The Just Security Podcast

‘The Presidents and the People’ Book Talk

• Just Security • Episode 88

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With the U.S. presidential election less than a week away, anxiety is high, both across the country and around the world. Many fear the rise of populism and the erosion of democratic norms. In over two centuries, the United States has had many presidents who pushed on the door of anti-democratic power, but it has also had people who pushed back. 

Ahead of the election, what lessons can we learn by looking to the past? 

Brown University political scientist Corey Brettschneider is one of the leading thinkers on presidential power. His recent book, The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It examines how John Adams, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, and Richard Nixon abused their power, and how citizens like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Daniel Ellsberg resisted and offered a more democratic understanding of the Constitution. 

Just Security Senior Fellow Tom Joscelyn sat down with Brettschneider to discuss the book and the lessons it offers for the election, the state of American democracy, and beyond.

Here is Tom’s conversation with Corey Brettschneider. 

Show Notes: 

Paras Shah: With the U.S. presidential election less than a week away, anxiety is high, both across the country and around the world. Many fear the rise of populism and the erosion of democratic norms. In over two centuries, the United States has had many presidents who pushed on the door of anti-democratic power, but it has also had people who pushed back. 

Ahead of the election, what lessons can we learn by looking to the past? 

This is the Just Security Podcast. I’m your host, Paras Shah. 

Brown University political scientist Corey Brettschneider is one of the leading thinkers on presidential power. His recent book, The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It, examines how John Adams, James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, and Richard Nixon abused their power, and how citizens like Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Daniel Ellsberg resisted and offered a more democratic understanding of the Constitution. 

Just Security Senior Fellow Tom Joscelyn sat down with Brettschneider to discuss the book and the lessons it offers for the election, the state of American democracy, and beyond. 

Here is Tom’s conversation with Corey Brettschneider.  

Tom Joscelyn: Hi. My name is Tom Joscelyn. I'm a Senior Fellow at Just Security. And prior to joining Just Security, I was a senior professional staff member on the House January 6 Committee, and there I was one of the principal drafters of the Committee's final report. 

As part of my work for Just Security, we are running a series on democracy backsliding and the solutions to the issues that we currently face in the U.S. and abroad. And today, we're recording a podcast with Corey Brettschneider, who is the author of a very interesting book, an excellent book, really, that I highly recommend, titled The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It. And Corey is a professor at Brown University, where he teaches constitutional law and politics. He has written another book called The Oath in the Office, which I read after reading this one, and also, similarly, can recommend, and he's very widely written for other publications. And so, I want to welcome Corey first to our podcast. Thank you for joining us. 

Corey Brettschneider: Thanks so much, Tom, really looking forward to the conversation. And of course, the book, if there was any audience for it, it's you and your Committee and the fine work that you did. 

Tom: Well, I certainly appreciate that. But the book, I think, and again, the title is The Presidents and the People. It really does reframe American history in a very intriguing way. It really tells — what I found interesting about the book — and this is, I'm going to put the fluffy praise up front, and then we can get into the substance of it — but what I thought was interesting is, there's a lot of stories in the book I was familiar with beforehand, but the way you told them or retold them really kind of shed new light on the whole matter, which I thought was really interesting. And that to me, as somebody who's been reading up on John Adams, for instance, and my opinion of Adams has gotten lower and lower and lower the more I've read, your book, sort of, was the final nail in that coffin. But there are many other stories in the book that are very, very interesting, so I highly recommend it.

In any event, let's move on to the actual meat and potatoes now, of our podcasts, and less praise and more discussion. You know, we're recording this podcast one week prior to the presidential election in the U.S. For the first time in modern American history, at least, we have a presidential candidate who, I would argue, and I think many people would argue, is openly running as an autocrat. He's someone who has no respect for the U.S. Constitution or the rule of law. And you know, Corey, one of the arguments I've heard from folks on the American right, sort of enabling what we hear come out of Donald Trump on a near daily basis, is, well, you know, we shouldn't worry too much about the threat he poses to our constitutional order, because our institutions are strong enough to contain his autocratic ambitions.  

This is something I see often on social media. It's something I see often in conservative press. And, you know, every time now I hear or read that specious argument, I think of your book, and I thought of it often as I was reading your book, because your book is really a warning, I think, that our institutions are not nearly as strong as we may think they are in terms of containing the autocratic ambitions of a president. And for that reason, I think you really outline why that is. You really quote Patrick Henry, a revolutionary who did not want to ratify the Constitution, and precisely because he was concerned about the powers of the presidency. 

Do you think that's a fair assessment, kicking off, that our institutions really are not as strong as maybe a lot of people think they are? 

Corey: Yes, absolutely. And I think that is exactly, as you said, central to what I'm trying to convey, that there is a sort of naive idea, somehow, that the Constitution has these magic mechanisms in it. And just to elaborate on what you said, I take very seriously the revolutionary hero, Patrick Henry's, warning to America about how weak the institutions are going to be, the checks, specifically, on a president.  

And let me just elaborate on what he says, because I really think he says it in a way that's so prescient. He says, look, in many ways, the framers are assuming a good person in the office of the president, a person of virtue, the way that they spoke. And specifically, of course, they're imagining the president of the Constitutional Convention as the first president, George Washington, who isn't going to collapse the system. He's too modest for that. And what Henry says is, but what if? What if you get a bad person in power in the office of the presidency? And what if — and this is the part that's really worrying — what if you get a criminal president? And he says, the institutions, you know, the way it's supposed to work, it's not going to work. Think, for instance, of the courts, the Supreme Court striking down or stopping unconstitutional action by a president. That's not going to happen. What about impeachment, the thing that the framers really think is going to stop a president who abuses power. That's not going to happen either. And then he goes on to say, instead, what's going to happen is that this person, the criminal president, is going to see that, in the face of his crimes, that there is nothing to stop it. And that's going to embolden him. 

And then he makes a wild prediction, which is that in fact, this person won't stop when it comes to making a — this is his phrase — “push” for the American throne and will eventually crown himself a monarch. That's the language that Henry uses. And my argument in the book is that, that's been true to some extent — that courts, far from stopping abusive presidents, have often enabled them. And I think you mentioned, for instance, John Adams. Well, when John Adams signs the Sedition Act — which is gerrymandered to attack political opponents, and it makes it a crime, essentially, to criticize the president, but not a crime to criticize the Vice President, Thomas Jefferson, who's a member of the opposition party — it's used to shut down journalists who criticize Adams, or sitting Congressman Matthew Leon from Vermont was prosecuted,  why not go to the Supreme Court? And the answer is, well, Samuel Chase, you know, maybe the most important justice at the time, has lobbied for the acts and went so far as to exercise his ability to sit on the lower court prosecution of Thomas Cooper and make sure he couldn't even raise the free speech claim. So, it's just, right, and the book, Dred Scott, for instance, I talk about, or even U.S. v. Nixon, which we could get into, leaves so much room for abuse despite the fact that it's an important decision. So, even when the court acts as it should, it's weak when it comes to a check.  

What about impeachment? I talk about the Johnson impeachment and why that was justifiable, but yet failed in the end, and think, most recently, of course, of the January 6 impeachment, which, if ever there was a time when impeachment was justifiable, it was there, and yet it didn't work. But yet, the book has hope in it, as you know too, because the idea isn't that the system will collapse, or that there's no check. There is a check, which is citizens rising up in what I call these democratic constitutional constituencies and getting behind and calling to account, recovering, presidents after crisis presidents. So, it's a story of cycle of crisis and recovery, and the mechanism that's doing the work are these citizen movements aimed at recovering our Constitution, and specifically the Democratic idea of a constitution.

Tom: You already have gotten — we've already talked about John Adams a couple times, and definitely next on my list to go through with you is just a brief sort of summary of his, I think, strange and curious views of the Constitution. I mean, one of the things that stood out to me — it was surprising to me, and maybe be surprising to other people who are not steeped in this stuff like you are, but just how that there were founding fathers, founders of this country, who had an anti-democratic reading of the Constitution. 

And I think you write in your book that it's not really agreed upon how widely held that view was, but certainly, John Adams had a quasi-monarchical view, or semi-monarchical view, of the Constitution and the powers of the presidency. And it all seems very counter intuitive to me and probably to a lot of other people, because, how can a president, who’s only a president for four years, have the powers of a monarch. You know, it doesn't really make much sense on its face.  

But the more you read up on John Adams, the more I kind of began to suspect that that HBO mini-series that came out several years ago really whitewashed him, you know? Paul Giamatti is a great actor, and I agree with one of his previous characters on Merlot, but when it comes to portraying John Adams, I think that it didn't really portray the John Adams that we see come alive in the pages of your book and in other works now to kind of expose his views. 

And maybe, can you elaborate a little bit on how John Adams and maybe some others — again, we don't know exactly how widespread this was — how they viewed the presidency within the confines of the Constitution, how they had such a different view of that role? 

Corey: Yeah, great. I mean, the Constitution, of course, is written in broad principles. It's vague, it's somewhat short, and so, there are just differing interpretations of it and differing reasons — readings, sorry, of it. There are differing readings of it. And part of the argument of the book is that you have a current, one strand, of authoritarian readings of the Constitution, and specifically the powers of the president. And that stands in contrast to the heroes of the book who defend this democratic idea, heroes like the newspaper editors who fought Adams when it came to their own prosecutions. The main hero of the book, I'd say, is Frederick Douglass and his insistence on the idea of “we the people” being the primary principle of reading the Constitution, and people like Daniel Ellsberg and Wlliam Monroe Trotter and less known people like Sadie Alexander. They're the citizens who really defend the democratic idea.  

But exactly as you say, part of the threat of these five before Trump — and of course, all of them have elements of Trump — presidents who abused power, who had authoritarian actions that defined, in many ways, their presidencies, what made them so dangerous, in part, was the idea that they had of an authoritarian constitution. And so, let's just take a couple. When it comes to Adams, I completely agree. McCullough and others, you know, there's a tradition of writing about presidential history where you talk about how learned the person was, how virtuous, how wonderful. And when you look at the actual reality of American history, that's often not true, including of our most loved, supposedly loved figures.  

And for Adams, you know, if this wasn't a hidden idea or something that was secret. He was a political theorist and a lawyer and one of the most learned people of his time. That part's right. But when you look at what his view is, it's that actually, I think he thought that there were too few powers of the British monarch, too much constraint of Parliament on the monarchy, and when he imagined the president as an analogous figure to the monarch, he wanted even more power, in some ways, than the British king.  

Now, what specifically did that mean? You know, it meant that, for him, the justification of a mixed constitution was that some, you know, the lower house, for instance, the House of Representatives might be based in popular sovereignty and “we the people”, but the justification of the presidency was very different. It was based in an idea of stability, and so that gave rise to the idea that, really, the president was beholden to the people. 

So, when it comes to the Sedition Act — and I laid out, you know, how partisan it was — it didn't look unconstitutional to him or many in his party who shared his beliefs. And in fact, many Federalists had exactly this idea, kind of, monarchical idea. And because under the British common law, of course, criticizing the king was a crime. It was a crime of sedition. And so, the idea that you would have a statute that enact that common law principle to protect the entity, the president, that was supposed to be the basis for stability in the country — that didn't look unconstitutional to them. So, it wasn't that they were embarrassed, or this was some secret that they had. It was really based in a monarchical, quasi-monarchical idea. I mean, it's not that he's an absolute monarchist. It's a kind of constitutional monarchy, is his idea, and that's completely consistent with sedition and the shutdown of the opposition party and Chase and others backed him up. My worry is that this court, when they look at the history, they'll revive that monarchical view. And you see little bits of hints of this, that really the Sedition Act might not have been unconstitutional the way some Federalists understood it. 

I'll give Richard Nixon as the other example, because, you know, that's the most, one of the most famous lines in American history — when a president does it, it's not illegal. And it's seen as sort of a you can't handle the truth moment, like a moment in which he just sort of lost his cool and said this wild thing. But for him, it was also a reflected view. He thought that in a civil war — and he thought America was in a civil war with protesters like Daniel Ellsberg at the head of it — that a president had emergency powers, and so, like Lincoln, he really could shut down the opposition. And when he formed the kind of criminal “plumbers” unit, that wasn't, you know, something that was, he thought, illegal. And now, of course, with the immunity decision, which I'm sure we'll get to, in an awful way that authoritarian idea of the presidency is at least partially vindicated. 

So, yes, there is this idea of presidential power based in an authoritarian idea of the Constitution. And part of the argument of the book is that the way the Democratic idea of “we the people” gets formed is in opposition. The newspaper editors resisting Adams’ authoritarianism do not read the First Amendment as just a consistent with the idea that that sedition was completely constitutional. They think of it as a right to dissent, a right to criticize the president the way that, I think now, is baked into the ether of the United States, hopefully for a long time — that you can't just shut down the opposition party, that Saturday Night Live isn't an illegal act. 

And there was an attempt, I think too, to push back against Nixon, by Daniel Ellsberg and others and the grand jurors who tried to indict him, who thought a president wasn't above the law. And as I said, I worried in that case that we still are in the midst of that authoritarian idea, in some ways. Some of the ideas of the unitary executive, and in particular the immunity case, further that idea. 

I'll mention, too, Woodrow Wilson, another great hero, and “hero”, as he's often portrayed. I do not portray him as a hero. What I did there in uncovering his — and each of them have different ideas of this authoritarian version of the presidency, I mentioned Nixon and Adams — and for Wilson, it's much populist. He does think that the president has a democratic authority because he's elected by the American people, but it's a kind of populist idea that that authority can be used in all sorts of abusive ways. 

And in particular, his nationalism and his white supremacy — he’s certainly not the first white supremacist president — but they go hand in hand at the core of his idea that a president is supposed to further national efficiency. And he says, well, what's the thing that stands in the way of national efficiency? It's what he calls friction. What does he mean by friction? He means integration. So, when I went into the lecture notes, which I don't think anybody's ever looked at before, of Wilson's students collected by a librarian at Princeton, that's really the vision that you see of his authoritarianism, that it is a kind of racial authoritarianism tied to his white supremacy.

Tom: Yeah, now that you mentioned his lecture notes, which I thought, as a nerd, that immediately jumped off the page to me, that you were referencing a source I think has probably not been plumbed nearly as much as it should be. 

But, let's take a step back and look at the sort of the architecture for a second for the five presidents you cover, because we just talked about John Adams, and of course, his egregious behavior was really aimed at his political opposition, his critics, through the Alien and Sedition Act. And we've covered that. I think it's striking in your book how three of the other presidents you cover — James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Woodrow Wilson — those middle three, really, their behavior is aimed at denying racial equality and racial justice. And it really leaps off the page how much of their behavior and their actions and how they threaten the constitutional order really did discriminate against Black Americans and was trying to enshrine white supremacy. 

And you mentioned your critique of Woodrow Wilson. If you're a fan of Woodrow Wilson, I implore you to pick up this book and read Corey’s evisceration of Woodrow Wilson, because you will not be — you should not be a fan after the fact. But, you know, you go through these three presidents, I think, very carefully, and how you know their actions really were aimed at Black Americans and denying equality and racial justice. 

But contrasting that, you mention Frederick Douglass, who is one of the great heroes of American history, and he really does leap off the page. I mean, a really remarkable figure. But maybe, I thought, maybe you could talk a little bit about how Black Americans have played such an essential role in really making America a democracy, really making it a democratic and “united states” of America, as opposed to something else. 

Corey: Yeah, and that really is the crucial moment where that happens. Of course, if Adams would have succeeded, there wouldn't have been an opposition party. That was his attempt, and he came pretty close to it. I talk in the book, as you know, about a plot that sounds a lot like January 6, where the Federalists had a bill to deny the certification of electoral votes, with the thought that if there weren't enough votes to through that that first process, that things would be thrown to the House of Representatives. It sounds a lot like Trump and Eastman's plot, and when that was uncovered by a newspaper editor named Dwayne, they sought his prosecution. 

So, this was a very serious threat to even getting the project of American democracy off the ground, trying to, really, steal an election and to seek the prosecution of your political opponents — we wouldn't have even had the beginnings. And that fails. The presidency — when Thomas Jefferson says, we’re all Federalists, we're all Republicans, it is a democratic core idea, because it's saying, essentially, we're not going to prosecute the opposition, we're not going to bring back the Sedition Act. And in particular, when Madison refuses to prosecute his opponents in the War of 1812 despite the calls to do so from his own party, when he in fact highlights the opposition Federalists by inviting them to the White House — that's the beginning of American democracy. Without it, as I said, we would have had an autocracy. It wouldn't — the project wouldn't have done. 

Tom: I've got one quick question for you there on James Madison. This comes from my colleague Ryan Goodman. It's interesting. You deal with James Madison, and rightfully so, praise him for not evoking another Sedition Act, or trying to quash his opposition during the War of 1812. It's curious what you think about his handling of Andrew Jackson, who, you know, he obviously chastises him in private, but Andrew Jackson, of course, who goes on to become president and really defies the constitutional order in his own way, especially with the oppression of the Cherokee Nation and things he does there. You know, he does assault the constitutional order when he's, you know, running things in Louisiana, and he institutes martial law, and he refuses to revoke martial law. He imprisons, you know, any dissent or the people criticizing him. I’m curious if you think that is there anything, should James Madison have done more to basically chastise, in public, Andrew Jackson, and maybe that would have, you know, sort of rapped him on the hands? Or do you think there was no further he could have gone?  

Corey: Yeah, I think it's a balance. I have a hard time judging him, because I think what he's trying to do is, he’s certainly refusing in his — I think the heroic thing is, let's remember, it's war. And so, in the midst of war, there's an easy out for him to bring back the Sedition Act. You could say Adams, that was a, you know, quasi-war was, you know, tension, but there was no actual war. The White House had been burned. And so, the thought that there was a national emergency, I think was, in some ways, the commonsense thought. So, he's doing something extraordinary in refusing to bring back the Sedition Act, refusing to prosecute opponents, and, in stopping his military leader Andrew Jackson, who is really trying his best to shut down free speech and to stop opponents in New Orleans. 

And, you know, so, I thought that, my kind of thought about him is, in fact, he's criticized often for being a kind of passive president, but he's doing so much in resisting the commonsense, at the time, idea in reviving — now, I think his worry is, if he had been more aggressive in protecting free speech and by, you know, not just limiting the actions of — and, you know, there were legal proceedings against Jackson, stuff is done, but if he had gone further right, my worry is that that, you know, he might have lost the support that he had for what was already a controversial defense of democracy. B 

But absolutely, you’re right, the threats reemerge, and Jackson, far from being chastised, you know, that would have been a nice end of that chapter, that Madison resists him, and that's the end of his career. But of course, it's not. And, you know, to me, it makes the point that things are so fragile. Our first point, that even if you have these victories, as Madison did, and protecting free speech, there's a vulnerability that in the future, people will rise up and continue to threaten democracy. And that's exactly what I'm trying to show with Jackson, that, you know, this frightening figure in American history is stopped for a moment, but there's always a danger of them reemerging. 

Tom: So, I mean, that makes sense. I think, you know, to go back to the broader point too, about the role of Black Americans, and, you know, making us a more perfect union. You know, the second president you cover, I think, is, James Buchanan, right? So, he lobbies for the Dred Scott decision, which is really another stain on American history. And then you talk about the private opposition, you know, when it comes to John Adams, it's these newspaper editors and some politicians, including Jefferson and others who, sort of, you know, go against Adams and what he's trying to do with the Alien Sedition Act. But then with James Buchanan, the coalition's a little bit different, I think, and it starts to evolve these private actors. You're focusing on these private constitutional constituencies, these, as somebody else said in another interview, like, “constitutional heroes.” Maybe talk about how that starts to coalesce with what Buchanan does with the Dredd Scott decision, and how the new opposition starts to form against this, you know, new sort of racial injustice that he's trying to foment. 

Corey: Right. And I want to just emphasize your point when you first raised the question, which is that the thesis of the book really is, you know, the last exchange was a long way of saying, America is still a proto-democracy. It's got a long way to go. And when you think of the more full idea of democracy, of a multiracial democracy, it's in this moment of Douglass’ resistance, specifically to President Buchanan.  

And so, just to set this up, Buchannan is different than Adams and Nixon in that he pretends to be a kind of George Washington figure. He says, you know, look, there's this case pending, which is about the question of whether or not Black Americans have rights under the Constitution, even personhood, and I'm neutral. He says in his inaugural address, his only inaugural, I'm going to let the court decide. And we know now, and Douglass suspected this, and he was correct, that, far from it, that Buchanan is really lobbying the court for the most extreme decision, which they make, which is the decision — the most evil decision, in my opinion, in American history — to deny legal personhood, any rights, to Black Americans under the Constitution, and to deny legal citizenship under the federal Constitution to black Americans. 

And so, now, here's the question, how do we resist this? That's the question for abolitionists. And for Lloyd Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison — and I think the dominant mode at the time — and this is a kind of commonsense view —

Tom: If I could just interject one quick thought here, what you're about to say is a point that really stood out to me too, is with contrasting William Lloyd Garrison, the very well-known abolitionist, and his approach to the Constitution and seeing it as something that had to be, you know, shunt aside, versus what Frederick Douglass thinks, you know, the Constitution, how he tries to redeem it. And this is so crucial to understanding the role played by these private constituencies. But go ahead. Sorry.

Corey: Yeah, absolutely. Really the idea for the dominant abolitionist movement is, this whole Constitution is horrible. Of course, it's an authoritarian document. It defends slavery, and let's get rid of it. Dred Scott is evil, and so is the Constitution. It's kind of packed with the devil. That's the sort of language that you hear. 

And Douglass says something very different. He says, look — and this is so crucial too, not just for history, but for understanding what's wrong with modern forms of originalism —  he says the way you read a document isn't through intent, first of all, that there were multiple intents at the founding, and it isn't in the narrowest way of the text. It's for its principles. And when you read it that way, you can see the democratic document that is the Constitution. So, taking, for instance, the preamble. It doesn't say, We the White People. That's one of Douglass’ famous lines. It says, We the People. That's a democratic idea. Take the ban on the corruption of blood, that you can inherit the kind of British tradition, that you can inherit the crimes of parents in the next generation. He says, what is the ban on that? 

But a ban on slavery, which is evident, you know, what is that but a ban on slavery in principle, because slavery is a hereditary system, and he says — probably his most important argument — the Declaration of Independence frames the entire Constitution. It gives us the way to read all of it, and its praise of equality is not limited. So, he's saying, it's not that we have to abandon the Constitution. It's the Dred Scott court, and relying on intent and claiming this is a pro-slavery document has missed the democratic meaning. Now, that is a very controversial thing to say, even within abolitionist circles in the 1850s, and certainly against what the court's saying. And yet, it's the idea, I think, that frames American democracy. And so, when I talk about Frederick Douglass, not just as a hero, but really as the true founder, of course, he's writing in the 19th century, not the 18th century, but really does found American democracy in the way he reads the Constitution.

Tom: You know, I think that that comes true. And you know, there's a lot in your book, too, about Frederick Douglass’ relationship with Lincoln and how he continues across, you know, really, multiple presidents, to really push to enact a real, true democracy inside the United States, or a more complete, more full United States democracy than we have.

And I think, you know, a lot of that is really fascinating. What I'd like to skip ahead, just for the sake of time, to Woodrow Wilson and your blistering, blistering critique of Woodrow Wilson, because I think you phrase it in the right way. Like I think you put, you put a point on it what Wilson was all about. And I think it may shock people to learn that Woodrow Wilson did conceive of a sort of a white supremacist bureaucracy, you know, inside the U.S. And he really was a full segregationist, and the actions he’s taken. And once again, you see that this coalition of private constitutional actors, in this case, I think it's William Monroe Trotter and Ida B. Wells and then some others, really come together to oppose the Wilsonian view of what America should be. And I thought maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit, and what you learn from these documents, these lecture notes, which, again, seem to be a source that haven’t been fully plumbed by historians. 

Corey: Yeah, it's the librarian at Princeton. After Wilson left, Princeton realized this was going to be a historical figure, and so he collected these, sort of, leather-bound notes where students were writing down what he was saying. 

And what you see there is, you know, disparagement, first of all, the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, the legacy of Douglass’ ideas, the ban on chattel slavery, the idea of equal protection, the idea of a right to vote free from discrimination. And Wilson says, really, the post-Bellum amendments didn't add any rights to the Constitution, just left them in the hands of the states to decide. So, he's disparaging reconstruction in every way possible. He does that in his textbook, where he praises the Klan, for instance, and where, not only does he show Birth of a Nation in the White House, but he was a good friend of the author, Thomas Dixon, who wrote The Klansman, the basis of Birth of a Nation. I argue that in the textbook you see this. 

But it's really in his constitutional philosophy that you see this authoritarian idea of the Constitution, racial authoritarianism, because he's arguing, you know, for this idea — the President, first of all, is first among equals of the other branches, and has this goal of national efficiency — he's basing this partly on his courses too, in comparative constitutionalism. And yet, there's this thing in the way, and that's what he calls friction, which is integration.

And so, when he — for the first time since Grant resegregates the federal government — and demotes Black Americans, for instance, in the post office, who had climbed pretty high up, he’s called out on it. And it's not that we're just discovering this for the first time. There was a confrontation in the White House in print by William Monroe Trotter, a newspaper editor from Boston, and Ida B. Wells. And we know what happened in these confrontations because they leaked the transcript. And it's pretty incredible, because you see in real time this battle between the authoritarian idea and the democratic one. Wilson is saying to them, look, there's nothing in segregation. That's about subordination, and it's just separation. It's the reduction of friction. And by challenging me, you're creating friction. And they say back, no, it's subordination. It's second-class citizenship. That’s this system is. We're not imposing it on the Constitution. That's what you're doing. You're creating this system in segregation of second-class citizenship. Now —

Tom: I’ve got one quick question for you on that. So, on friction, I was struck because it strikes me as just — struck, strikes, whatever — it’s very inconsistent, I think, with how Madison or others may have conceived of the Constitution and the role of political interests in factions. I mean, they envisioned friction, right? They envisioned contesting visions of how things should be. And here's Wilson trying to preach this version of the Constitution, which is frictionless, which seems to me to be completely opposite of what the real founding vision was. 

But in addition, you know, it's true that these stories were known of what he was doing at the time, but I think where your book really delves into this is, this is a very deeply- held belief by Wilson. This is something he really is — this is not something ad hoc. This is something he's really carried with him into office, from his time in academia all the way through the presidency, which to me, that's frightening, you know?

Corey: Right, I mean, you know, that was so well said, and it captures, really what I'm trying to show, that he talks, for instance, about the president as a leader, first among equals of the other branches. It really is not a Madisonian idea. He rejects the Madisonian idea. He's the first to talk about a living Constitution, I think, too. And he has this sort of Darwinist idea. He had studied something called Teutonic germ theory at Hopkins as a PhD student in political science. 

And, right, this kind of nationalism is so core to his view, which is very different, of course, in the framers’ understanding, and, you know, combines it with this threat to the nationalism, which is integration. And so, the white supremacy is not just a sort of by the way casual thing, or sometimes it's thought, oh, he was a Southerner, and he's just sort of unthinking about it. No, it was a deeply thought-out idea of white nationalism — again, not the first racist president, but the first white nationalist president because of that unique combination. 

But yet, you have the seeds of resistance there too. You have the idea that separate is inherently unequal. It's almost word for word what Trotter and Wells are saying back to him. But you know, Trotter dies despondent. He kills himself thinking that Wilson's won. And so, it's going to take decades for the revival, and of course, they're not the ones that are able to push back and to form the constituency that will recover an idea of equal protection. It comes much later, during Truman, not in the Brown case. I mean, that's another part of the book. We're often taught it’s Brown, of course, the reversal of Plessy, and formally, that is true, but it's in the Civil Rights Committee of Harry Truman, really, and people unknown, people like Sadie Alexander, who revived these ideas against Wilson's vision.  

Tom: Yeah. And you also mentioned Walter White, but not the Breaking Bad one, but a different one entirely. Yeah, no, I mean, but it's interesting to see there's this continuum, really, from, I don't know, the first half of the 19th century, all the way through the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and you can say, ongoing, where there's this struggle continuously to uphold the Constitution and truly democratic principles, and the role that these Black activists have played time and time again to do that. I mean, it's really striking, I think, in how that is presented in your book. 

Let's go forward to Richard Nixon, who, you should know, before we talk about Nixon, that I have elsewhere criticized Henry Kissinger at length, I think he's the greatest fraud of the foreign policy establishment. I have a lot of criticisms of him, and so, if you have anything critical of him, I welcome it. But, we'll focus on Nixon's abuses of power here, and what Nixon really did.  

You know, obviously, everybody's familiar with Watergate, everybody's familiar with, you know, the actions that he took to try and, you know, corruptly use the power of the presidency. You go beyond that, I think, in the book, in terms of looking at more holistically, at what he was about, and talking about, for example, you know, the thievery that he wanted at the Brookings Institution and other things, and sort of showing that it was not just that Watergate was not really a one-off, but was sort of a more comprehensive approach to the presidency that he had, a more authoritarian approach to the presidency had. And of course, then, also focusing on his opposition to Daniel Ellsberg and how he really tried to put that authoritarian power, focus it on this one individual who was really trying to hold him to account. Maybe you could elaborate a little bit on that, and then we'll go to the future and where we are now, actually.  

Corey: Great. Yeah, I was fortunate enough to speak to Daniel Ellsberg at length a few months before his death about all this, and so a lot of it is firsthand based on him. It's also information that I gleaned from the amazing Watergate prosecutors who are still alive, including Philip Lacovara, who gave me a lot to go on. And then, of course, documents that have been released and as a result of FOIA requests and lots of efforts of some amazing publications.  

So, the part — exactly as you say, and I will start with Kissinger, because it just illustrates it so perfectly. I mean, you can listen to this on the web. This tape, Kissinger says to Nixon — he wants what he believes. And a lot of, I think, good research suggests, and Ellsberg thought this too, that what he thought was in this safe at the Brookings Institution, the Pentagon Papers, of course, stopped with Johnson, and so the thought was that there was another set that would implicate Nixon, in particular, Nixon's illegal dealings with the Viet Cong to try to delay the war until he was president and could get a better deal before he was president. And he thought this documentation was in the safe at the Brookings Institution. Ellsberg told me he did have a lot of this information, but it was at his brother's house, and there was a fire at the brother’s house, and anyway, he was looking in the wrong place, but he was right to think that he had a lot of it. 

And Nixon says to Kissinger on the tape, you know, I want what's in that safe. And Kissinger, very sensibly, says, well, Mr. President, we should go through the legal process. And Nixon's response, and you quoted it, is to say, no, Henry, I want it done on a — the word he uses is “thievery” — basis. And you know, it is the ordering of a crime. And that connects to what we were saying before, that he thought the president could order crimes in a civil war. 

And it was all aimed at Ellsberg, because he thought of Ellsberg, as he calls him, the “main ball”, as sort of the leader of this opposition, the papers and the threat that he posed. I asked Ellsberg how this got going, and his answer was, and he provided documentation after the conversation to show this, was that he had written an op-ed saying that there was a possibility that Nixon was going to use a nuclear weapon, tactical nuclear weapon in Vietnam, and that freaked him out, that he would have such inside information to know that this was actually something that they were doing. 

But it wasn't just the safe or the famous break-in at the Watergate building, or the attack, the break-in at the psychiatrist office of Ellsberg. There were other ongoing investigations of Nixon at the time of the time of the pardon, that included the attempt to kill or incapacitate, as Ellsberg put it, him at the Capitol steps, an event that involved Roger Stone creating a diversion, a kind of counter protest. As Ellsberg was reading an anti-war play, the plan was they were going to run in and beat him to death, and he escaped. And, you know, why don't we know any of this? It's because the pardon really wiped it all away. It ended these investigations. We never had a truth commission. We never had the prosecution that I think we should have had. And it really vindicated, I think Nixon's crimes, the vast crimes. And of course, there were others too, involving using the IRS to illegally go after opponents. And the idea that Nixon was, you know, was just Watergate, that's exactly what I'm trying to challenge. There were a series of criminal acts, an attempt to shut down Ellsberg and the opposition, based in an authoritarian idea of the presidency.

Tom: Let's go forward from there. I think you argue, one of the stronger arguments — well, there's a lot of strong arguments — but one of the stronger ones, or points for our current predicament we find ourselves in, I would say, is the idea that the lack of accountability for Nixon, the lack of the effort to hold him accountable for the whole range of his actions, not just Watergate, and the effect of that pardon, was to basically set up an ongoing potential for crisis, or an ongoing crisis in the power of the presidency and the presidency and the interaction between the people and the presidency. 

And, you know, I'm struck, because today, obviously we do have an ongoing crisis with, you know, one of the two major party candidates who has openly stated that he wants the Constitution to be suspended. And, you know, there's all sorts of actions. Look at what we documented on the January 6 Committee or in court filings. You can see that he really did assault the constitutional order, the constitutional process, in a way that we really haven't seen since, in any form, I would say, in our history. But certainly, there were precursors to it, as you write, in 1800, with the effort to deny electoral certification, but this holistic idea that they could use, he could use the power of the presidency. Trump could use the power of the presidency to effectively throw out tens of millions of votes and throw out the entire, you know, voting process, and the entire democratic process we have for choosing a president, is really something new. 

And he uses a lot of the different elements that you talk about in the book are combined, really, in his plot, the January 6. Definitely, a lot of times I'm reading something, I'm thinking, oh, that's a parallel in terms of the January 6 plot. But how, you know, as we go forward here, trying to look forward, you know, how do you think — first of all, I got a couple different questions here. One, do you think there is any private constituency today that's trying to now hold the Constitution up and basically hold Trump accountable for what he did, but also, going forward, try and restore our constitutional understanding of the presidency's powers? I think, I don't, I'm not sure — if you would start there. Do you think there's anything forming politically? 

Corey: Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, the immunity case is sort of the capstone. The book came out the day after the immunity case, and that really does solidify the Nixonian idea that, you know, okay, it's presumptive, you know, it's official duty. But with all these caveats, the delay of the case and the possibility that when it comes to the president’s most dangerous actions, including possibly the attempt to deny the certification, the pressure on the vice president, that there might be immunity — that is a vindication of Nixon. And part of that is able to continue because, as much as Daniel Ellsberg and the grand jurors who I interviewed, you know, tried to indict Nixon, and talk about their straw poll to do so, we never really did have the constituency that you would need behind a simple idea. You know, think of the recoveries in the past — the idea of the right to dissent, the idea of equal protection under law, or equal citizenship. We did have constituencies. We did vindicate those ideas. The idea that we really never have vindicated is the idea that no person is above the law. That was supposed to be U.S. v. Nixon, but it left room for the immunity case. So, that's the thing that I'd like to see vindicated, not just through legislation, or if need be, an amendment, to undo the immunity case and make it clear that not just a former president, but a sitting president could be prosecuted.  

But I'm a defender of, you know, the law that existed and functioned pretty well in the Lawrence Welsh investigation in what became the Ken Starr investigation. I'll talk about that in a second, which is the independent prosecutor law, the Ethics in Government Act, as you know and listeners know, created this office in which you couldn't be fired from a president, in which the office wasn't beholden to the Department of Justice's policy that sitting presidents can't be indicted. That's a commonsense way to think about how to institutionalize the idea that no person is above the law, not even a president, and to create a real check on power.

That law functioned between Carter and Clinton. But of course, Ken Starr's investigation convinced many Democrats that it was too cumbersome on a president, too in the way of getting things done. And the line I've been using is, you know, I'd rather have ten Ken Starrs, even if all that's true, than one Donald Trump. The threat that a president above the law could become like Patrick Henry — hat seemed like hyperbole, perhaps, before Trump, “crown himself a monarch”, or before Nixon. And yet, you see what Trump is really trying to do, which is to institute this monarchical idea of the presidency. And so, I think we need that.

Now, how it's going to happen? I was deliberately left it open, you know, because I didn't want to specify. There are a lot of people doing this work, as you know, and you're a part of it, Tom. Of course, the January 6 Committee was one of the most important moments in making Americans aware of the danger of the U.S. presidency and of the fact that January 6, I mean, this was the theme of your report and the hearings, that January 6 wasn't just a riot. It wasn't just violence at the Capitol. It was an attempted self-coup that almost worked, and that could have worked, and that could still work, despite the legislative fixes that we've tried. They were trying to get Mike Pence. And imagine if he would have done it, to refuse to certify these votes and to throw things to the House of Representatives, or imagine if he had been killed during those events. There were all sorts of ways in which it almost worked.

And so, putting back the idea of criminal accountability of a president, which we didn't see in Trump, we didn't see in Nixon, and should have, I think that's crucial. Now, who's going to do it? I think that's what the book's about. It's a call for readers to rise up, to find these people, to become these people. And rather than specifying ten people I thought had the potential to do it — that's really what I wanted to do, was to issue a general call for agency — I should say, too, and we started with this, if we don't do it, the fragility could collapse. I mean, it's nothing about these citizens’ stories that makes it inevitable. It's agency. It's heroes jumping and doing this when they needed to, and because the traditional checks don't work — the courts, I mean, that's just become even more evident, this court is not going to stop Trump, and didn't before, really, in crucial moments like the travel ban, the Muslim ban case, he claimed as a travel ban, of course, it was a Muslim ban —

Tom: I testified in Congress against that when I was working in counter-terrorism, counter-extremism issues at the time, and I thought that was such an egregious affront. I mean, it was, there was no — I spent 20 years of my life doing counterterrorism work, and the Muslim ban had no basis in counter-terrorism policy. It was, there was no — it didn't even make any sense if you knew what the terrorism threats that were flowing our way at the time were. So, I was very struck that that was deemed kosher, when, to me, it quite obviously should not have been, you know. 

But you brought up January 6 in the culmination of this plot and what — I guess this is probably the final set of questions I had for you were, if there are any lessons we can learn from these private constituencies in the past for today, and how we can step forward, because one of the things that struck me as I was researching January 6 and working on the report for the Committee was that we have this arcane Electoral College process, which I think, you know, I'm in the camp of doing away with it, but fine, we have it, and it’s on the books. But, what really Trump and his advisors did was, they really attacked all these steps in this arcane Electoral College process between the votes being even — well, even before the votes are cast, but let's just say, when the votes are cast and counted — there are all these steps between then and actually declaring the winner and certifying the victor and inaugurating the new president-elect as president. You know, it struck me that, as I was going through this, and I learned a lot about the process, for the first time myself. I was generally familiar with it.

But, it struck me that there's such a lack of civic education now on these issues, right, that most Americans can't possibly know, really understand the unconstitutional nature of the January 6 plot unless you understand what it is he was attacking, what he and Trump and his advisors were attacking, right? There is this process on the books with the Constitution and the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act. There are all these different provisions on, you, statutory law that's in place to govern this whole thing. And he and his advisors systematically attacked all of it, right? It was really — it was not something haphazard, right? They identified these pressure points, and they tried to put as much pressure as they could on each and every one of them. 

And I was just wondering about the role of civic education going forward, especially we now live in an environment where, you know, a lot of formerly constitutional conservatives, or a lot of people I know who would frame themselves as conservatives, are devoted to Trump above the Constitution. I think that's pretty obvious. They don't really believe in the Constitution. They believe in Trump, and they're not really willing to stand by the Constitution against what he was doing, right, his threat to the Constitution. And I’m just curious what you think about the future in terms of civic education and trying to get people to understand, you know, here's what a constitutional order should look like. Here's what our constitutional democracy should look like. And this is why this stuff is so dangerous.  

Corey: Yeah, I mean, I think that really, in the end, is what the book is about because, you know, it's about a hope that the constitutional constituency will rise up and call a president to account. But how can that happen? You have to have citizens who are receptive to it, who know about these ideas. Now, the hope is, you know, you did see it in the past, and you did see it in a way that, you know, was very unlikely for it to emerge. And so, the idea that a formerly enslaved person, Frederick Douglass, would be the one who taught us how to read the Constitution in this democratic way, would be our teacher, not just a student of the of the Constitution, the ultimate teacher — you know, that gives me hope for the possibility going forward, that, now look, there's — even in the opposition to Trump. There is a Garrisonian wing that says, let’s just abandon this whole thing. And it's all flawed. And I think that's not helpful at this moment either, that the thing that we really need to do is to understand the mechanisms and understand how they should work in a democracy and to create accountability. 

You know, part of it, I think, is the possibility of prosecution, but also a citizenry that can call the Supreme Court out when it does these outrageous authoritarian things, as it did in the immunity case, claiming for the first time that there was immunity, not just for a sitting president, but for a former president, something that Gerald Ford in his pardon obviously, you know, thought couldn't be right, that wasn't well thought. So, yes, I mean, it is the whole book, and it's written, I hope, that, you know, advanced high schoolers and college students could read it. 

I tell the story in The Oath and the Office. As you might remember, you know, one of the great kind of writers in presidential history, author of a book club about presidential rhetoric, being told, oh, it's your fault too, because we all read your book about how to manipulate the press and how to pressure America. And so, that Nixon made it required reading, and the response was, well, anything about presidential power, I assumed was within the confines of the Constitution, because everybody had read about the Constitution. We had civics, and the Nixonian crew were businesspeople who didn't care about the Constitution. Well, we've got to restore that. We've got to teach it, but we have to be careful how we teach it too, because Ron DeSantis has a version of the Constitution he's teaching, which is an authoritarian one. We've got to revive and teach the democratic Constitution.

Tom: No, I think that's so perfectly well said. And you know, I'm resisting the temptation right now because you keep bringing up the immunity ruling by the Supreme Court to delve into all the problems with that, because that would lengthen this podcast by another probably three to four hours. I've dissected that ruling many, many times, and I find it the most ridiculously illogical ruling I've read in quite some time. Even within the four walls of what the Supreme Court majority decided, it's not consistent at all logically. 

But I did, I would just say this about that ruling. Reading your book, it did heighten my fears about that ruling, I would say, and that there is this existing — from the founding to today — there is a camp that believes the president United States has quasi-authoritarian powers. And you know, you can see this in the unitary executive movement. You can see this in other forms of belief about the Constitution and how it works and what the president’s role is. And certainly in the immunity ruling, I was struck that people who are supposedly constitutional conservatives — and this is where a lot of my concern comes from — they were not really concerned at all. In fact, they were not concerned one wit with the constitutional role played by, say, the states or the vice president acting as the president of the Senate or Congress, or any of these other constitutional bodies who have power and responsibilities when it comes to the Electoral College and the certification of the President. And they were only concerned with the supposed powers of the presidency. 

And once you realize that, you realize you're dealing with a pretty warped framework for understanding the Constitution, in my view, and how this is all really supposed to work. So maybe, we can leave it on a note that maybe you and I can have a longer conversation in another podcast, specifically about the immunity ruling and how it's consistent with what you have, really, I think, done such an expert job and wonderful job, and explained in The Presidents and the People, this ongoing push, this ongoing threat to our democracy, to have this authoritarian reading of the Constitution. How's that sound to you? 

Corey: Sounds terrific. And I couldn't agree with what you said more — that it undermines exactly the idea of a rule of law, in which a president is checked by grand juries and by the, you know, the law and law enforcement and the other branches and absolutely, it undermines all of it. And I look forward to that conversation.

Tom: Well, thank you once again. Corey Brettschneider, he's a professor at Brown. Folks, go get The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It. I'm telling you, it's a great book, I learned a lot about it and really reframed my understanding of a lot of what we witnessed in American history. Thanks again, Corey.

Corey: Thanks so much, Tom, what an amazing conversation. Thanks especially for reading it so closely and bringing out the themes as they connect today. And as I said in the beginning, you know, the work of you and your Committee in the report on January 6, and calling Trump to account and pointing out to Americans and doing that civic education of teaching them why this was not just a riot, but was an attempted self-coup and showing, too, the vulnerability of our system — I couldn't think of a better discussion partner. So, thank you so much.  

Tom: Oh, that's a high praise. Thank you so much. 

Paras: This episode was co-hosted and produced by me, Paras Shah, and Tom Joscelyn with help from Clara Apt.

Special thanks to Corey Brettschneider. You can read all of Just Security’s coverage of elections and democracy on our website.

If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.

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