Charlie Savage
speaker
492 appearances
3 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2025
last heard 20 Jan
Charlie Savage’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Right.
So a running theme in what Jonathan and Maggie have been talking about is Trump exercising power until somebody stops him.
And Congress right now, controlled by a Republican Party that is completely in his thrall, clearly is not going to stop him.
There will be an election later this year.
We'll see if at least one chamber flips, then there could start to be significant, you know, meaningful oversight investigations.
Although we saw that in the first Trump term and the answer to those investigations were stonewalling of subpoenas and such.
And so if Congress currently, it clearly is going to do nothing and, you know, the question arises whether even under democratic control, it can effectively do something.
That leaves you with the courts.
And the big question being, to what extent is this judiciary going to ratify, or at least not stand in the way of,
these extraordinary myriad ways in which he's assuming and exercising powers that were not previously clearly understood to reside in the White House.
It's a little hard to talk about this right now because a lot of the litigation over this stuff is unresolved.
A lot of people think it is possible that the court may strike down his unilateral imposition of import taxes or tariffs.
And that may be a big exception to an overall pattern.
But from the vantage point right now, for the most part, while he has been stymied initially by lower court judges a lot, when stuff has reached the Supreme Court, it has by and large allowed him to do what he wants to do.
You know, a lot of my work chronicling executive power, going back to the Cheney's experiences in the 70s and how that informed the Bush administration and so forth.
has centered around this idea that executive power acts like a one-way ratchet and that it's easier to make it larger than to roll it back again because whatever one guy does, the next guy takes as a baseline and then innovates further and then that becomes the new baseline.
And I think that is a truth about what we see in the growth of executive power, not just under Trump, but under the generations leading up to this moment.
So if Jonathan and Maggie are right and there is a Democratic president who...
also jettisons all this caring about the rule of law and checks and balances and norms of self-constraint that would fit that pattern.
When you say it's appealing, I mean, possibly it's appealing in the moment in the crowd yelling at the rally.
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