Gavin Newsom

But I do believe in these founding documents.

I do not think that somebody should enrich themselves in office.

I do not think, I mean, the founders, if they came,

As the scholar Yuval Levin told me back in November, he said, they wouldn't be surprised that someone was seeking monarchical power.

But they'd be so surprised and so disappointed in that their first article of the Constitution, after the beautiful poetic preamble written by Gouverneur Morris of New York,

The rest of it is code.

It's just sort of the operating manual.

It's like Ikea.

Well, how the hell am I going to put this thing together?

And the first article is the legislative.

Oh, co-equal.

And they would be so shocked that the legislative had yielded so much out of...

fear of some kind of retribution that they'd ceded the ability to tax tariffs.

That's the province of Congress.

The idea that you could change what the White House looked like or build a ballroom or slap your name on something, that's the province of Congress.

The second article, the executive, would be the managers to carry out what Congress had said.

And oh no, we're in too modern an age.

Things happen too fast.

So you can have wars of choice.

And inevitably, the chaos that's created, if you get back to where you were before, somehow that's an overwhelming victory.