Fareed Zakaria
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
No, Mike Johnson is happy to be the errand boy to Donald Trump.
Because at the end of the day, he knows that the way he's going to stay in power and get elected is by being Donald Trump's errand boy.
So if you have a system like that, you actually don't have the checks and balances.
The checks and balances are completely notional.
Or similarly, as you point out with the court, I think what Trump is doing, for example, on the tariff case,
is a fascinating use, again, of this kind of illiberal democracy, because he's intimidating the court and saying, we're doing this for national security.
We're getting tons of revenue.
All these deals have been done.
You undo the whole reputation and a set of relationships and deals I have made
Well, yes, but what you did was plainly unconstitutional.
I mean, literally, it is in the Constitution, in a line, not by implication or inference.
There is a line that says foreign commerce will be regulated by Congress.
Tariffs were regulated by Congress.
And by the way, they knew what tariffs were.
The reason we had the American Revolution was...
Tariffs.
When people talk about the Tea Party, what was that?
That was a tariff, which they called a tax and a tariff interchangeable on tea coming in from Britain.
But by the way, that means the whole American revolution was a misunderstanding.
If only we had realized that we in America were not paying the tariffs, it was the poor Brits who were paying it.