Nate Cohn
speaker
982 appearances
7 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2025
last heard 16 Sep
Nate Cohn’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 — 5 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 2.
Appearances
Should he go even farther? The president faces really serious political risk, according to the poll. If he were to outright defy the judiciary, for instance, only 6% of voters said that the president should be allowed to defy a Supreme Court ruling.
Only 26% of voters said that the president should just do whatever they think is best, even that means going outside of the existing rules, compared to two-thirds who say that the president needs to follow the existing rules.
And it's like that on every question. And they're not close either. We have a very polarized country. We're used to 50-50 elections. We're used to issues where the parties are, you know, between 40 and 60 percent on these kind of big executive power questions.
about whether the president gets to go beyond the limits that have been imposed on presidents in the past, we're talking about a quarter of the electorate or less that's on his side. The overwhelming majority of the public is just not there for this, including, to flip the glass now to being half empty for a second, half of Republicans won't be there for him.
That's the scenario where congressional support would quickly start to break down, I think.
Yeah, you're moving outside of the realm of public opinion here, right? Because the means by which various institutions can respond to the president may be much more limited than the public reaction against him.
So it's totally possible the president can pursue a wide-ranging agenda that goes well beyond what any president has done in the past, that the courts and the Congress fail to check him, even though a majority of the public is opposed. That's a real possibility.
Nonetheless, over the medium to longer term, this tremendous amount of public opposition to the excesses of the presidency to this point, let alone the more extreme scenarios we're contemplating, would make it very difficult for the president to sustain this kind of conduct over the longer term.
in a world where the democrats have taken control of the house let alone if you imagine the president seeking a third term or even if he doesn't seek a third term simply if there's another republican who gets elected whether they could continue to pursue these policies like this kind of public opinion makes a lasting change like this much more difficult i think to sustain and you know i should say that when we look at this in the context of a broader rise of right-wing populist authoritarianism across the world in places like hungary or turkey or russia or india
We see that the political parties that are pulling this off are really popular. They command overwhelming support from the public. They do so when they win in the first place. They enter office with a broad coalition and often a clear majority of the electorate. And they solidify that support in office.
It's also worth noting that they are assisted often by undermining the institutions that attempt to check them, whether it's the media or the courts or so on, the kinds of things that Donald Trump is attempting. That's not how this is playing out to this point. Donald Trump may be undertaking many measures that are reminiscent of those populist, right-wing, authoritarian governments.
But the public's response is not conducive to that taking hold in a way that permanently affects the trajectory of the United States without a large backlash, whether that's in the midterm or the next presidential election and so on.
That's right. And Donald Trump, if he is trying to create a more authoritarian system of government in the United States, is running up against longstanding American values that are as old as the Republic or even older. And that makes it much more difficult for him to get the public to acquiesce to broader claims of executive power than presidents have managed to claim for themselves in the past.
In a strange way, and this is an extreme example, and there are obviously many differences, but in a strange way, it's almost the reverse of the challenges the U.S. faced in Iraq. When the U.S. invaded Iraq, there were lots of people who questioned whether the U.S. could implant a democracy in a country without any history. We tried. Liberal democracy.
We tried, and it failed for a number of reasons besides the country not having a tradition of democratic governance.
But if you were to try and implant an authoritarian regime in the United States, you face a sort of similar version of the problem, but in reverse, where you're trying to get the citizens to go along with the form of government that it doesn't have experience with in the past and hasn't built a system of values around and support. And again, that doesn't mean it's impossible.
You can clearly point to cases historically where even liberal societies turn toward more authoritarian regimes. But that doesn't mean it's not more challenging as a consequence. And you can see that in the poll. Right.
That's right. And that's also part of why I can't help but think that this was a bit of a missed political opportunity for conservatives and for Donald Trump. You know, they didn't win the last election to landslide by any stretch, but they often won the debate over the issues fairly decisively. On immigration, the public wanted a crackdown on immigration and a secure border.
They wanted improved public safety. They wanted lower costs. There were a lot of opportunities here for the Trump administration to pursue a very conservative agenda that was consistent with the mandate that they had.
And to the extent that they think that they are acting within their mandate over their first hundred days, I think that they have misread it and that they have taken it much farther than they argued for in the last election and that voters believe that they were voting for when they backed him last November. And the consequence of that has already done real damage to his presidency.
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