Mark Labberton:
We all know that we’re living in a time of great turbulence and chaos in our national and also in our international lives. It’s in a context like that where things are changing so fast, in fact, things have changed significantly even since this podcast was first recorded just a few days ago, and that turbulence is the very thing that causes so many of us great worry and concern and at the very least confusion over what is going on. We need to find voices that we can rely on to help us understand that landscape, and to me, Yuval Levin is one of those. Dr. Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute where he holds a chair in public policy. He’s the founder and editor of National Affairs and a senior editor at The New Atlantis, as well as being a contributing editor to the National Review and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times. Yuval, welcome back. We’re so glad that you’re here today to be our guest.
Yuval Levin:
Thanks very much for having me, Mark.
Mark Labberton:
When we last spoke on Conversing, it was in the context of your book, American Covenant, which is really a book about trying to remind us of the constitutional foundations of the moment that we live in and the framework that was set by the framers of the Constitution, and you were particularly strong in the book and in our conversation talking about the significance of the centrality of Congress in the way that the Constitution has been set up. Many people, as you know right now, feel as though we are in the middle of a constitutional crisis already or certainly on the precipice of a significant constitutional crisis. This is your field. I couldn’t wait for the opportunity to have you back on to come to this very moment that we’re living in. Whatever one thinks of the actual policy issues, I want to start just talking about the constitution itself and what is happening. So as you know, when I sent you an email invitation it had in the subject line simply help with three exclamation points. So give us help. Where are we constitutionally in this moment?
Yuval Levin:
Well, I think the first thing to say is that it’s hard to know. This has been a very frantic opening to a new administration, mostly by design I think, though increasingly not by design, and I think that’ll grow as the administration has to confront both the realities of the world and the implications and consequences of its own actions. Less and less of what we find will be on purpose. In a broader sense, we are living with the consequences of presidential gigantism which has been with us now for two generations in some respects, but has been increasing and which I think for the Trump administration is an explicit objective. Their goal is to strengthen the presidency in relation to the rest of our system and to put the president really at the center of our national life in a novel way.
I think a lot of what we’re seeing are the beginnings of forms of testing the system of seeing how far they can push, seeing how hard they can press, where will the courts resist, where, if anywhere at all, will Congress stand up for itself. This has only been a few weeks and so it’s still early. A lot of what they’ve done is fairly vague. A fair amount is also really hard to parse. We don’t quite know which tweets are true and which are not and I think we’ll find out over time, but there is definitely a moment here in which the structure of the system is under question by an administration that wants to shift the balance even further in the direction of presidential power, and that’s clearly what we’re going to be living with in these four years.
Mark Labberton:
Do you believe that Trump is interested in being constitutionally faithful?
Yuval Levin:
Well, I think that Donald Trump has never really shown much evidence of knowing where the boundaries are when it comes to constitutionalism. I think he thinks of the presidency as a platform for himself and in really almost kingly terms about the opportunities that it offers him. He’s very impatient with the constraints of the other branches, especially of the courts, and I think is never been particularly clear about the reasons for those boundaries or even the character of them. He obviously knows more coming in this time than he did the first time about what the presidency is and maybe some of what its limits are, but I don’t think he thinks about the office in terms of the Constitution, and the term constitution, which is a term very frequently found in the mouths of our presidents, is not a term that is frequently found in his mouth.
Mark Labberton:
Right. In our last conversation you talked about, as I mentioned, the centrality really of Congress as the key part of our government that is at the core of, as much as anything else, of the pluralism of our society and the possibilities of vigorous debate and argumentation over what policies should be taken, how things should be governed. But right now, and this has been true as you have said in that book and just now, it’s certainly at least two generations in which this gigantism of the presidency has really swamped in many ways a roughly evenly divided Congress. So right now in this moment where the gigantism of the presidency is being extended even further than it had been extended before, what do you see happening in Congress? I could think of all kinds of labels I might use, but I’m curious how you would describe it.
Yuval Levin:
I think it’s useful first to think about what we lose when Congress is so weak. So Congress and the presidency are not just two venues for power. The separation of powers in our system has to be understood as a distinction among institutions. It’s not that there’s this thing called power and they divide it among three, but that there’s this thing called a legislature which is a body, a plural body representative of a large society that is intended to facilitate bargaining and accommodation among the representatives of some of the key factions of society. And then there is this other institution, an executive which is embodied in one person and then delegated through a bureaucracy which is intended to carry out the work of government in practice, working within the frameworks that are created by the legislature. In the absence of a reasonably assertive legislature, you lose that venue for bargaining and accommodation and you’re left with a unitary institution overpowering the rest of the system.
The president can’t be representative. Nobody really ever expected the president to be representative. Presidents are elected to be accountable. Congress is elected to be representative, and part of what that means is that we are in the sway of the will of one individual to an unusual degree and to a degree much greater than that intended by the framers of the system. Now that person may have a majority behind them. In this case, President Trump has a very narrow majority behind him, but he got elected, but it is still nonetheless the case that what we’re watching here is the operation of the will of an individual on the system, and the system is really meant to answer to the negotiated will of a plural body. Congress is meant to be dominant. A lot of what we’re seeing instead is a desire on the part of members to be observers and commentators on the presidency rather than to be in the driver’s seat of policymaking at the national level.
A lot of members of Congress now understand their own success as being a function of being seen to speak for their team, of being the people who verbalize the sentiments of their party, and so their sense of the job is very expressive and performative and they don’t think in terms of negotiating and bargaining. Now it has to be said, the president’s sense of the job, all of our modern presidents, has also been very expressive and performative and less focused on administration which is ultimately their job. I think these dysfunctions are connected, they’re related to each other. When one branch isn’t doing its job, it’s very hard for the others to do theirs, and it’s a problem. It’s a problem, and I think it expresses itself ultimately in a kind of absence of constraint and boundaries that we’re going to see played out. There’s no way around it.
Mark Labberton:
So what feels like a set of actions that have been taken in these opening weeks that are just a kind of random grab bag of power plays, and this is what I think you were referring to earlier when you said no one really knows exactly how to interpret this because it’s too early, but all the signs are something that at least many voices and I think I am basically fearful that really what we have is just genuinely a lawless president who might formally play out, for example, government jurisdiction and court findings and rulings and so forth, but who has already shown signs of a readiness to act regardless of whatever the court may decide in a way that is more consistent. Now I’m not saying he’s doing this to the degree that he could still do it, but the momentum seems to be moving in that direction. Do you agree with that or is that overstating it?
Yuval Levin:
Well, it might be worth thinking about a couple of distinctions in trying to figure out whether that’s true because I think we have to figure out whether it’s true and that we don’t quite know that at this point. There are a couple of things going on. One is that the beginning of a new administration now in the modern era, the beginning of a new administration is unavoidably a little surreal. There’s a lot of action and it’s intentional in a way that’s a little bit unusual, that is what’s happening is what the administration wants to happen which isn’t actually how things normally are.
The president’s job is very often to respond to events he doesn’t control and did not initiate and that’ll be this president’s job too. But in the first few weeks it’s almost like the whole world stops and holds its breath and watches this new president and what gets rolled out are the things that his people have been planning for a long time, in this case really for several years, so that they do come in with some things in their pockets that they know and we don’t. This is more the case this time than the first time for Trump where I don’t think they really expected to win the election and the transition didn’t really produce much. This time they really did come in with some worked out ideas and they’re rolling them out. We’re seeing them happen.
Some of what’s happening is less worked out. I think some of the things around Elon Musk and all of that are not all that well planned, but in any case, they’re being rolled out intentionally. And so in this early period, in the first month or so of a new administration there’s always a sense that the new president is very powerful, is dominating events, the opposition is on its back and incapable of responding and are they ever going to get their act together, and it takes a couple of weeks and then they do, and it takes a couple of weeks and things start to just roll all over the world and the president suddenly is responding as much as he’s initiating, and we’re gradually entering that phase. We’re not quite in it yet.
It’s important not to overread the strength that’s evident at the outset here because we don’t really know how much of this will play out. We don’t know what the courts will do. We don’t know exactly what’s even quite going on at this point, and all sorts of things get reported that don’t turn out quite to be the case. There’s also some self-reporting that’s exaggerated this time which is very strange, things being tweeted by the president and by Elon Musk who is behaving in a kind of pseudo-president role that doesn’t really exist in our system and they’re saying they’re doing things which some of which they turn out really not to quite be doing. Some of what the people around Musk are doing is actually more legally regimented than it seems and they are getting permission. They are following various kinds of legal parameters even as they’re talking a big game. So we’ll see on that front.
I think the other thing to keep in mind is that presidential power expresses itself in two kinds of directions. I would think of them as inward and outward. The president first of all is powerful over the executive branch, and secondly, the president is a powerful actor in our larger constitutional system in relation to Congress and the courts and the states. The way in which our constitution is now understood I think correctly by the courts is that the president’s power over the executive branch is very far-reaching. The president in fact is the executive branch. The second article of the Constitution begins with a very stark sentence that says the executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States, period, and that means that the president does command the executive branch.
On the other hand, the president does not command the federal government, not alone, and this court has not inclined to side with presidential power in relation to Congress and in relation to the rest of the system so that at one and the same time the court has been had an expansive view of executive power over the executive branch and a restrained view of executive power in relation to Congress. I think we have to distinguish between some of the controversies we’re seeing along those lines.
So if the question is can the president decide who runs the payment system of the treasury and can he send some 21-year-old to plug into the server, the answer’s probably yes. That’s an administrative choice. It seems like a bad idea, but it’s not illegal most likely. When the question is does the president have to follow the law, the answer to that is going to be yes, that is the president cannot just decide to shut down an agency created by Congress, cannot just decide not to spend money appropriated by Congress. All these things are going to go to court on both ends and I think this court is going to side with executive power over the executive branch but not with executive power in the larger system. And so these questions are going to end up being more complicated than they seem.
I’m not sure at this point that we are seeing an administration that’s willing to ignore court orders. We haven’t seen that happen yet, and there’ve been some court orders that have forced them to stop doing things and they’ve stopped doing them so far, but I certainly worry that’s the direction in which we’re headed, and they want confrontations, they want to be tested in court. What happens if and when they fail is more of an open question than it usually is, and so it’s more of an open question than I’m comfortable with.
Mark Labberton:
So am I right then to infer that you feel as though the check that the court has on Trump is real and in the way you’ve just parsed things about the difference between executive power and executive over Congress power, in that debate the court will side in one case with greater liberty to the president, on the other case, greater restraint?
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, exactly, and this can be a little confusing, but in the last term of the Supreme Court, in the same term the court overturned what’s called Chevron deference, the idea that administrative agencies can decide for themselves what the law means and the court sustained a very expansive view of presidential immunity. I do not think that is contradictory. I think that they’re advancing a coherent idea of executive power there where the president commands the executive branch but does not command the American government.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah. That’s a very helpful distinction. The question I think behind what we’ve just been talking about is whether that will actually stand and whether there will be-
Yuval Levin:
That’s right.
Mark Labberton:
… respect for the distinctions that you’re drawing and a willingness to be self-restrained which would not exactly be the most common description of Donald Trump.
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, I don’t think we’re going to see a lot of self-restraint, and more than that I think there’s an expressed desire by some of the people around Trump to test the boundaries of executive power. We’re going to see, for example, a fight over what’s called impoundment which has not happened in 50 years. The idea that if the president doesn’t like what Congress has appropriated money for, then he just doesn’t spend the money and doesn’t do what the law requires. That’s been understood to be both illegal and unconstitutional for half a century now, and the people around Trump seem like they want to test that out and we’ll see.
Mark Labberton:
Right, right, right. You’ve said that character is destiny, and in light of that, describe how you would bring the character question into this moment in American life.
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, I think character is destiny, especially in the American presidency because the presidency really is one person, and although the power of that one person is then delegated through a bureaucratic system that involves literally millions of people, it’s nonetheless the case that every presidential administration has had more or less the character of the president. If you think about the personality of the Reagan administration or the George W. Bush administration or Barack Obama administration, those all had, each had the personality of the president in some very important ways and the bureaucracy at its upper levels functioned like the president.
That was true when Donald Trump was president too the first time and his administration, not just himself but the entire administration had a kind of impulsivity, unpredictable intensity that was a function of his own personality and character. I would say the fact that character is destiny in the presidency is not good news for Donald Trump and is not good news for the country while he’s president because the biggest problem with Trump is his character, is the lack of a sense of personal responsibility and self-restraint, the lack of a respect for the need for stability and coherence in leadership, and to have an administration that has that character is going to challenge our system and I think just create problems for the country in some important ways.
So for me this is really the key point about Trump. There are a lot of things that his administration did the first time and will do this time that I like as a practical matter, as a policy matter. A lot of what they’re doing in education, a fair amount of what they did in foreign policy last time I approved of and thought was good, but at the end of the day, in moments of decision and crisis it’s the president’s character that determines how things go, and his character showed itself in those moments of decision and crisis around COVID in the wake of the election that he lost and refused to treat as lost, and in various moments of crisis and decision, character showed itself that’s going to happen again. And so my biggest worry about Trump is not one policy or another. There’s some I like and some I don’t, but it’s that ultimately the presidency is one person and this one person is just not a good fit for that office.
Mark Labberton:
So taking some of these comments that you’ve made over the last couple of minutes and I want to come back to what I consider to be the overreach of the presidency in, for example, the wide governmental loyalty tests that are being meted out. Now that feels to me like a president trying to control the federal government rather than just controlling the executive branch, right, and that is driven by character and in particular by personal paranoia and narcissism that causes him to believe. I understand the idea of a united team. Nobody’s thinking that a leader doesn’t need a united team. That’s really different than a uniform team and it’s really different than a loyalty team that takes and will be searched out and punished if not found to be loyal. So is that an interpretation that you would agree with, and if so, what do we do as a nation when character is the primary issue and when Congress doesn’t seem interested in calling any of that in question?
Yuval Levin:
I think the problem with the emphasis on personal loyalty has to do with the nature of the president’s everyday job which is the making of decisions.
Mark Labberton:
Right.
Yuval Levin:
What the president really does is make hard decisions. Easy decisions in the executive branch are made well below the level of the president, and by the time a question reaches the White House it’s been fought over and thought through by a variety of people with a variety of views. I worked for a president, I worked for George W. Bush in his second term, and I would say that my sense of what his day is like is that it’s meeting after meeting in which the two people in the country who know the most about something that he knows nothing about are disagreeing in front of him and he has to decide which side to take. It’s a very hard job. It requires judgment and it requires hearing different sides and having some room for opposition, having some willingness to contemplate the possibility that the course you’re on is wrong and not working.
Administration is impossible when people on the ground are afraid to tell you what’s going on. And so when things are not going well and the person who represents the president on the ground doesn’t want to get in trouble by saying, “I think we did the wrong thing here, or we need to change course or fix this or change that,” then that doesn’t get heard and bad decisions get made. Loyalty tests are very bad for decision-making. Now as you say, there’s got to be some degree of broad agreement. People who work for the president have to have more or less the same disposition so that they believe in what they’re doing in trying to advance a policy direction that they take to be basically right.
In that sense, it makes sense to make sure that the people who work for him voted for him. That’s not crazy, but loyalty, personal loyalty, the willingness to say he’s never wrong or the kind of test you have to pass when someone says, “Who won the 2020 election?” and you’re expected to offer an answer that isn’t true in order to get the job, that creates an environment that’s going to make decision-making under stress very difficult to do well. And so I worry that the presidency just can’t work well that way and they’re going to much greater lengths in that direction this time than the first time Trump was president. I think there’s a sense that what went wrong last time was all these people who weren’t loyal, and I don’t think that is what went wrong last time, and if they lean hard in this direction they’re going to find that a lot of things go wrong this time.
Mark Labberton:
Yuval, if you were to name the top two or three alarm bells truly that might even keep you awake at night, what are they right now?
Yuval Levin:
We talked about one which is the possibility of the administration just willfully ignoring a court order. At that point, I think we really are in a new situation because I think where we should worry is for the infrastructure of our politics more than policy direction. There may be things going on here that I just don’t approve of, that I wouldn’t do if I was president, or that I wouldn’t vote for if somebody asked me, but that’s how politics works. Elections decide policy direction, and what they’re doing is basically what they said they would do. The problems arise when the system for decision-making and for politics and policy breaks down. So one worry I would have is the willingness to ignore a court order.
I think I would also worry about just open, blatant lawlessness. Shutting down a legislatively mandated agency is the beginning of that kind of thing. I’m not sure what we’re seeing with USAID and so on so far is illegal, but it’s headed in that direction, and if that’s the direction they continue to proceed in then I do think there are very real problems. Secondly, I would worry about ignoring signals of trouble, ignoring dissent, ignoring opposing voices. A sense that they’re ignoring reality and pretending things are happening that aren’t, that’s very dangerous in the presidency. The president is really there to deal with the real world. That’s what we need in that job. That’s the person whose phone rings at 3:00 in the morning, and if you’re not willing to face reality in that moment then we’re in real trouble.
I think it’s also worth worrying about the tendency for vengeance and for personal vendettas, for using the power of prosecution and of law enforcement for political purposes, even for personal purposes. I do not think that’s quite something we’ve seen yet, but we’ve certainly heard a willingness to do it from the president and from others who he’s putting in positions of authority in law enforcement, and I think that’s one place where the red flags would be most serious.
Mark Labberton:
I’m struck by how all three of those things are in part, not wholly, but in part characterological, right? They are really a reflection of the character of the person who holds that responsibility, and the thing that will push or pull the thing that will restrain or simply dominate are all in a way bound up with the character and mindset of the person that holds the job.
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, there’s no way around it. In the presidency, character just does matter. In Congress you’ve got 535 people and they’re very different from each other, and the overall character of the institution is the kind of functional average of those people. The presidency really comes down to one person making key decisions, and that means that when we choose a president we really have to think about the character we want in our government for those four years because that’s what we’re going to get. It’s going to be that person’s judgment and that person’s character. That choice is awfully important for that reason, and we have to think not only about party, not only about ideology, but also about temperament and character in filling that particular job.
Mark Labberton:
I know that at this stage the thing that I’m about to say could sound like pushing the panic button, and I’m not above pushing the panic button so I’ll admit that, but there is something about the momentum and the moment that we’re in that makes me feel as though there are dangers on horizons that of course can just be driven by paranoia and anxiety, mine or someone else’s or a collective body of people and people who are not supportive of Trump which I admit to being. At the same time, there’s things that do seem genuinely at least at stake, and it’s very hard to see what the check and balance that at least one grows up thinking is the character of government is even remotely in place.
Now I do know the midterm elections are coming and that I think there will be some kind of congressional reset at that moment, or so I would imagine. But nevertheless, when I think about the rumblings that I’ve read about in several different places of the thought of beginning to lay the groundwork for Trump having a third term as a kind of symbol in a way of this overreach, this what I think of as lawlessness, deconstructing, or even abandoning the constitution, I don’t want to live in that paranoia and I don’t live in that paranoia, but when things like that come onto the radar, it is not hard to understand why for many people that feels like a danger of a kind that we’ve just never really faced in our country.
Yuval Levin:
Yeah, look, I think that we can look at the experiences of some other societies and see that there are moments when the boundaries just get broken and those moments are very dangerous and they’re not always easy to predict, and there’re always people who deny they’re coming, so we should be willing to worry. I do think that on the whole our institutions have proven fairly strong in this period, that ultimately a lot of what the Trump administration is doing, the vast majority of it really is just working through the system. They are trying to get legislation passed to change the tax code and set federal spending. They’re spending a lot of time with Congress. They have so far when they’re tested in court they send their lawyers, and if they lose they stop doing what they’re told to stop doing, so far. There’s certainly a lot of very wild talk and talk has a way of becoming action in the hands of assertive executives, and we should certainly worry about it.
I don’t think we’re facing a third term. I just, I think that at the end of the day the basic boundaries of the Constitution persist and Trump himself when he’s been pressed on this, at least so far, has always been careful to say that kind of talk is a joke. I think that will continue. But look, that we would even have to ask is an indication of where we are. There was no one who thought that Barack Obama or George W. Bush thought they were going to have a third term, but when you ask me does Trump think that, I have to take a second before I can give you an answer.
So I certainly think that we are closer to that red zone than we’ve been in my lifetime and that I’m comfortable being, but I would say it is better to worry than to panic. Worry lets you make distinctions and say, “Look, some of these things I just don’t like, but they’re legal and he won the election and he is the president. Some of these things I do like, but they’re not how the system works, and some of them are both terrible and dangerous.” To draw that kind of distinction, you have to not be in a panic. I don’t think that panic is the place to be in this moment, but I don’t think that we should dismiss the possibility that we could find ourselves in a crisis that is just not like what we have lived through in American politics in our lifetimes. You have to be ready.
Mark Labberton:
Right, right. So going back to your book, American Covenant, and this very strong argument that I found really persuasive and actually quite hopeful about the potential role of Congress, I want to come back to that because it feels as though from an average citizen’s point of view, the way to respond to this moment is in part an appeal to Congress, right? Write your congressman, call your congressman, sit on the doorstep of your congressman’s office, et cetera. So given the anemia of Congress right now and the owning of it by one party, albeit with this extremely narrow margin, what is the role of the American citizen to have in this moment? Where does a voice of citizenship best find itself expressed and to whom?
Yuval Levin:
Well, I do think Congress is a key part of the answer to that question. Congress certainly is in a weak place now, but it is closely divided. I would not look at this Congress as a partisan freight train. They’re going to have a lot of trouble getting anything done, and a lot of members are going to be in a position to exercise some leverage, and I think it is good for them to hear from their constituents what that leverage might need to look like or what it would best involve.
By March 14th, which is a month and a week from now roughly, they have to pass some kind of extension of appropriations for the rest of this fiscal year. That’s going to require Democratic votes. It’s not going to be done by Republicans alone, and for it to happen, the Democrats are going to be in a position to ask for something. It can’t be all that much, but it ought to be something doable, and it might be that the best way to use that leverage is not exactly in the appropriations process but in thinking about what’s happening in the executive branch. Democrats should certainly be thinking that way and hearing from their constituents about that.
I would also say that it’s still the case in America that most governing happens at the state level and there’s a lot to be done and influenced and engaged at the state level, and state politics in this moment in most places are more sane and functional than national politics which is not normally the case in America, but it is now. Governors are some of the sanest people in our politics in this moment, and that’s also a place to direct civic action and citizen pressure. All of this in a sense is relatively normal, and I do think we should see that most, for the most part, our political life is as it has been, but we are facing some potential threats and dangers and various ideas are on the march that we should be wary of and pushing back against them.
I don’t think that the lesson of Trump’s first term should be that people who oppose him should just sit it out and wait. I think the lesson on the contrary is that the Trump administration does respond to pressure. We saw that already. When they moved to freeze all federal grants, there was a lot of pressure that came back at them from the public, and they did back down, and it was not just because the courts paused their action. They could see that it was not going well and that it was not going to be well received. I think the move to levy tariffs on Canada and Mexico also met with a market response and a citizen response that had an effect. So they’re going to be sensitive to that, and by all means, citizens should have their say.
Mark Labberton:
If you were to have the ability and influence, I suppose the word would be power, but I’m only acknowledging that that word is relevant to this question, and you could do, let’s say two things right now that you would most want to see occur, albeit with due process and appropriate pluralistic debate, et cetera, but what would be the things that you would most want to see happen?
Yuval Levin:
Well, I think that one important ingredient of a functional American politics that’s missing now is the sense that policy change should happen through cross-partisan negotiation in Congress. I think Republicans have come into this Congress with a sense that whatever they are going to do, which isn’t going to be much, is going to be done on partisan lines, and they’re proceeding through a very difficult process of negotiating a big tax bill on their own without the Democrats. That’s actually not how the logic of such things has normally worked. Even think about tax reforms, the big tax reforms that are understood to have been Republican measures in the past 50 years were actually bipartisan measures. The Reagan tax reforms got a lot of Democratic votes. The Bush ones got a few. I think some recovery of the sense that’s how Congress works and that’s how the system works would be helpful here.
It should influence the President too. President Trump has said, for example, that in his first month in office he wants to have met every house Republican. Well, why not every house Democrat? I think there are actually probably 25, 30 Democrats who were elected in districts that he won who might have some incentive to work with him on something. Thinking that was possible would by itself I think change some of the incentives and sensibilities that are driving this administration now, and it is possible they’re just ignoring the possibility and preferring to treat this as a more polarized moment than it even is. To begin with, I would want to see a recovery of that kind of instinct, that sense of what’s possible.
I also think that it would be important to think about the character of the budget process as a way to force the president to hear the priorities of different factions in his own party and in the other party. So again, a way of inserting into what we think of as policymaking processes a negotiating mindset, a variety of voices. I think that’s a lot of what’s missing. But beyond that, it’s hard to say. I mean, in a way, the mindset of what’s the thing we would do if we could magically do anything is the problem, not the solution, and it’s how Donald Trump is thinking.
Mark Labberton:
Yeah, that’s right.
Yuval Levin:
What would I do if I were the emperor? I think the most important thing in this moment is for him to realize that he is not the emperor, and that our system never lets us do that thing we would want to do. That’s the beauty of the system, and not breaking that system and therefore asking the other great political question, what can I get done that I also want to achieve, that’s the question our president should ask, and the answer to it has to be mediated by the structure of the system. I think Donald Trump does not take enough account of that structure. The people around him encourage him to ignore that structure, and above all I would want to see them understand themselves as playing a role within the larger constitutional system, and therefore a role that is constrained and accountable and answerable. What worries me is the absence of that.
Mark Labberton:
Which brings us back to character is destiny. Yuval, thank you so much. This has been rich, and I know that many of the listeners will find this extremely stimulating as I have, so thank you again for joining us. I know that it’s typical of presidents to say things like God bless America, but as two people of faith as we are, I think we can say jointly may it be that God would actually bless America in this era with all of its problems. So thank you.
Yuval Levin:
Thank you very much, Mark, and yeah, God bless America.
