Fareed Zakaria
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
More than in places like in Europe.
Giorgia Maloney comes to power in Italy, and she's a fire-breathing right-wing populist.
But she's contained by the institutions.
Her policies have actually not been as radical as people thought they would be, partly because there are lots of institutions, both within Italy and within the European Union, and she's basically not torn them up.
In the United States, we have the oldest constitution in the world, which is great in many ways, but in some ways it's kind of old fashioned.
So for example, our Justice Department does technically sit entirely under the president.
That is not true in Europe.
All their Justice Departments are independent agencies.
So what that means is that what we developed after Watergate was a set of norms
the president wouldn't ask the attorney general to prosecute certain cases.
But those are all just norms that we developed after Watergate.
And Trump just broke them all.
And he just said, look, there's no law that tells me I can't do this.
Similarly, he's correct when he says, there's no law that says my kids can't do all the business they want and take advantage of the fact that they're my children.
And all these things were norms.
And what it's turned out is that we need more
actual laws that constrain executive power in particular.
And the challenge here is the Supreme Court has become so pro-executive power that I think we're in a very bad fix because you can see the problem as you described it.
The Trump presidency is basically knocking down norms, in many cases, violating laws.
The TikTok ban should have been implemented.