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Fareed Zakaria GPS
The Imperial Presidency: A Fareed Zakaria Special. Aired 8-9p ET
Aired May 10, 2026 - 20:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
[20:00:00]
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
OBANA: There we go.
ZAKARIA: President Obama was transforming the country often with the stroke of a pen and without Congress.
OBAMA: Thank you.
ZAKARIA: It was a shocking turnaround for the former constitutional law professor who on the campaign trail had blasted George W. Bush's aggressive use of executive power.
OBAMA: We've paid a heavy price for having a president whose priority is expanding his own power. The Constitution is treated like a nuance.
ZAKARIA: I hope you will join me next for this special report on presidential power.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
DEAN: And thank you for joining me tonight. I'm Jessica Dean. Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there. Have a great night, everyone.
(BEGIN VIDEOTAPE)
FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN ANCHOR (voice-over): Three years after he resigned from office, Richard Nixon gave an interview to the British journalist David Frost and made a striking observation.
DAVID FROST, BRITISH JOURNALIST: So what, in a sense, you're saying is that there are certain situations where the president can decide that it's in the best interest of the nation or something and do something illegal.
RICHARD NIXON, 37TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
FROST: By definition?
NIXON: Exactly. Exactly.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): It was a startling statement from a man who had faced impeachment for abusing his high office. But Nixon was a very good lawyer with a strong grasp of the Constitution. And he understood a crucial feature of American democracy, perhaps its crucial weakness.
The extraordinary potential power of the president. The Department of Justice technically works for the president. It is part of the Executive Branch. And as commander-in-chief, he has vast scope to define acts in the best interests of the nation.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The meeting will come to order.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The Constitution's real check on the president.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What did the president know and when did he know it?
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Impeachment.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All those in favor?
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Is a political process, not a legal one.
NIXON: I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): With removal from office requiring a conviction, voted by two-thirds of the U.S. Senate, few presidents have navigated these realities better than President Donald Trump.
After two impeachments, four indictments and a guilty verdict.
CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN ROBERTS, U.S. SUPREME COURT: Congratulations, Mr. President.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Trump was elected president once again. In his second term, he seems to be living by Nixon's declaration. He has defied Congress, ignored the courts, denied due process, attacked free speech, prosecuted opponents.
DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The United States military began major combat operations in Iran.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Launched a war unilaterally.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Shame on you.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): And even deployed the military to main street. "He who saves his country does not violate any law," Trump has declared. That's a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The first item that President Trump is signing is the rescission of five executive actions.
TRUMP: Could you imagine Biden doing this? I don't think so.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): But Trump is actually the culmination of a long story. Presidential power has been veering out of control for years in ways
the founders never intended. Truth be told, the American presidency was a ticking time bomb, a dangerous vehicle for an unscrupulous person to become a quasi-autocrat.
To understand, we need to go back and tell the story of the IMPERIAL PRESIDENCY.
Welcome to a special report on presidential power. I'm Fareed Zakaria.
[20:05:02]
In 1973, the famous historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. published a book called "The Imperial Presidency." An instant classic. It was the height of the Watergate scandal, when presidential power had reached disturbing new levels. Schlesinger argued that Richard Nixon's abuses of power were singular and egregious. But he also pointed out they were part of a pattern.
Presidents before Nixon, on both sides of the aisle, had been accumulating more and more power, while Congress, the people's House, had grown weaker and weaker. That disturbing imbalance of power has actually gotten worse in many ways since Nixon. And this is exactly what America's founders feared the most.
(Voice-over): America's constitutional convention was held in secret so that the founders could debate and speak freely. But a leak from the proceedings to a local newspaper made one thing clear. It said, "We never once thought of a king." The founders detested monarchy, having risked their lives to defeat one. "So far as we approve of monarchy," the revolutionary Thomas Paine wrote, "in America, the law is king." The nation's first Constitution, "The Articles of Confederation," actually had no executive branch at all.
NOAH FELDMAN, HARVARD LAW SCHOOL: There was no president of the United States because that's how much the framers felt that you couldn't trust centralized authority.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): That very weak government failed so James Madison, the father of the new Constitution, included a president, tightly constrained by checks and balances between the legislature and the judiciary. If there was one branch that reigned supreme, it was not the president. It was Congress. The founders called it the First Branch. "In Republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates," Madison wrote.
LEAH WRIGHT RIGUEUR, JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY: A healthy role of Congress and a power vested in Congress ensures that there can be no king.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Congress would pass all the laws and was given the most crucial powers to tax, regulate commerce, and declare war. The president was to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.
FELDMAN: Madison wanted a weak executive. It was Congress giving the orders, and then it was just up to the president to execute those orders.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): For 150 years, Madison's system worked. During wartime, presidents wielded more power. Most notably Abraham Lincoln in the Civil War. But when the wars were over, power swung back to Congress.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Soviet Russia parades its military strength.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Everything changed dramatically with the start of the Cold War. The conflict with the Soviet Union was a never-ending nuclear armed crisis. Leading presidents to claim vast inherent powers as commanders-in-chief.
CHARLIE SAVAGE, THE NEW YORK TIMES: Presidential power grows enormously in the '50s and the '60s.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Harry Truman launched the Korean War without even asking Congress.
HARRY TRUMAN, 33RD PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We are fighting in Korea for our own national security and survival.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The first president to do so in such a large scale conflict.
FELDMAN: Before the Cold War, that would have been unimaginable.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): President Dwight Eisenhower toppled Iran's government in a coup without going to Congress.
DWIGHT EISENHOWER, 34TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Air action is now in execution.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Lyndon Johnson's administration faked a crisis in the Tonkin Gulf.
LYNDON B. JOHNSON, 36TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Hostile actions have required me to take action.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): And used a congressional vote on that skirmish as the rubber stamp for a war with a half million troops.
The imperial presidency was in full swing. And then came Richard Nixon.
[20:10:02]
NIXON: American and South Vietnamese units will attack the headquarters all along the Cambodian frontier.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Abroad, he expanded the Vietnam War often in secret and asserted extraordinary powers on the home front. Nixon refused to spend money appropriated by Congress, a practice known as impoundment, violating Congress's power of the purse. He withheld information from Congress claiming executive privilege. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Five men were arrested early Saturday while
trying to install eavesdropping equipment at the Democratic National Committee.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): And of course, there was Watergate.
NIXON: If he cancels his trip because of this --
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The break-in and the cover-up were actually a small part of a much larger criminal operation.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I began by telling the president that there was a cancer growing on the presidency.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): There were vast domestic spying programs, burglaries, sabotage and intimidation, involving the Justice Department and the FBI, the IRS and the CIA, all targeting Nixon's enemies list.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Would you consider the crimes to be impeachable if they did apply to you?
ZAKARIA (voice-over): But to Nixon, all of these criminal acts were OK, well, because --
NIXON: When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The White House made it clear today that President Nixon has decided not to release tapes of his conversations.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Watergate culminated in a constitutional crisis.
NIXON: If I were to make public these tapes, the confidentiality of the Office of the President would always be suspect from now on.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Nixon refused to turn over his tapes.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Nothing like this has ever happened before.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: And our offices have been sealed by the FBI.
ZAKARIA: Until finally relenting to a Supreme Court order.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: All those in favor, signify by saying aye. All those opposed no.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: No.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Aye.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Aye.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Facing almost certain impeachment.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: There is a president waving goodbye.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The president resigned.
GERALD FORD, 38TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over.
I, Gerald R. Ford, do solemnly swear.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): After Watergate, America vowed never again.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: This is election 74.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: This is the way it looks across the country.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Democrats will win 299 seats.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): And elected a wave of reformers to Congress to rein in the presidency. The first branch awoke from its slumber, passing a slew of bipartisan laws forbidding impoundment, limiting surveillance and putting watchdogs in executive agencies to name just a few measures.
RIGUEUR: Congress is saying we need to reassert our authority.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The Justice Department established strict rules preventing the White House from meddling in its cases, and from influencing its decisions on whom to prosecute. It was a reset between Congress and the president, and a return to the kind of checks and balances that the founders had envisioned. The hope was to prevent a future president from becoming imperial ever again.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: That is the World Trade Center. And we have --
ZAKARIA (voice-over): But the imperial presidency.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Another plane just crashed right now.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Move it back.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Made a comeback big time.
RICHARD CHENEY, FORMER VICE PRESIDENT: A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): That's next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:16:14]
ZAKARIA: From dismantling government agencies to prosecuting political enemies, to unilaterally launching a war, many of President Trump's actions often appear to violate the law. But all of them are perfectly legal, according to an extreme theory of presidential power. Conceived on the fringes of conservatism, the theory was rejected by the mainstream right for years, but it gradually gained traction, becoming what some experts today call the legal pathway to American autocracy.
It all began in the 1980s.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The American presidency had an action riding up to Capitol Hill.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): On a warm January day in 1981, President Ronald Reagan declared the dawn of his revolution.
RONALD REAGAN, 40TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): He was determined to drastically roll back the federal government.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: President Reagan's budget cutting blade is hanging over the federal government.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): But Reagan's new hardcore conservatism, a historic departure from moderate Republicans, faced a challenge. How could it possibly defeat a massive government bureaucracy that had been lawfully created by Congress?
RIGUEUR: He makes a lot of promises, but he is faced with a congressional body that is very hostile to his agenda.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The president of the United States.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The solution? A new imperial presidency. As political scientist Terry Mau and William Howell describe in their book "Trajectory of Power," it was the right's fervent desire to slash big government that led to a novel and ultimately dangerous legal theory.
"The unitary executive theory." The godfather of this new doctrine was Reagan's close adviser and second attorney general, Edwin Meese.
EDWIN MEESE, FORMER UNITED STATES ATTORNEY GENERAL: The framers did not envision a weak executive.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Meese recruited talented young conservative lawyers and turned Reagan's Justice Department into a kind of right- wing legal think tank churning out new conservative ideas. Out of this transformed Department of Justice came the unitary executive theory. In a radical departure from 200 years of precedent, the Justice Department argued that the president enjoyed complete control over agencies within the executive branch and could ignore laws passed by Congress which had created and shaped these agencies in the first place.
SAVAGE: There would later be attempts to say, well, it's kind of been there since the dawn of time, but no, this was a thing that was invented right at that moment in the mid-'80s.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Justice Department officials even suggested that the president could defy the Supreme Court. RIGUEUR: That suggests that the president is beholden to no one but
the president.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Some veteran Republicans were appalled by these claims to new, unchecked presidential power.
RIGUEUR: There's a lot of tension with old school Republicans who are like, this is not the way that you do things.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Also a concerned. The right-leaning Supreme Court.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The Supreme Court rejected Reagan administration arguments.
[20:20:00]
ZAKARIA (voice-over): In a 7-1 decision, it swatted down the theory in 1988. Writing for the majority, Chief Justice William Rehnquist, a former head of the Nixon White House legal team. and no bleeding heart liberal himself, would not even use the words unitary executive in his decision.
FELDMAN: Chief Justice William Rehnquist was a conservative's conservative, and Rehnquist had no use for the unitary executive theory.
ZAKARIA: It was a devastating defeat for the legal theory, but within a faction of the right, its influence continued to grow, and it was championed by the ultimate Washington insider, Richard Cheney.
(Voice-over): Starting as a staffer in the Nixon administration, Dick Cheney became President Gerald Ford's chief of staff, and he watched the presidency get cut down to size in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate.
SAVAGE: And from inside the White House, where young Cheney is being shaped, this did not look like a necessary constitutional correction. It looked like an outrage.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): From that point on, Cheney made it his mission to rebuild the power of the White House.
CHENEY: We've seen our concern about Watergate and Vietnam create that the myth of the so-called imperial presidency.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): In addition to domestic agencies, Cheney believed the Constitution gave the president absolute power over national security.
CHENEY: Where the president as commander-in-chief in the interest of protecting American lives is justified in taking whatever action he deems appropriate.
GEORGE H.R. BUSH, 41ST PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Dick, welcome aboard. ZAKARIA (voice-over): As secretary of defense, he urged President
George H.W. Bush to launch the First Gulf War without going to Congress, as required by law.
BUSH: The battle has been joined.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Bush rejected Cheney's advice and got Congress to greenlight the U.S. intervention. Cheney later claimed that Bush could have attacked even if Congress had voted no.
CHENEY: I would certainly recommend to the president that we go forward anyway.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: That is the World Trade Center, and we have --
ZAKARIA (voice-over): But it would take a national tragedy.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: Another plane just crashed right now.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Move it back.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): For Cheney's view of executive power to be fully realized. The horror of September 11th quickly provided an opportunity for Vice President Cheney to expand presidential power.
RIGUEUR: Fear is this incredibly compelling tool, and the person that knows it better than anyone else is Dick Cheney. I think in 9/11, what Cheney saw is an opportunity to put the unitary executive's theory into full blown practice and to ensure that this is an ideology that is full steam ahead.
CHENEY: A lot of what needs to be done here will have to be done quietly, without any discussion.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): As Congress prepared to send the country to war against al Qaeda, President George W. Bush's White House lobbied for an even broader mandate. A blank check to wage war anywhere in the world, including inside the United States. Congress said no. But the White House grabbed more power for itself anyway.
SAVAGE: After 9/11, a sort of new and improved version of the unitary executive theory destroys the ability of Congress to regulate the entire government.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Reviving the once fringe unitary executive theory to give the president free rein over domestic agencies and combining it with Cheney's belief in a president's complete control over national security, Bush's legal team wrote secret memos claiming nearly unlimited presidential power. Those memos would form the legal backbone of the war on terror and lead to some of Bush's most controversial policies.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Apparently our government has been spying on us.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): From warrantless surveillance of millions of Americans' phone calls and e-mails. UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: So-called enhanced interrogation techniques.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): To the use of torture. Congress had passed laws making those actions illegal. But the White House said it could simply ignore those laws.
FELDMAN: Dick Cheney encouraged people throughout the government to say, whatever we do is part of our inherent power and can't be limited by Congress.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Cheney's decades long quest to restore presidential power had been accomplished. His triumph then leaves a powerful legacy today.
[20:25:01]
RIGUEUR: Dick Cheney lays the blueprint for Donald Trump's expansion of presidential power. Without Dick Cheney, there is no imperial Donald Trump.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Coming up.
(CROWD CHANTING "YES, WE CAN!")
ZAKARIA (voice-over): A young senator from Illinois who blasted Bush and Cheney's imperial presidency.
BARACK OBAMA, 44TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Change has come to America.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): And became an imperial president himself.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:30:17]
ZAKARIA: Not so long ago, it was the Republican Party that was rising up in protest over a president they said was acting like a king.
WOLF BLITZER, CNN ANCHOR: The imperial president, the autocratic leader.
JOHN KING, CNN CHIEF NATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Some Republicans called him the imperial president, that he's using executive powers to go beyond his true authority.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The imperial president they were talking about -- Barack Obama. And in a way, the Republicans had a point.
OBAMA: We can't wait for an increasingly dysfunctional Congress to do its job. Where they won't act, I will. There we go.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): President Obama was transforming the country often with the stroke of a pen and without Congress.
OBAMA: Thank you. ZAKARIA (voice-over): It was a shocking turnaround for the former
constitutional law professor who, on the campaign trail had blasted George W. Bush's aggressive use of executive power.
OBAMA: We've paid a heavy price for having a president whose priority is expanding his own power. The Constitution is treated like a nuisance.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): But once in the White House, Obama began to expand his own power.
RIGUEUR: Obama starts doing things through executive order and just signing executive order after executive order.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): At the beginning of his presidency, Obama bent over backwards to work with congressional Republicans on an economic stimulus plan to.
OBAMA: To make our economy stronger.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): On health care reform.
OBAMA: Health care is hard.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): On anything, really.
RIGUEUR: Republicans adamantly opposed everything that he does.
ANDY KROLL, PROPUBLICA: Their goal was to make Barack Obama a one-term president.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): So Obama decided to govern alone, relying increasingly on executive orders. He ordered power plants to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by over 30 percent by 2030. Increased the minimum wage for hundreds of thousands of federal workers. And unilaterally extended the deadline for the Obamacare health insurance mandate.
KROLL: Republicans in Congress are predictably furious about this.
JOHN BOEHNER (R), FORMER SPEAKER OF THE HOUSE: The president is taking the actions that he himself has said are those of a king or an emperor, not an American president.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): There was one arena in which Obama flexed his presidential power, perhaps more dramatically than any other. Immigration.
BROOKE BALDWIN, FORMER CNN ANCHOR: This is just one of those days that a lot of young people are going to remember for the rest of their lives.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Obama announced DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, by executive action.
OBAMA: The Department of Homeland Security is taking steps to lift the shadow of deportation from these young people.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants who had arrived as children could now deferred deportation and work in the country legally. Previously, Obama had insisted he could not make such a massive move without Congress. "I am not king," he said. But Congress had repeatedly failed to act. Critics accused Obama of illegally overriding existing immigration law.
KROLL: If you talk to constitutional scholars about DACA, there is a real fierce debate and I think some pretty strong arguments that this was policy under the guise of executive action.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): But if Obama's actions seemed like an overreach, they proved to be small bore compared to what would come next. Donald Trump.
TRUMP: The Office of President of the United States.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Trump made it clear in 2016.
TRUMP: We're going to make America great again.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): That he had a big appetite for executive power.
TRUMP: I alone can fix it.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): But Trump would need help if he wanted to maximize the power of his office. From a master bureaucrat and a self- described radical, Russell Vought.
RUSSELL VOUGHT, DIRECTOR, OFFICE OF THE MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET: Washington has a spending problem.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Vought has been the mastermind behind some of Trump's biggest power grabs, testing the limits of legality.
KROLL: Vought was the one who laid the groundwork for this incredible display of executive power.
[20:35:01]
ZAKARIA (voice-over): For years, Vought had believed that the president should be able to do whatever he wished with the federal bureaucracy, even though it is Congress that has the sole power to create agencies, structure them, and fund them.
Vought embraced the unitary executive theory, that once fringe interpretation of the Constitution that gives the president absolute control over the Executive Branch, even in defiance of congressional laws.
(Voice-over): That theory gave Vought a license to steal, his critics say. When as the head of the Office of Management and Budget in the first Trump term, he refused to spend money that Congress had legally allocated. KROLL: Congress is more or less no longer a co-equal branch of
government if the president has the ability to block the most important power given to Congress in the Constitution, the power of the purse.
TRUMP: Do not worry. We are going to build the wall. OK? Don't worry.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): One of the first big tests of Vought's extralegal approach was the battle to build Trump's border wall. The fight between Trump and Congress over funding for the wall led to a then record 35-day government shutdown. When the bill did finally pass, Trump got over $1 billion for steel fencing. But he wanted more.
KROLL: The White House sees it really as a middle finger to President Trump.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Russell Vought helped come up with a solution. Declare a national emergency at the border with Mexico. As a result, his Office of Management and Budget simply took nearly $4 billion that was lawfully assigned to the military's budget to fund the wall.
KROLL: There wasn't an emergency at the southern border in a way that justified declaring this kind of national emergency.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The move provoked anger on both sides of the aisle.
SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR (D-MN): I believe this is unconstitutional.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Vought later mocked those who had stood in his way.
VOUGHT: President Trump had a bunch of people around him where he was constantly like sitting on eggs and saying, oh, my gosh, he's getting me to violate the law.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The border stunt was the canary in the coal mine for many presidential power grabs to come. Vought championed the power of impoundment, which would let the president refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress.
SAVAGE: He wants to shrink the size of government. The president can simply just not spend money on programs that Congress has funded. The size of government can shrink dramatically.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Congress had specifically outlawed the practice after Watergate, but Vought didn't care. In 2019, he and Trump froze over $200 million in security assistance for Ukraine, allegedly to pressure President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to investigate Joe Biden. The Government Accountability Office said that withholding the aid broke the law.
FELDMAN: If Congress allocates money for a specific purpose, then the president just has to execute the law by spending that money on that purpose. Unless Congress has given him explicit discretion, he's got to do it. UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The Senate will convene as a court of impeachment.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Trump was impeached for the whole Ukraine debacle.
TRUMP: I did nothing wrong.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): But in the end, he was acquitted by a Republican majority Senate.
FELDMAN: The takeaway for Trump, and really for the whole system, was you can get away with this, and maybe it's actually not a violation of our constitutional principles. Probably the single greatest expansion of executive power that took place in Trump's first term was doing that and getting away with it.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): For Trump and Vought the executive power grab was just beginning.
TRUMP: I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Trump 2.0 is next.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[20:44:04]
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Late January of 2021 was a dark time at Mar-a- Lago. Donald Trump had just left office in disgrace.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: The president departs the White House for a final time this morning.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): After a second impeachment.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: And House Resolution 24 impeaching Donald John Trump, president of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): He was accused of inciting an insurrection to overturn an election.
TRUMP: We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Indictments loomed. Prison was possible. A second term was all but a pipe dream. But Russell Vought was planning for one. In an old townhouse in Washington, he had launched the Center for Renewing America. One of its top priorities, preparing the game plan for an unprecedented display of executive power.
[20:45:08]
In Vought's eyes, the stakes could not have been higher.
KROLL: He talks in almost apocalyptic terms about the direction of the country.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): In a remarkable essay in 2022, he declared, "We are living in a post-constitutional time. The left had thrown out the Constitution," Vought claimed, "because the left's woke and weaponized deep state bureaucracy was against the people. We are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover," he warned. So the right needed to assert executive power over the bureaucracy and simply crush all the left's entrenched forces.
FELDMAN: If you support the idea that the government is broken and the only thing that can fix it is by bringing in a single imperial president, then anything is justified.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Vought envisioned a president who would eliminate lawfully created government agencies.
BRIANNA KEILAR, CNN ANCHOR: USAID officially shuts down.
KAITLAN COLLINS, CNN ANCHOR: President Trump shredded the 45-year-old U.S. Department of Education.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Used the Justice Department to openly prosecute political enemies.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: A federal grand jury indicted former FBI director James Comey.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): And used the military to put down protests.
One of the last things Vought wanted his president to do was to worry about the law.
TRUMP: This is going to be close to 500 miles by the time we finished.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Too many policies had been foiled in Trump's first term, Vought claimed, because his lawyers said, you can't do that.
VOUGHT: I don't want President Trump having to lose a moment of time, having fights in the Oval Office about whether something is legal or doable or moral.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Vought's philosophy harkened back to President Nixon's approach to the rule of law.
NIXON: When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Vought wrote a chapter on executive power for Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for a Trump restoration. It was so controversial during the campaign that Trump denied knowing anything about it.
TRUMP: I don't know what the hell it is. It's Project 25. That's seriously extreme, but I don't know anything about it. I don't want to know anything about it. ZAKARIA (voice-over): Meanwhile, the Democrats had four years to rein
in executive power, just as they did after Watergate, but did remarkably little.
JOE BIDEN, 46TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: My campaign for president, I made a commitment.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): President Joe Biden pushed the limits of power himself, canceling roughly half a trillion in student loan debt with an executive action.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: About 43 million people would qualify for loan cancellations.
UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: $300 billion is the amount of money that taxpayers will be on the hook for.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): The Supreme Court halted Biden's measure, but then issued a monumental, controversial decision granting the president's executive power never before seen in American history.
TRUMP: All of us here today do not want to see our election victory stolen.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): In a case over whether Trump could face charges for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, the court gave all presidents immunity from prosecution for any official presidential act, placing them firmly above the rule of law. In a scathing dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out that a president could commit blatantly criminal acts and face no charges.
ASSOC. JUSTICE SONIA SOTOMAYOR, U.S. SUPREME COURT: Orders the Navy SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival. Immune. Organizes a military coup to hold on to power. Immune.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): "The president is now a king, above the law," she wrote.
TRUMP: We will very quickly make America great again. Thank you very much.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): Donald Trump won the 2024 election. Over 50 criminal charges against him were dropped.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Ending the weaponization of government.
ZAKARIA (voice-over): And from day one, Trump would follow Russell Vought's game plan for the most powerful presidency since Nixon. A super imperial presidency never seen before.
Coming up, my closing thoughts on executive power.
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ZAKARIA: And now for some closing thoughts on this subject.
Liberal democracy came out of the West before spreading to many parts of the world, from Asia to Africa. But where and when did it begin? One plausible answer would be in 1215, in a meadow on the banks of the River Thames near Windsor Castle.
That's where King John met barons and archbishops contesting his rule and issued magna carta, which for the first time set formal limits on the king's power. That idea, checks on the authority of the executive, lies at the heart of liberal democracy. At the heart of the West's distinctive contribute to the world.
America played a crucial role in deepening this tradition. Many consider the first written constitution in the world to be the Fundamental Orders of Connecticut adopted in 1639. That's why Connecticut is called the Constitution State, which you can still see on its license plates.
[20:55:00]
The fundamental orders advance the Western project of limiting executive power. It is that system that is now in danger, weakened by the steady rise of presidential power in America since the Cold War. Expanded further by the war on terror, and now transformed into an out of control beast under Donald Trump.
As I've argued before, when you look at Western democracies today, the United States stands out. Populism has surged across much of the democratic world. Distrust of elites is widespread. Political rhetoric has grown more furious and personal. But America appears to have moved further down the path toward illiberal democracy, a system in which elections remain even as constitutional restraints, independent institutions and the rule of law are steadily hollowed out.
The United States is the oldest constitutional democracy in the world. That is why its slippage is so striking. Sweden's V-Dem Institute, which measures the condition of democracies around the globe, has described the erosion of American democracy as unprecedented in scale. In an earlier age, almost any one of the administration's actions would have triggered a national uproar. But now they come so fast and in so many spheres that shock has curdled into fatigue.
We see threats and lawsuits directed against media companies, attempts to stifle law firms to work with government agencies, and even access to federal buildings. The use of the Justice Department against political opponents and the deployment of military forces within the United States. Some of these steps are defended as vigorous assertions of presidential authority, but almost no one could deny that their range, frequency, and aggressiveness are extraordinary. Certainly unlike anything in the half century since Watergate.
Ironically, part of the problem lies in the very success of the American constitutional order. Because it has endured for so long, Americans have come to assume that it does not merely work, but it needs no repair. Yet America's political framework dates back not just to 1776 or even 1639, but to even earlier informal institutions and arrangements devised by English settlers in North America. It was a remarkably modern system for its time, but that time was four centuries ago.
Many other Western democracies, often drawing directly from the American example, later adapted and improved on it, especially after 1945. They created justice systems and electoral commissions, more insulated from day to day politics. In the United States, by contrast. neither prosecutors nor elections are reliably protected from partisan pressures.
The same is true elsewhere in the system. Since Watergate strong norms developed against overt executive interference with law enforcement. But norms are only norms as the Trump administration has shown, by breaking them with little consequence. Many democracies have found less politicized ways to choose judges and have imposed fixed terms on senior jurists. America has retained an openly partisan process for appointing federal judges and then grants them life tenure.
In other words, other nations borrowed some of America's core insights. Checks and balances. Judicial review. Constitutional limits on executive power. And then refined them in practice.
As I've shared before, Steven Levitsky, one of the foremost scholars of democratic collapse and the coauthor of "How Democracies Die," once told me that perhaps the deepest cause of this institutional decay is that America has been so successful for so long that it never felt much need to reform itself. It's a truism in business, as in life, that people learn less from success than from failure.
America won the Cold War, led the information revolution, and remains, by almost every material measure, the most powerful country on Earth. And so we have been slow to scrutinize our own system, to recognize its weaknesses and to improve it. As Levitsky put it, "American exceptionalism has blinded us to weaknesses in our constitutional and political system."
Alongside this lack of introspection, Levitsky described as crucial the failure of leadership. "We have no memory of democratic collapse or authoritarian rule," he noted. "In places like Poland and Brazil, generations know what it is like to have lost the rule of law and constitutional safeguards. But Republican leaders, business leaders, Supreme Court justices don't seem to think that we could actually watch democracy decay and even die. This is America, they seem to think. We're different."
That failure of imagination is creating the complacency that might prove deadly.
My thanks to all of you for watching this special hour. I'm Fareed Zakaria.
