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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I think it's profoundly unappealing in terms of a recipe for a country that does not literally go to war with itself.
Because it means that if whoever is in power is completely unconstrained and there are no checks and balances and the rule of law means nothing and there are no norms, then it's existential that that side stays in power.
Exactly.
And the other side comes in, then that side thinks it's going to go to prison because they just broke all these laws.
There has to be a war to prevent the other side from coming in.
It's hard to say that this is like a permanent entrenchment of what we saw in the year 2025 is the way it's always going to be going forward now.
I think certainly, though, the American-style system of democracy and checks and balances and separated institutions wielding co-equal control over the government is not how America has functioned in the first year of the Trump second term.
And, you know, the whole system is very sick right now.
I would throw bombing Iran into the list of things that are across the line.
But certainly negotiating peace deals is not.
Well, presidents of both parties going back have carved out for themselves an ability to use American military force abroad unilaterally without going to Congress under certain circumstances.
The circumstances are basically incidences where there's a national interest in the anticipated scope, duration, nature of the hostilities fall short of war in the constitutional sense.
So one-off airstrikes, peacekeeping operations, small-scale interventions.
Bombing Iran was seen as across the line because it created such a risk of a major regional conflagration that the anticipated risk that it could lead to a full-scale war meant Congress needed to be involved from the beginning if we were going to cross that line.
Mm-hmm.
The boat strikes and the Venezuela Maduro operation, certainly in that category.
Trump is assuming for himself the power to essentially order the summary extraditional executions of people who had always been treated as criminal suspects and the crime they are suspected of committing, not even a capital offense, that is drug trafficking.
He's done so through a sort of conjuring into existence legal realities, you know, realities in quotation marks.
I determine that there is an legal, formal state of armed conflict with a secret list of drug cartels and criminal gangs and that, therefore, the people on boats suspected of smuggling narcotics for them are not criminals.
They are combatants.
Showing 21–40 of 492 · page 2 of 25
← Previous
Next →