I'm Dan Kurtz-Valen, and this is the Foreign Affairs Interview.
Look, I think at the end of the day Americans expect that the executive branch works in good faith.
What does it mean to act in good faith?
I think it means to take seriously that any action you take is about more than just the short-term policy impact of politics.
It's about safeguarding the trust that any of us who's ever served in government I know felt or should feel that we are stewards or fiduciaries for a country and we have to hand it off in better shape than we got it.
If one thing can be said to characterize the first months of Donald Trump's second term,
it is his expansive and often norm-breaking use of presidential power, both abroad and at home.
There are the lethal strikes on boats alleged to be smuggling drugs in the Caribbean,
the range of tariffs he's imposed,
the way he's gone after enemies and withheld funds and restructured the federal workforce.
The list could go on.
Trump has disregarded constraint after constraint on the power of the executive.
and many of the forces expected to check that power in the courts, in Congress,
in the private sector, or media have shown little ability or willingness to do so.
In the early weeks of Trump's second term,
Tino Queer wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs called How to Survive a Constitutional Crisis.
Quear,
a former justice on the California Supreme Court who now serves as president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace,
looked at Trump's early moves and tried to lay out a framework for understanding which of them represented just radical shifts in policy,
and which then posed a threat to the very foundations of the American system.