The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 25 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
We still have months to go until Donald Trump takes office, but according to The Washington Post, Trump’s top allies are already at war with each other over the transition. On top of that, Trump just tapped an anti-Islam extremist, Sebastian Gorka, to a top national security role; that’s unnerving even some in MAGA. It’s becoming clear that Trump is so certain he won a massive mandate in the election that he doesn’t need to even bother running a smooth transition or take care to avoid appointing wildly extreme people to top roles. Today, we’re checking in with political scientist Julia Azari, co-author of the Good Politics/Bad Politics Substack and author of a great new piece on why delusions about mandates can produce terrible governing outcomes. Welcome back on, Julia.
Julia Azari: Thank you so much for having me.
Sargent: So it’s getting crazy. Elon Musk is privately raging at Trump lawyer Boris Epshteyn, accusing him of leaking to the media and having too much power over the transition. Meanwhile, Trump just appointed Sebastian Gorka as senior director for counterterrorism. This is a guy with wildly crazy extreme anti-Islam views. The Post quotes a source saying that Trump’s national security transition team views Gorka as a clown. Julia, Trump clearly thinks he can govern however he wants to. What’s your reaction to all this?
Azari: I think that’s right. He’s selecting people for the administration that clearly aren’t meant to build a broad coalition and that clearly are going to come into conflict with each other. That’s pretty typical mandate overreach, when presidents think that they have this public approval for whatever they’re doing or even a personal mandate that that becomes a recipe—especially for a second term overreach.
Sargent: I’m interested in this idea of personal mandate. Let’s come back to that. You wrote this great piece about presidential mandates. Trump is declaring that he has this massive mandate. It’s nonsense. He didn’t even win a popular majority. It’s a very slim victory. But regardless, as you wrote, claims like this of mandates have historically been linked to big expansions of presidential power and to unchecked presidencies. And we’re looking at an unchecked presidency right now about to hit us. Can you talk about all this?
Azari: Yeah. One of the arguments that I made in the piece, which is based on a book that I published in 2014, is that when presidents start talking about how they have the approval of the electorate for what they want to do, this tends to be associated with not just policy but with the expansive claims about what the president can do.
Essentially, the idea of an electoral mandate is something that’s designed to run roughshod on checks and balances, whether those be from the other branches of government or from the electorate, the media. Mandate claims often are invoked in a situation where presidents are experiencing some pushback and they go on the defensive and they say, Well, my critics are promoting this scandal—that was Nixon and Watergate—or my critics are asking me too many questions because they don’t believe in the mandate that I won. My point in the piece is to be very wary of these kinds of claims.
Sargent: It seems interesting to me that there’s an added nuance with Trump. As you mentioned, presidents invoke mandates as a way to push back against resistance to their agendas—institutional resistance, whatever it is. In this case, we’re in a unique situation because he’s coming back into power after having had a presidency, of course.
In that presidency, he was reigned in by his own people. So now, he’s picking all these people who will not reign him in. He’s essentially running roughshod over the very idea that he should have anyone internally that acts as a check. Clearly, that’s related to this concept of a personal mandate, right? He must really be besotted with that idea. Can you talk about that particular confluence: him really coming in and being adamantly devoted to not having internal checks, and also thinking he has........