ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

jamelle bouie

I’m Jamelle Bouie.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt. And this is “The Argument.” This week, is President Trump getting bolder and more dangerous?

jamelle bouie

I think Trump gets more erratic. I think he lashes out more, either on Twitter or in public appearances.

david leonhardt

Then, should Democrats pack the Supreme Court?

ross douthat

I don’t see the equilibrium that exists on the other side of a big court-packing thing. I just see escalation without end.

david leonhardt

And finally, a recommendation.

jamelle bouie

And it’s fun because it includes, more or less, every single black actor who’s going to be famous in the next 10 years. And I always love those movies that you can see accomplished actors in smaller roles when they were younger. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

Last weekend, President Trump made a sudden and shocking policy shift in Syria. He pulled U.S. troops from the country’s northern border with Turkey, effectively endorsing a Turkish military operation and abandoning the Kurds, who are longtime American allies. Trump’s decision goes against the advice of the Pentagon, the State Department, and many congressional Republicans. Even Senator Lindsey Graham, a loyal Trumpist, called into Fox News to voice his concern.

archived recording (lindsey graham) I expect the American president to do what’s in our national security interest. It’s never in our national security interest to abandon an ally who’s helped us fight ISIS. It’s never in our national security interest to create conditions for the re-emergence of ISIS.

david leonhardt

Syria is just one example of Trump’s new boldness. He’s also publicly asked China to dig up dirt on his political rivals, and he has blocked an ambassador from testifying to Congress about the Ukraine scandal, all of which raises the question, as Trump faces impeachment, is he growing more dangerous? Michelle Goldberg is on assignment this week, so our colleague, Jamelle Bouie, is joining us. Jamelle, welcome back to “The Argument.”

jamelle bouie

Thank you for having me.

david leonhardt

Ross, you’ve argued before that Republicans around Trump in Congress and in the administration were holding him back and preventing him from living out his worst impulses. But is that still true?

ross douthat

I mean, a long time ago, back before I became the world-weary cynic that I am today, I had argued that the 25th Amendment— which allows you to remove a president for incapacity— would be a better way to remove Donald Trump than impeachment. And one of the currents in that argument was the fact that as impossible as it is to really operationalize, the virtue of the 25th Amendment is that it is quick. You know, if you could actually get the necessary cabinet officials, and the necessary senators and so on, the president you’re removing would be removed expeditiously. I have some anxieties about what Donald Trump would do in the course of a six month period where it seemed like he was being, in slow motion, removed from office. What’s fascinating about the Syria decision is that you would expect sort of strategically for the president to be casting around for foreign policy moves that would, if not rally the wider public, at least shore-up his base. There’s a big chunk of Trump’s base that I would describe as conservatives who think the Iraq War was a mistake, and who are generally anti-interventionist, but have strong sympathy for the Kurds a lot of concern about the fate of mideast Christians. And it isn’t just the Lindsey Graham’s and the hawks in the party who hate this move. It’s also a bunch of Kurdish-friendly evangelical Christian sympathizers with Middle Eastern Christians. And so as far as I can tell, it isn’t just that foreign policy people don’t like this move there. It actually alienates a group of people who Trump desperately needs in his corner during impeachment. And as such, it does seem like a more flailing and bizarre move than some of the things we’ve seen from him in the past.

david leonhardt

Yeah. And Jamelle, the only explanations that I can see — but tell me if you disagree — are either incompetence or something nefarious. So incompetence could just be Trump doesn’t care about foreign policy. He was on the phone with President Erdogan of Turkey. And Erdogan asked for this, and Trump did it. The nefarious explanations are, basically, Trump cares about his business interests in Turkey, or Erdogan has some information perhaps involving a previous phone call with Trump that he knows if it became public, would damage Trump. Or, this has to do with repaying Erdogan for burying evidence involving the murder of Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudis. I mean, I don’t see any policy-based argument for what Trump is doing here.

jamelle bouie

Yeah, I don’t either. And I I had to choose between something nefarious and just Trump’s general incompetence and ignorance and obsequiousness toward authoritarian leaders, I’m going to go with the latter. Trump, being in the conversation with Erdogan, a authoritarian leader whom he admires like he admires many other authoritarian leaders, being in that conversation, and then in an attempt to show Erdogan favor — in an attempt to show whatever friendship means to Trump — Trump ends up agreeing to something that benefits Turkish foreign policy interests. That doesn’t surprise me. That’s pretty much the story of Trump’s interactions with world leaders since he entered office. And so that seems, to me, to be the most plausible explanation for what’s happening. What’s interesting, to me, about all of this is as soon as the White House announced what it was doing, immediately, congressional Republicans began to push back, and pushed back quite forcefully. Not in private, not behind closed doors, but with public statements condemning the president.

david leonhardt

And I couldn’t help but contrast that to what I see as the cowardice of former Trump administration officials. And so we’re taping this on a Tuesday. It’s possible this will change by the time you hear this podcast. But as of now, vanishingly few people who were in the Trump administration— like James Mattis, or H.R. McMaster, or Rex Tillerson, and who are in foreign policy— have come out and said anything. And that just continues a pattern that I find depressing, which is, these people entered the Trump administration often with the implicit promise that they were going to be the adults in the room and try to keep Trump from doing bad things. Trump either humiliated them, in the case of Tillerson and McMaster, or they resigned on principle, in the case of Mattis. And I don’t think they should be showing Trump this loyalty of being quiet. I think they should speak up about a foreign policy decision that I see as pretty disastrous. Ross, do you have some counterintuitive defense of the silence that I’m not thinking of?

ross douthat

I mean, I’m just— I think it’s more meaningful for Republicans who are actually in elected office to speak up. I mean, Mattis, I think, is sort of a singular case because he pretty clearly did resign on principle in a way that made his disagreements with the president plain, while simultaneously maintaining this post-resignation silence. So I think if he spoke up, it would at least cause a ripple. I think figures like Tillerson— others from earlier in this administration— I don’t think they’re as politically relevant to the decision-making process right now, or the sort of media debate. You have to see the Republican reaction against Trump’s move as, in part, bound up in this new climate of debate that impeachment has opened up, where it’s sort of— there’s no one in the Republican base that’s particularly sympathetic to Erdogan and the Turkish government. So you can break with him there as a sort of signal to the White House that they need to handle impeachment differently than they’ve handled it to date.

david leonhardt

Jamelle, the first sentence of your new column is Donald Trump is probably the weakest he’s been since becoming president. And I agree with that. It also scares me because it feels like we’re starting to see Trump unhinged. And that feels really worrisome. Do you agree with that? And what can you imagine coming next?

jamelle bouie

I mean, I do agree with it. As this impeachment investigation moves on, if the public continues to move in the direction of supporting it — and the Washington Post poll Tuesday morning shows 49 percent of Americans support outright removal— it’s only been a couple weeks. And the public has kind of moved decisively in favor of at least moving forward with this. And it’s easy to imagine, especially given that the president’s erratic behavior also includes behavior that further incriminates him and his allies, it’s easy to imagine the numbers there just moving further in the direction of the investigation. And in that environment, I think Trump gets more erratic. I think he lashes out more, either on Twitter or in public appearances. I think he begins to take more impulsive actions in the places where he has a bit more freedom of movement. Although in the pushback to this move in Syria, is, I think, indicative if he attempts to take these sort of wildly erratic moves, will result in some measure of pushback from within the Republican Party — especially if it is running counter to what some interesting group of Republican lawmakers want to see happen.

ross douthat

And also, there’s the question of what the military does, which in its own way, makes this constitutionally fraught. But there’s been a pretty steady pattern with Afghanistan and Syria of Trump making announcements or sort of floating withdrawals that then pretty clearly get sort of slow-walked and sort of maneuvered against not just by Republican senators, but by people in the military hierarchy. I mean, like, with the China thing that you mentioned, David — right— in a way, yes, it’s much more erratic and dangerous for the president to stand on the White House lawn and tell China to investigate Hunter Biden. On the other hand, if you’re the Chinese government and you’re looking at the situation in the U.S., how seriously do you take that kind of request, right? It seems unlikely. There does seem to be ways in which the erraticness limits the damage that the erraticness can do.

david leonhardt

Ross, I think the point about this being constitutionally fraught is an important one. Because it is, in the grand scheme, it’s not good that the military feels empowered/able to ignore commands from the president, pretend they just didn’t happen. At the same time, the fact that one of the president’s erratic orders could include the use of nuclear weapons, which is simultaneously an extreme example, but also, I don’t think it’s that extreme. I would hope in that kind of case, a military — like, the American military would say we’re not going to do that. And that really feels like the 25th Amendment scenario that Ross has talked about — which, for people who are not fully up on all their amendments, is the provision that allows the cabinet — half of the cabinet — to remove the president if the president is incapacitated or otherwise incapable of doing the job. Let’s close by spending a minute on the impeachment inquiry. I mean, it seems to me at this point, that the Trump administration, they’re just not going to cooperate because they view the inquiry as illegitimate. And look, they can be unhappy with the inquiry. But it is not illegitimate. And the idea that they’re just going to say we’re not going to play along, that’s a constitutional problem if the executive branch is essentially going to ignore what the Legislative branch is doing. And I guess it leaves me wondering what each of you — first of all, Ross in particular— whether you think I’m being too harsh on the Executive branch here. And what options does it give the congressional Democrats?

ross douthat

I mean, I think, in part, it depends on the kind of stonewalling. There’s some stonewalling that, as in the Nixon impeachment, would end up getting litigated in front of the Supreme Court. But I think ultimately, the constitutional remedy is that the Democrats include that stonewalling as an article of impeachment, right? I mean, that’s sort of the ultimate remedy. I’d also say— and I’m curious what Jamelle thinks about this — if the White House is stonewalling their witnesses, let’s say, the Democrats aren’t going to be able to get. But they also have to decide how much of this can happen behind closed doors, and to what extent they need to sort of consistently be building a public case. I think the Democrats, if they expect the impeachment inquiry to keep moving people into the pro-impeachment column, they need a public strategy around the hearings to get the public there, don’t you think?

jamelle bouie

I think that’s right. I mean, I think that if the actual goal is to build a broad case for removing the president from office, and the public hearings, a public strategy, a public case built piece-by-piece is necessary, I think that’s going to, given the administration’s stonewalling, I think it’s going to require actual aggressive action from the House to deal with rejection of subpoenas. And to make clear kind of the order of constitutional power here, that the Executive branch does not actually run Congress, and that it is actually not O.K. for, say, Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, to refuse to comply with the subpoena. That’s just not how this works. And since the Democrats have opted to take this battle to court, rather than fight it in the open, I think actually, in addition to weakening their hand in of the longer term, ends up eroding Congress’s subpoena power— which I don’t think anyone wants.

ross douthat

How do you think they could fight it in the open, Jamelle?

jamelle bouie

It might be unnecessarily dramatic, but sort of being willing to arrest somebody who rejects a subpoena. I mean, I am increasingly of the opinion that the way to bring the American system back into some balance is a very empowered Congress. And so I’m sort of open to Congress really using the full suite of its authority.

ross douthat

Are you ready, David, for that, arresting Mike Pompeo, putting him in a small cell underneath the Capitol dome?

david leonhardt

I’m not, but I agree with you, Jamelle. I think it’s time to broaden the range of options here. I mean, you’ve got an administration that’s just completely rejecting a Congressional investigation in a way that we really haven’t seen before. I’m against them using that part of their full suite of powers, arresting officials. Because I think it would hurt their public relations game. But I am all in favor of them considering every option. I mean, I guess, what I would be in favor of is Democrats thinking about both the outside game and the inside game here. So Jamelle, I agree with you. They shouldn’t simply be fighting narrow court cases. They should be doing that, but they shouldn’t be doing only that. And part of the way Democrats have succeeded during the Trump years is by having a grassroots strategy as well, which involves getting people in these groups like Indivisible to call Congress. It involves actual public protests. If Trump is going to deny the Democrats the hearings that help the American people understand that what Trump has done is out of bounds, then you need other ways to convey that message to people. So, Ross, you get the last word here. I mean, how weak do you think Trump is right now?

ross douthat

I mean, I’ve thought that Trump was distinguished by incredible weakness throughout his entire presidency. So I don’t think there’s some radical discontinuity here. But I think he’s been weakened more by the first couple weeks of this than I expected. I mean, he survived the Mueller investigation in no small part because much of that happened while John Kelly was running his White House. And it’s not clear to me who actually steps in to either control Trump and manage his response to impeachment, more chaos is possible than maybe I had anticipated in thinking about how this compared to Mueller. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

O.K., we will leave it there, take a quick break, and come right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] The Supreme Court returned to the bench this week. And this term, it will hear major cases about immigration, L.G.B.T. rights, abortion, and more. It’s likely that most of those decisions will lean to the right because of the makeup of the court. And the court has the makeup that it does because Senate Republicans have played hardball. They broke with historical precedent and refused to allow Barack Obama to fill a court vacancy in his final year in office. Donald Trump got to fill that vacancy instead, with Justice Neil Gorsuch. Every 5 to 4 decision and it breaks along partisan lines would likely have gone the other way without this particular version of hardball. Jamelle, you argued in a recent column that Democrats do have a good option here, a constitutional option, which is to expand the size of the Supreme Court. That’s also known as court-packing. And I know it sounds radical to a lot of people. So can you walk through how it would work?

jamelle bouie

Sure. So since the Judiciary Act of 1789, which gave Congress the power to set the number of justices on the Supreme Court and judges in the federal judiciary, Congress has been able to expand the court at will. And it’s done so several times. It’s done so for narrow political reasons. And I want to say at the tail end of the John Adams administration, President Adams and the Federalists — the still existing Federalist majority in Congress— reduced the size of the court to protect Federalist policy from the incoming Jefferson administration and the incoming majority of Jefferson’s allies in Congress. Shortly after Jefferson and his allies came to power, they promptly expanded the court. Later in the 19th century, during the Civil War, Republicans expanded the court again to protect Lincoln’s policies. And then, reduced the size of the court, and then expanded it again during the Grant administration to protect Republican gains. That last expansion is when the court got to its current nine member state, and remained that way — has remained that way since then. But I think the important thing to recognize is that these are all methods of playing power politics that have been used in the past.

david leonhardt

And it’s not just that you don’t think it’s beyond the pale. You think Democrats should do it, right?

jamelle bouie

Right. So my case basically is that in giving Gorsuch on the court, Republicans played a form of legitimate constitutional hardball. McConnell said he could take that step, held the seat open, sort of used that to help rally Republican voters behind Donald Trump as a candidate. He won, and then they were able to fill the seat with a majority in the Senate. Constitutional hardball, the definition of it. And then, of course, there’s the Kavanaugh hearing, the Kavanaugh nomination, which had its own set of controversy and had less to do with any particular kind of constitutional hardball, and more of just ordinary political hardball. But if you, as a Democrat, think that the Gorsuch nomination was either illegitimate or the kind of hardball that needs to be countered, and if you think that the Kavanaugh nomination and confirmation is an offense on top of it all, then I think the way to respond to that is basically to nullify it. And the way to nullify it is to use the Congress’s power to expand the court, add two, members and kind of bring things back to some equilibrium. But the important thing is to neutralize the attempt to make the court a vehicle for a narrow ideological movement, in my view. And my sort of long-term dream is to make the court less important to policymaking, period.

ross douthat

So I’m also in favor of that, I think. And I can sort of see a weird case for it. It’s like, all right, the courts are fundamentally politicized, even if nobody admits it. So let’s just admit it and then we can get to an equilibrium where, ultimately, judicial battles become less important. I’m sketchy on the sort of steps in between, right? Where you say, all right, the long-term goal is de-politicization. So we’re going to, in the short run, increase politicization by a move that would be seen by anyone on the right of center as not a restoration of equilibrium, but a further escalation. Obviously, we’re in an escalatory game in congressional politics, court politics, and so on. And I think, when you’re in that kind of game, if the other side escalates, you can’t just do nothing. If you were in a situation where President Trump was putting forward a replacement for Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the Democrats had the power not to bring that replacement to a vote, they would obviously have every reason to do it. What Jamelle is proposing, though, is beyond that, right? It’s saying, all right. They escalated, so we need to escalate beyond them. What’s the plan for getting to equilibrium, right? I don’t see the equilibrium that exists on the other side of a big court-packing thing. I just see escalation without end. Am I wrong?

jamelle bouie

I would expect, right, if I were to game this out, I would expect that the initial court-packing would result in escalation from the other side, either Republicans, when they take power, removing those justices or adding two more, adding their own number. And the way I envision this is that the tit for tat would actually have to stop at some point, right? And so my hope is that the willingness to play hardball on the Democratic side, and then to respond with hardball — and then to respond that with hardball — might produce a desire for a truce. Among the plans I like for Supreme Court reform involves expanding the bench, making it 13 members, 15 members, 17 members, having those members have staggered terms, and then treating cases the way we do with circuit courts with a panel of randomly-selected judges hearing those cases. And so no one really knows. The goal is that no one really knows who is going to be hearing a case. And both sides get an opportunity to put their favorite judges on the court at regular intervals. In combination, those things would incentivize, if not more moderate consensus-oriented justices, then at least would de-incentivize the effort to kind of center your entire politics around the judiciary, which I just don’t think is— I don’t think it’s healthy in a democracy. I think that’s the wrong way to do this thing.

david leonhardt

I’m pretty uncomfortable with it, because I do think it leads to a series of escalations that are ultimately pretty damaging to the functioning of American government. And progressives, particularly, should want to have a well-functioning government. On the other hand, what McConnell did was outrageous. And it’s going to determine Supreme Court decisions for years. And it wasn’t just McConnell, it was the entire Senate Republican caucus. So I think Democrats need to think about a response. And I don’t see a great solution here. But I think talking about court-packing is actually really productive right now.

ross douthat

I mean, Jamelle’s argument is on the other side of our next escalation, we will finally achieve the ground for a responsible compromise. And I just feel like that’s just what both sides keep saying to each other as they escalate their way to civil war. And you know, I’ve spent my whole life hanging out with conservatives who have a narrative about Democrats and the court that sounds exactly like what you guys are saying about Republicans, right? This is the nature of escalatory politics, is that both sides have their grievances and their wrongs that they think justify the next thing. But it does seem to me, that if your goal is to depoliticize the court or weaken the court, you need the plan to just do that.

jamelle bouie

One of my views of American politics right now is that things are out of balance in part because Democrats do not play constitutional hardball, that they’re so consumed with trying to preserve norms that they’re just allowing them to be trampled over. So I think it’s just useful to show willingness to play similar kinds of constitutional hardball.

ross douthat

I guess I just feel like the entire history of — the entire ground of all our Supreme Court debates is one of liberals using the Supreme Court to play power politics for decades, sometimes for good causes, and sometimes for bad ones. And I think, I don’t know. The narrative that Democrats have been wimps on the court, I just don’t think fits with the history of the last 60 or 70 years of American politics.

david leonhardt

I mean, I understand why you would say that about the 20th century.

ross douthat

Well, I’m deliberately starting with the war in court. I mean, I think the Supreme Court has been a force for conservatism at all kinds of points in American history. I’m just saying that modern liberalism was very, very comfortable expanding judicial power dramatically in order to achieve liberal goals that Democratic majorities did not support. And that was a defining feature of liberalism for decades, continuing down to the 1990s and 2000s. And it has only ceased to be a defining feature of liberalism because they’ve lost some hardball battles over control of the Supreme Court.

david leonhardt

I mean, I’m open to the idea that in the past, liberals were sufficiently hardball about the court. But Jamelle, I’m going to quote for your column here, which is that this is what the Supreme Court has done under Chief Justice John Roberts, denied Medicaid coverage to millions of poor people, neutered the Voting Rights Act, authorized new waves of voter suppression, unleashed the power of money for entrenched interests and would-be oligarchs, and opened the door to extreme partisan gerrymandering. And because it happened before Roberts was on the court, but it was still a conservative court, you didn’t have on your list, decided a presidential election. And so, Ross, I agree that if you kind of look at Brown v. Board and Roe v. Wade, there is this 20th century history of liberals using the court as a form of power—

ross douthat

I mean, Obergefell v. Hodges was not 50 years ago, right?

david leonhardt

No, that’s true. But I assume you would agree that the last 20 years have been much more about a conservative court overruling progressive legislation.

ross douthat

I think there are very few major examples of a conservative court completely overruling progressive legislation. I mean, I think affirmative action is the classic case, where the court has been sort of involved in affirmative action in ways that have weakened and redirected it without ever eliminating it. And maybe that will change with this court, right? I mean, I agree that it’s possible. But Obamacare is the same way. The Roberts court did not overturn Obamacare. It did stuff around the edges that reshaped the law, and sometimes in stupid ways, because when conservatives legislate from the bench, they do stupid things too. The modern conservative Supreme Court is not like the New Deal Lochner Era Supreme Court. It’s much more restrained in its attacks on liberal legislation and liberal governance.

david leonhardt

O.K., let’s end here. Is there any case in the current term that you both are watching?

ross douthat

I mean, I’m watching the abortion cases to see what Kavanaugh and Roberts do.

david leonhardt

And do you have an expectation?

ross douthat

No, I’m practicing agnosticism. [BOUIE LAUGHS]

david leonhardt

I’m similarly uncertain. I mean, I think it is really unclear what this court will do on abortion. And boy, it’ll be a big deal either way. Jamelle, what about you?

jamelle bouie

There’s a gun case out of New York. And I’m curious about this because it’s about open carry. Depending on how the court goes, it could leave the status quo in place, or open up a kind of national right to open carry. [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

O.K., we’ll leave it there and move on to our weekly recommendation, when we give you a suggestion meant to take your mind off of the news of the day. Jamelle, since you’re our guest, you get to go. What recommendation do you have for us?

jamelle bouie

So I think I’ve said before when I have done a recommendation, that I watch a lot of movies. It’s sort of my main activity next to my job and being a parent and partner. And so a movie that’s just been on my mind since I watched it this past month, is Abel Ferrara’s 1990 “King of New York.” It’s a kind of crime drama that takes place in a heightened version of late ‘80s New York, so even more crime-ridden, even darker. I don’t think — there may be one or two daylight scenes in this entire movie. The entire film takes place under cover of night. And it stars Christopher Walken as a recently released convict who attempts to rebuild his drug empire. It is violent and explicit, and also, absolutely captivating. If you want to experience a kind of gritty version of New York, then I think this is kind of the perfect example of it. And it’s fun because in addition to Walken, it stars more or less every — or, includes more or less every single black actor who is going to be famous in the next 10 years: Wesley Snipes, Laurence Fishburne— he’s not black, but Steve Buscemi is in there. I mean, there’s a lot of people in this film that show up and who will go on to great careers. So it’s one of those movies. And I always love those movies, that you can see accomplished actors in smaller roles when they’re younger. I love seeing that happen.

david leonhardt

Jamelle, I’m definitely going to see this because I’m older than you. And I actually grew up in late 1980s New York. And you know, my friends and I would go play Donkey Kong and other bad video games in Times Square arcades. And it is difficult for people who didn’t experience New York back then, and who do now. It is difficult to describe how much New York changed so rapidly. So Jamelle, what’s the recommendation again?

jamelle bouie

So the recommendation is Abel Ferrara’s 1990 film, “King of New York.” [MUSIC PLAYING]

david leonhardt

That’s our show this week. Thank you so much for listening. If you have thoughts or ideas, leave us a voicemail at 347-915-4324, or you can email us at argument@nytimes.com. If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating or review in Apple Podcasts. This week’s show is produced by Kristin Schwab for Transmitter Media, and edited by Sarah Nics. Our executive producer is Gretta Cohn. We had help from Tyson Evans, Phoebe Lett, and Ian Prasad Philbrick. Our theme was composed by Alison Leyton-Brown. We’ll see you back here next week. [MUSIC PLAYING] I’m older than you, and I actually grew up in late 1980s New York.

ross douthat

They called him the king of New York, in fact.

david leonhardt