'Unmaking the Presidency'
The Lawfare Podcast
The Lawfare Institute
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 10 May 2020
⏱️ 37 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
From the moment of his inauguration, Trump has challenged our deepest expectations of the presidency. But what are those expectations? Where did they come from, and how great is the damage? "Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful Office," by Benjamin Wittes and Susan Hennessey, which is excerpted in this episode, situates Trump era scandals and outrages in the deeper context of the presidency itself. Now, the coronavirus pandemic presents one of the greatest challenges the modern American executive has ever faced. How did we get here? And in Donald Trump's hands, where does the world's most powerful office go from here?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | The following podcast contains advertising to access an ad-free version of the LawFair |
| 0:07.2 | podcast become a material supporter of LawFair at patreon.com slash LawFair. |
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| 0:18.2 | Also, check out LawFair's other podcast offerings, rational security, chatter, LawFair |
| 0:25.6 | no bull and the aftermath. |
| 0:34.0 | So as the Trump presidency progressed and his attacks on the norms of the traditional presidency |
| 0:39.4 | continued, the questions shifted from whether the presidency would change Trump to whether |
| 0:45.4 | and how Trump would change the presidency. |
| 0:49.6 | Our object in this book is to take this question seriously. |
| 0:54.0 | The presidency is not a static institution. |
| 0:57.4 | As we shall see, it evolved dramatically over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, |
| 1:03.8 | evolved in how it is organized, evolved in how it interacts with the public and congress, |
| 1:09.4 | evolved even in how it sounds. |
| 1:11.6 | The presidency is changeable and in systematically violating the norms of the traditional presidency, |
| 1:18.4 | Trump is proposing to change it. |
| 1:20.6 | He is proposing not just that a president can do certain things, but that a president |
| 1:25.7 | should do these things. |
| 1:29.2 | I'm Susan Hennessy and this is the LawFair podcast May 10th, 2020. |
| 1:35.9 | This week's episode is an audiobook excerpt from the introduction of Benjamin Woodace and |
| 1:40.7 | my recent book, Unmaking the Presidency, Donald Trump's War on the World's Most Powerful |
| 1:46.3 | Office. |
| 1:48.3 | When the moment of his inauguration, Trump has challenged our deepest expectations of |
... |
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