Is Trump the Roman Tyrant America's Founders Feared?

0:04Hi, everyone. It's Evan Osnos. Susan and Jane and I are nearing the end of a summer break, and we wanted to bring back an episode of ours from earlier this year that feels especially relevant now. This spring, Jeffrey Rosen from the National Constitution Center stopped by to talk to us about the steps that the nation's founders took to try to make our constitutional system tyrant-proof, or as close as they could get to it. Given everything that's happened recently in the past few weeks, with the National Guard being deployed here in Washington, D.C., and President Trump's rhetoric targeting judges and lawyers and the law itself, we thought it would be an important moment to revisit this episode.

0:46The Washington Roundtable will return with a new episode on September 5th. And in the meantime, you can listen to some excellent conversations from our colleagues Tyler Foggett and David Remnick on Mondays and Wednesdays. And we'll see you after Labor Day.

1:06Welcome to The Political Scene, a weekly discussion about the big questions in American politics. I'm Susan Glasser, and I'm joined by my colleagues Jane Mayer and Evan Osnes. Hey, Susan. Good morning to you both.

1:25All right, great to be with you. Just another fun week in Washington. There's been a sort of parlor game of sorts, right, that we've been playing. What period in disruptive history does this most resemble? In the early days of Trump 1.0, we were reading about America in the 1930s and early 1940s and the original America First movement. Then I remember around the 2020 election in January 6th, we were all frantically looking at the comparisons to the run-up of the Civil War. Will we know it when it happens? What about Reconstruction? This time, I've been asking and asking and wondering, what was it like when the institutions of the Roman Republic were under attack and it turned from a democracy into an empire?

2:21So we thought, well, let's go ahead and turn that into a show. And actually, we have the perfect guest for that show. I ran into this person the other night at a book party, which is a very Washington thing to do. And immediately, the question turned to this very question, which is, do we need to be looking that far back into history? What was it like? Our guest, Jeffrey Rosen, the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, he immediately had an answer for me. He said, you know, Susan, that America's founding fathers were absolutely obsessed with one particular worst case scenario for our republic.

3:00And that was the rise of an American Caesar. So we'll talk about that and whether there's anything to the comparison today with Jeff Rosen, who is not only the president and CEO of the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, a terrific institution, author of many books, including most recently The Pursuit of Happiness, How Classical Writers on Virtue Inspired the Lives of the Founders. We're delighted to have him here today. Thank you. Welcome, Jeff. Who is that behind you in the picture? That is Louis Brandeis, who inspires me to be industrious. Oh, man. Brandeis is sort of the patron saint of this show.

3:37He seems to come up about once every episode. That's true. Didn't we just literally talk about him last week? We are Brandeis fans, I have to say. He's the best, especially on Caesar Day. But we're also Jeffrey Rosen fans. So thanks so much for being with us. Oh, we are Jeffrey Rosen fans. So I was just recounting the conversation that gave rise to this special appearance on the Political Scene podcast. And Jeff, I really appreciated your clarity here. Obviously, history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes a bit. And clearly, America's founders were absolutely terrified by the idea of an American Caesar.

4:16So tell us what you make of the comparison and whether we're on to something when I see our institutions right now under attack in this way. Well, I'll just start by telling the story that begins this new book, which is called The Pursuit of Liberty, How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America. The book is a story of how that Hamilton-Jefferson battle defined all of American history. And it starts with this dinner party that defined American politics for the next 250 years. Washington's away. Jefferson convenes the whole cabinet, including Hamilton, for a convivial chat.

4:53And at some point in the evening, Hamilton says, who are those guys on the wall? And Jefferson says, those are my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced. Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke. And Hamilton waits for a while, and he says, the greatest man that ever lived was Julius Caesar. And this convinces Jefferson that Hamilton is honest as a man, but he believes in the need for force or corruption to govern man. Now, Ron Chernow concludes that Hamilton was almost certainly joking, but in fact, Hamilton's view towards Caesar was complicated. He admired his strength and energy, but he feared Justice Caesar crossed the Rubicon, subverted the Senate, persuaded them to call off elections, to install him as dictator for life, and also by flattering the people with cheap corn laws, persuaded them to give up liberty.

5:43He thought that that was the greatest danger in America. And he has this amazing line where Hamilton writes to Washington, the only path to a subversion of the Republican system of the country is by flattering the prejudices of the people and exciting their jealousies and apprehensions to throw affairs into confusion and bring on civil commotion. And then there's this line, when a man unprincipled in private life, desperate in his fortunes, bold in his temper, is seen to mount the hobby horse of popularity, it may justly be suspected that his object is to throw things into confusion, that he may ride the storm and direct the whirlwind.

6:18Jefferson also fears of Caesar, but Jefferson thinks that Caesar will come from above, not below, from scheming financial oligarchs out rather than from the people and the mob. And Jefferson fears that a future unscrupulous Caesar-like president will lose an election by a few votes and insists the election has been stolen. Jefferson's solution to avoid a Caesar-like dictator is a one-term limit for a president. Hamilton's solution is a presidency for life, because he thinks that a permanent president won't be tempted to be corrupted to flatter the people. And in all of the rest of American history, the question is, has Caesar come?

6:55And Andrew Jackson is attacked as a Caesar, as King Andrew. But he patriotically refuses to endorse secession. He puts down nullification. And of course, he accepts his defeat in the 1824 election. Lincoln is attacked as a Caesar during the Civil War when he suspends habeas corpus. FDR is so attacked as a Caesar that he holds a party with himself as Caesar dressed in a toga. That's right. That's a famous picture. It's hard to unsee. I'm surprised, you know, given how much time you've devoted to John Adams in your work, who is, after all, somewhat of an exhausting presence for his peers at the time.

7:30But he wrote also pretty well about the idea of how aristocracy contributes ultimately to the rise of supreme power. Is there something in that dynamic that is resonant with today's America? You're absolutely right. Adams is the most prescient critic of aristocracy and oligarchy. And he reads Polybius. And Polybius says that all governments deteriorate into their excess. Monarchy deteriorates into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into the mob. And he is especially convinced about the lasting influence of aristocracy and wealth. When he reads Adam Smith and says that the greatest human urge is to be admired and paid attention to, he literally wants to call off elections and make all elections hereditary because he thinks that aristocrats and oligarchs, rich celebrities, will be able to court the people because the people admire wealth and great power.

8:28And he has this deep understanding of the persistence of class politics in America. And he writes to Jefferson, aristocracy can never last. The everlasting envies, jealousies, rivalries, and quarrels, the cruel rapacity upon the poor ignorant people, their followers, compel them to set up a Caesar, a demagogue, to be a monarch and a master. And he thinks that Polybius' cycles are precisely being worked out in America and that the aristocracy will become an oligarchy. And the solution is separation of powers to put a king on one side and a democratical assembly on the other side. I've got to say, this is just so on the money, so to speak.

9:11We have seen this rising oligarchy and then the anger of the masses who look to a Caesar-like figure who says he's on their side and is going to make America great again. Adams and Polyvius, do you see that as applicable to what we're looking at? Well, that's the question. It should be applicable. So how did Caesar establish himself? First, he flatters the Senate. He persuades them to abandon their institutional responsibilities while maintaining the forms so that people are duped into thinking there hasn't been a constitutional revolution. All right, check. Okay. And he demeans the senators who exercise their traditional functions and breaks the baskeys, the state office of one of the guys, and then throws excrement in the streets.

10:03He bullies and criticizes the senators. And at the same time, he wins popular supporters by fomenting class warfare, posing as a tribune of the people, passing a land redistribution law, and giving them cheap corn and bread and circuses and entertainment and wearing a special haircut. He cuts his hair in this really distinctive way so that he can appeal to the people as a popular celebrity. But he's embarrassed about his boldness and he combs over his hair a little bit. It's a total cover. Just saying. But it's that deep understanding of the economic and class basis of politics and the way that you could have a false tribune of the people who actually is serving the interests of the oligarchs and mostly a kleptocrat who's trying to enrich himself, all the while pretending to be an enemy of the institution.

10:55Let's talk a little bit about how he breaks the Senate. You mentioned checks and balances as the founders. Ultimately, that was their solution to this great fear. It seems like the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate and the Republican-controlled, if tenuously U.S. House, so far have sort of rolled over in the face of the executive, you know, expansion and assault on their prerogatives. What more insights do you get from how they ended the reign of the Senate? There was a violence and physical intimidation and humiliation. And as a result, the Senate refused to exercise its institutional prerogatives, the norms that had been the central function in the separation of powers and succumbs to Caesar's will and elected him a dictator.

11:44The fact that Congress has stopped fulfilling its institutional check is the central part of this story. This is obviously a longstanding constitutional evolution dating back to the 20th century when the executive branch under Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt first insists that the president is a steward of the people who can directly channel popular will. And increasingly, as partisanship becomes greater, the Congress refuses to check popular presidents of their own parties. Both Hamilton and Jefferson fear that Congress is going to be the strongest branch. Madison says that it will suck all power into its impetuous vortex.

12:24Hamilton never wants the president to be a king. This is the central point. Hamilton expects that impeachment will be a central check on corrupt presidents, and always expects that Congress is going to take the lead. So to the degree that Congress has stopped taking the lead, that combined with the judiciary, which we should talk about in a moment, has created a kind of monarchical president in a way that both Hamilton and Jefferson appeared and which will allow him to subvert Congress and bend them to as well. If you were looking back now and speaking to the founders, what was it they didn't foresee?

12:59They didn't foresee, of course, the media technologies that would allow the presidency to aggrandize itself. Famously, they didn't foresee the party system, but the party system for much of American history served as a way of channeling and encouraging pluralistic debate. It's the rise of negative partisanship combined with the primary system that created the kind of extraordinarily polarized system we're in today. And they could not have anticipated that Congress just wouldn't stand up for its own institutional checks, although if they'd look at Roman history as they did, they might have feared so.

13:38However, you could say they did anticipate it because they're just reading Roman history like nothing else. They read it as kids. They're having nightmares about Caesar. And they're not sure that the system is going to succeed. This is so important. None of them is especially optimistic that the system is going to work. All past republics have lasted for 80 years or so. Mostly, they don't know whether or not the people will find the virtue to resist demagogues and to educate themselves about facts and to be self-mastered and temperate. And they don't know whether they'll elect virtuous leaders.

14:12At its essence, to be a Caesar is to rule by whim, to rule in a sense by this unencumbered ability to just act on whatever it is you want. It is striking that today, just right now, you're beginning to see that even places that are usually quite compliant in the face of the American leader are getting nervous and uneasy. The Wall Street Journal editorial page just says this week that Trump in his going back and forth on tariffs and so on is treating the U.S. economy as a personal play thing. I wonder about whether there's a point at which we see that these leaders run out of the public patience.

14:56And at that point, do they begin to rely more on hard power if bread and circuses are no longer achieving the desired effect? That's a crucial point. And the Polybian cycle says that after aristocracy converts into oligarchy, people will rise up and democracy will be reestablished. But once that degenerates into the mob, then that's the opportunity for tyrants and emperors to jump in. And to that point, Jeff, here we are only seven weeks in and Donald Trump has already compared himself to a king. His supporters are already calling for an unconstitutional third term in office, wielding a portrait of him dressed up as Caesar.

15:44I mean, it feels like they're almost saying we want to be the founders worst nightmare. Where are we headed here? The Caesar playbook is the authoritarian playbook, which includes violence and delegitimization of the rule of law, autocracy ruled by personal whim, all with the approval and connivance of a minority faction of the people that are willing to go along. There is a different narrative, and that's that Trump is not Caesar but Andrew Jackson, and that past presidents have asserted very broad executive power, even those like Jackson who'd run as Jeffersonians against the federal government, that Jackson instituted this foils system of installing his own loyalists.

16:30He was attacked as King Andrew, and he was properly exercising authority over the executive branch, asserting the right to fire the head of the Bank of the United States and to fire executive branch officials. And to the degree that the U.S. Supreme Court endorses President Trump's control over the executive branch under the unitary executive theory and says that he's right, that he can fire all executive branch officials, then this would seem perhaps less like a coup and more like a rebalancing of power in the executive in ways that the founders might have tolerated. We're going to take a quick break, and then when we come back, we'll talk a little bit more about Donald Trump and the Supreme Court and whether they're going to support his view of an all-powerful executive.

17:38Jeffrey Rosen:our new daily game that challenges you to put things in order based on a hidden rule. You might be asked to sort peppers by spiciness, world capitals by population, or Martin Scorsese movies by release date. You can play catalogs every day at newyorker.com slash games and in the New Yorker app for iOS or Android. Here's a helpful hint. The app gives you free access to our entire archive of catalogs, along with our word scramble game Shuffalo and the mini crossword. So download The New Yorker app for new games to play every day.

18:16Jeff, welcome back. This is an incredible and timely conversation. None of us can remember a moment in time when there have been so many cases filed so quickly that go right to the heart of our constitutional balance of powers. And in addition to being a great historian and expert on the founders, You're one of our premier experts on the Supreme Court. Does John Roberts have in his hand the future of checks and balances? He does. And the cases are very consequential. I've found it helpful to divide the cases into a bunch of categories. There's the birthright citizenship case, which is the most likely for the Supreme Court to check the precedent because the overwhelming consensus among liberals and conservatives is that the text history, precedent, and original understanding of the 14th Amendment support birthright citizenship.

19:08But there are two other big categories of cases where the Supreme Court may come down in different ways. First, there's President Trump's assertions of unitary executive authority, and the court is being asked, are independent agencies constitutional? In a decision in the 1930s, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously upheld Congress's right to set up agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, and the Federal Reserve, whose heads the president can't fire at will. He can only fire for cause. The Supreme Court said that was okay and invoked the spirit of Justice Brandeis, who had said in an earlier case, the point of the Constitution wasn't to create efficiency but liberty to prevent the president from becoming an autocrat.

19:54The Supreme Court may say that you can't set up these independent agencies and that President Trump can fire their heads at will. There's a second category of cases involving President Trump's effort not to spend funds that Congress has appropriated. And here the court might come down in a different place. You could imagine Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Barrett, who just recently refused to go along with a refusal to spend allocated funds, although the decision wasn't final, saying, no, to maintain the separation of powers, Congress has control over the purse and the president can't subvert Congress's prerogatives.

20:32Still, it all does depend on Congress insisting on doing its job, stepping up to the plate. It seems like the bottom line in terms of politics is that if Congress doesn't step up, the court will not be putting a break on Trump. I think what we're all wondering is, will the court somehow step up and stop Trump in some way? And doesn't the immunity decision kind of in some ways already give him an incredible amount of leeway we've never seen before? The immunity decision, of course, by immunizing him from prosecution after he leaves office, might embolden him to defy criminal laws. Some have noted that the most significant parts of the immunity decision are the dicta that seem to endorse a really broad vision of the unitary executive theory, suggesting that he can't be checked by Congress, even if they wanted to check him.

21:22But the bottom line, as you said, is that Congress has to check him. And if they don't, he's got free reigns. You have such a deep knowledge of how justices have thought of themselves over the course of this long history. How do you see that factoring in? Different justices think of themselves differently based on their conception of the right way to interpret the Constitution. A central part of the conservative legal movement was creating this devotion to textualism and originalism. But it turns out that different conservatives can reach completely different outcomes. Chief Justice Roberts, who's not a self-described originalist or textualist, is an institutionalist.

22:01He famously came in saying he wanted the court to rise above partisanship at a time when the presidency and Congress were really polarized. That explained his upholding Obamacare and siding against Republican presidents in some other crucial cases. He seemed to embrace a different view in the Trump immunity case, but that was informed by his deep devotion to executive power, which he, like the other conservatives who served in the Reagan administration, have long embraced. And now, as we saw with Justice Barrett, the institutionalist in him may be quite devoted to enforcing the separation of powers, preventing the president from intruding on Congress's lane and checking the president in meaningful ways.

22:44Justice Gorsuch is a devotee of the unitary executive, but he's also a Jeffersonian who thinks that the executive should be cabin. And that's why the whole focus of his deregulatory decisions is Congress gets to make the law. The president can't change them by fiat. I really do think it's important not to view this as pro and anti-Trump. It's more complicated than that. Broadly, the conservative justices are Hamiltonian on executive power and Jeffersonian on congressional power, and the local justices are the opposite at the moment. But we could see some interesting coalitions and shifts. The justices are very afraid of being defied by the president.

23:28And that would be a constitutional crisis if the president refused to carry out a valid Supreme Court order. It's really important that it's never happened before in American history. Jackson may or may not have threatened it, but in fact, he had no order to defy. The court wasn't ordering him to do anything. The Cherokee Indians case was resolved by the state of Georgia. Lincoln came close when he refused to carry out Chief Justice Taney's order, defying his attempt to suspend habeas corpus without congressional support. But Taney was acting as a circuit justice. It wasn't a full order of the court, and Congress pretty quickly endorsed Lincoln's actions.

24:02And when the court is ordering the desegregation of Little Rock, the justices are so afraid that Eisenhower was going to defy their orders that they personally signed the first page in ink. They're just frightened. They're saying, we mean this. And as it happens, Ike sends the airborne troops and supports the court. Have you seen before the level of pushback and denunciation of the legitimacy of the courts? All over the internet, people are saying, well, what right do they have? The most troubling thing is the call for impeachment of judges when you disagree with them. Those calls were in the air after the election of 1800, during the controversy over the Alien and Sedition Act, when these Federalist hacks like Samuel Chase were giving drunken harangues from the bench and imprisoning Jeffersonians.

24:54But the central point there is that although Chase was impeached for his partisanship, he was acquitted because Marshall and others testified and believed that if you can impeach judges because you disagree with them, that's the end of the independence of the judiciary. And ever since the Chase acquittal, it's been a bedrock principle of American law that you cannot impeach judges simply because you disagree with their rulings. The legitimacy of the courts is central for maintaining the rule of law. And the rule of law is the only thing standing between us and violence. John Adams has this incredible letter to John Quincy where he says he'd been rereading the history plays of Shakespeare from Henry IV to And that English history during that century is just blood and the Red Rose and the White Rose and Civil War.

25:43And it's because the British didn't invoke Magna Carta and lost their devotion to the rule of law. And he prays that America will avoid that fate by tempering power with principle to avoid dissenting into violence. The rule of law is central. The legitimacy of the courts is central. Let's all agree, regardless of whether you're foreign anti-Trump, not to delegitimize judges just because you disagree with them. You know, Jeff, to bring this back to the very beginning of our conversation located in ancient Rome, Maureen Dowd recently quoted Caligula channeling his inner Trump or vice versa. I can do whatever I want to whomever I want.

26:24Instead of Caesar, should we maybe be thinking Caligula here? Well, Caligula can ask, of course, the bedrock principle of the American Revolution and the American Constitution is that the president is not a king. The Constitution is the opposite of empowering the president. And that's why separation of powers is the most important constitutional principle. What distinguishes President Trump from Vladimir Putin is that unlike Putin, Trump can't do whatever he wants because he doesn't have all the power, nor does Congress, nor do the courts. We the people have the power. We parcel it out so they can check each other and ensure that all branches are ruling in our name.

27:04These are urgently serious lessons of civics and of history. And we're just seeing history playing out before us. Jeffrey Rosen, a master class in all of the urgent historical questions that face the republic right now. No, seriously, I'm so glad we did this conversation. I have to say, Jeffrey, at a time when Americans are thinking about civic education and how do we get people to know our history and know the underlying structure of this country, the National Constitution Center is the place to go. Yes, thank you for that. Let me plug the website, constitutioncenter.org. It's just this amazing resource that brings together the best liberal and conservatives thinking on all the constitutional questions in the news.

27:44There's the We the People podcast I host every week that talks about these questions. Please check it out. Wonderful. Thank you so much. Thanks, Jeffrey. Thanks, everyone. Thanks. Have a great day. The political scene from The New Yorker will be right back.