You're listening to Robert Wright's Non-Zero Podcast.

Hi, Jack.

Hi, Bob.

How are you doing?

I'm doing great.

How are you doing?

I'm not going to complain right now.

Let me introduce this. I'm Robert Wright,

publisher in Nanzio Newsletter. You're Jack Goldsmith. You're exactly the person I want to talk to you right now.

That's why I emailed you a couple of weeks ago because I want you to tell us how worried we should or shouldn't be about Donald Trump.

You know, some people after his first month or so in office are worried that his,

I guess, exercise in consolidation or attempts to consolidate the presidential power and arguably

expand it are worrisome and could spell, according to some people, the end of democracy by the end of his

term. And you're very well positioned to address these things because, for one thing,

you've written about subject to presidential power. You wrote a book called Power and

Constraint. You're a professor at Harvard Law School.

You served in the Bush, George W. Bush Justice Department and were involved in consequential,

and in some cases, controversial advisory opinions about what the president, what that particular president could and couldn't authorize.

And also, you are now doing a sub-stack newsletter called executive functions in collaboration with Bob Bauer,

and you are covering a lot of this stuff there.

Now, since we set up this conversation, you wrote an op-ed for the economists.

This is one of these invited things where I guess you should feel very honored.

...