Jack Goldsmith
speaker
462 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 10 Sep
Jack Goldsmith’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 — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
Ultimately, this all depends on who the American people elect and how they respond to how the person they elect acts.
I couldn't agree more.
Jack Goldsmith, thank you so much.
Thank you.
Thank you for having me, Ross.
Sure. The Trump administration is pushing executive power across to unprecedented places in new ways on many dimensions. So I'll divide it up into a couple. First, vertically down through the executive branch, the administration has taken an unprecedentedly broad view of the unitary executive.
Maybe we can talk about that more later, but the basic idea is that the president gets to completely control the executive branch, its decisions, firings, interpretation of the law, that the president's views of the law prevail for the entire executive branch, and everyone has to get in line for that. And there have been elements of this before, but this is much more extreme than ever.
That's the vertical dimension. The horizontal dimension is that they are asserting super broad executive power claims vis-a-vis other institutions that have checkpoints against them, trying to weaken those institutions. Congress first. It's basically been attacking Congress's appropriation power, its core power.
It's been attacking Congress's traditional ability to determine which agencies are which and how they're organized. And it's doing something analogous with courts. It's been being extremely aggressive and pushing back against and game playing with courts.
I would not say that there's been any sort of systematic defiance yet, but they've come close to the line, and they're being extremely disrespectful toward courts. And then they're pushing out executive power against civil society. You see this in the law firms, the universities, and the like.
So horizontally and vertically, they're pushing executive power, sometimes through interpretation of statutes, sometimes through Article II.
Right. So several things have surprised me. I wasn't prepared for the extent of the onslaught. It's really just remarkable how many things they're doing, especially inside the executive branch, to try to bring complete control of the president.
And I wasn't expecting the extent of the loyalty tests and the insistence that the president gets to determine what the law is and that there's no independent legal check.
Very much what I was doing in the Bush administration. So my old office, the Office of Legal Counsel, has basically, which was traditionally in the Justice Department, traditionally the office that made legal interpretations for the executive branch, subject indeed to the review of the attorney general and the president,
That office has been basically set aside, and the White House is interpreting law, and the basic rule appears to be if the president wants to do something, it's lawful. That really does seem to be the operating principle. So the extent of that surprises me. The extortionate elements of the administration, the shakedown elements that remind me of a book I wrote about Hoffa and the mob,
It surprised me. I'm talking mostly about- This is the law firms. And arguably what they're doing a little bit with the universities. They're going beyond what Biden and Obama did and imposing penalties that are probably not lawful in the sense that they didn't comply with process.
So doing something pretty overtly illegal to try to force settlements, knowing that the universities are in a bad position and might not push back. I didn't anticipate that form of aggressiveness. You know, Trump was pretty bad in the administration in the disrespect of courts in the first term.
In fact, it was about eight years ago that the chief justice issued an announcement, not unlike the one three weeks ago, saying that the president needs to stand down a little bit in his criticisms. But they've gone much further, and frankly, I don't really understand the strategy.
It's been a strategy of utter contempt for courts, basically, and reading directives narrowly, filing massively disrespectful briefs, threatening noncompliance. I didn't expect the extent of that, and I don't fully understand what goal that serves.
So I'm going to give you an answer you won't like. I don't like that terminology. I don't like that conceptualization because it gives one a sense that there's an all or nothing line after which we're in a crisis. And I'm not sure quite what happens when that crisis hits. Here's the way I think about it. There's definitely been a diminution, significant diminution in legal checks on the president.
Showing 321–340 of 462 · page 17 of 24
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