and their self-understanding

born of Wilson that they should be out there campaigning.

I'm Benjamin Wittis and this is the LawFair podcast January 26th, 2019.

On a flight to Israel recently I sat down with a book that knocked my socks off.

The book was entitled The Rhetorical Presidency.

It was by a political scientist named Jeffrey Tulis and while written in 1987 it taught

me more about the developments that led to the Trump presidency than anything I had read

in a very long time.

The book is an account of how the speaking style of presidents changed from the founding

era through the 19th century and into the 20th century.

Probably everything we thought we knew about why presidents talk the way they do is wrong.

And the book taught me that the hyper rhetorical style of Donald Trump where he's talking

all the time is really an extension of developments that had been going on all through the 20th

...