Opinion | Trump and Musk, the ‘Co-Presidents’

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This is “The Opinions,” a show that brings you a mix of voices from “New York Times Opinion.” You’ve heard the news. Here’s what to make of it.

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I’m Aaron Retica, an editor-at-large for “The Opinion” section of “The New York Times.” I’m sitting with Jamelle Bouie, a columnist for “Times Opinion,” with whom I work very closely. Before the election, we worried a lot about what was going to happen if President Trump became president again. We talked a few weeks ago, and things were already looking pretty bad on the constitutional crisis front. And we’re talking again now, and I think it’s safe to say things look even worse. So, Jamelle, thanks very much for taking the time to talk with me.

Always a pleasure.

So let’s start with almost like a typology of executive power, and how they’re asserting it, because we’re seeing different things. At the Justice Department, we’re seeing one kind of takeover.

At the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, we’re seeing a different kind of takeover.

So could you talk a little bit first about what they appear to be doing and trying to do with their assertion of executive power?

Sure. I’m not sure that there are multiple typologies here. I think it’s actually a singular thing that they’re doing. They are really asserting the fullest form, the most expansive form of the unitary executive theory.

Because what the Trump administration, what the Trump presidency is trying to establish is this idea that when Article II, Section 1 says that the executive power shall be vested in the president, that this isn’t just a formalistic the president is the chief executive, that this means that anything that comes out of the executive branch, anything that touches the executive branch, anyone who operates under the executive branch, regardless of where they get their authority, is essentially an appendage of the president, a part of the president’s body in a way.

So if that’s true — if every single person working in the executive branch, working within the federal bureaucracy, is in some sense going to represents the president’s will, then the president has the total and absolute and unreviewable right to fire that person, to order them to do whatever. There’s no limit because the executive power is vested in the president.

Now, one of the immediate problems here — and this has been true for the entirety of American political history, and I think it’s a fatal problem for the unitary executive theory — is that the executive branch — the Constitution establishes an executive branch, but the actual composition of the branch doesn’t flow from the president. It’s a creature of Congress.

The CFPB, for example. Congress created the CFPB. Congress gives those employees or those agents a set of duties, a set of statutory duties. And in carrying out those duties, members of that agency are essentially operating in a ministerial role, right? They’re simply doing what they’re being told to do by Congress.

But in the literal sense, although the CFPB exists in the executive branch, it is a creature of Congress. And that’s true for most or many executive branch agencies. And it’s been true for the entirety of American history. This is just a thing.

And the truth of the matter is that the executive branch, the federal bureaucracy, is a creature of and jointly controlled — like joint custody of the president and of Congress, and of the courts, to an extent. But what Trump is asserting is that, no, I’m the only parent here, and I can do whatever I want with my children.

That’s happening in different ways, right? There’s the theory, the unitary executive theory. And of course, Trump made waves recently by posting — well, it’s a quote from Napoleon, except it’s not actually from Napoleon.

No, it’s from “Waterloo.”

Right. It’s from the movie.

Right. Which is appropriate.

Which fits, yes. What he posted, though, was “He who saves his country does not violate any law,” which also picks up from the Nixonian idea that he famously said to David Frost, after he resigned, that if the president does it, it’s not illegal. So there’s that assertion of that authority. But in practice, they’re also doing a lot of things. They’re attacking all these agencies. You called it an attempted hijacking. Brooke Harrington, who’s a sociologist at Dartmouth, refers to it as a hostile takeover.

And you asked, in one of your articles, whether the Constitution, as we know it, would still be in effect. Trump knows that his two opponents — and that is how he thinks about it. He’s not thinking — getting back to your analogy of a divorce, he’s not thinking of joint custody, right? He’s thinking I will have sole custody of the powers of the American government, which is obviously not the way it was set up. But he is trying to make those branches feel his lash.

That’s part of why you send absolutely breathtakingly absurd candidates like Robert Kennedy, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, and perhaps choicest of all, Kash Patel. That’s part of why you send them. It’s to actually humiliate these senators and make them vote for someone they know perfectly — many of them know, perfectly well, are not the least bit capable of doing the jobs they’re being asked to do. Well, that’s part of it.

And then on the court side of things, they’re trying a very typical MAGA tactic, right? As he would put it, the Marxist left is conjuring up this constitutional crisis. But as Karoline Leavitt, the White House Press Secretary, put it —

So all of this is coming together. How do you see it going forward?

I see it going forward. I mean, one thing it’s useful to do — to go back to that Waterloo quote, that faux Napoleon quote —

“Waterloo,” we should say, is a, I think, a 1970 movie.

Right, right, right. It’s quite good, too. So to go to that Napoleon quote, and to go to Napoleon himself, part of Napoleon’s deal — I mean, he crowns himself emperor of the French. He doesn’t say emperor of France. He’s emperor of the French. And he himself is presenting himself — and I’ll use the word again — as almost an emanation of the French people themselves, like the volksgeist of the French.

I think Trump — and whoever posted that, but even in how Trump presents himself, he does present himself as not simply the elected administrator of the federal government, not simply the head of state. He presents himself really as the spirit of the American people.

And so when thinking about what’s happening, first of all — and I said this in the conversation with some of our colleagues on “Matter of Opinion”— Trump isn’t just staking out some expansive vision of executive power. He’s really making a claim about where sovereignty lies in the American system. And he’s saying it lies with me.

And he who saves the country, doesn’t break the law. That is almost more, I think, than the Nixonian it’s not illegal when the president does it. It’s much more of a — because I’m sovereign, what the law is is subordinate to my will. I literally cannot break the law because I’m this instantiation of the country itself.

And so when Karoline Leavitt says that the constitutional crisis in the judiciary and that they’re usurping the president’s executive authority, if any of these people had any kind of traditional constitutional understanding, this would be absurd. An executive order, which is what this is all about, isn’t some royal decree. An executive order is, essentially, a bit of statutory interpretation, and by definition, then, it is subject to statutory review by the actions of judges.

But if you think of an executive order as a royal decree, as you think of an executive order as almost an emanation of the people themselves, then, yes, some district court judge blocking it seems like it should be illegitimate. So where does this go? The thing about these sorts of assertions of sovereignty is that it’s only true to the extent that political actors treat it as true.

And unfortunately, the people who are treating it as true are the people who currently hold the majorities in the House and the Senate, which is where looking to the future, where this gets tricky because when Congress does not act in response to a presidential, or judicial, for that matter, provocation to an assertion of power from either the other two branches, power grabs from either of the two branches, when Congress chooses not to act, what Congress effectively does is validate the assertion, validate the power grab.

And so Congress refusing to act in the face of what’s happening in the administration, refusing to take its custody of these agencies —

And specifically the power of the purse, which is the source of its constitutional power.

Right, right, right. Congress refusing to do that is ceding away its power of the purse. And just —

Could I make this point super clear for people?

Yeah, yeah.

By giving it away, what you’re saying is, by not asserting it, they are giving it away, right? Because as I’m always saying — and I think I stole this from some other political scientist — you don’t take power. You make it.

Right. And to specify what it would look like for Congress to not give it away in this circumstance, all it would take — I mean, and Republicans clearly like — I mean, what DOGE and Trump are doing are making cuts that they long would have wanted to make had they ever been able to get the votes to do so, which is part of why they’re probably not pushing back. They realize that if you were to do this legally and constitutionally, it probably couldn’t happen, or they would face too much political blowback.

But what would it look like, too, for them to maintain the power of the purse? It’s just to pass a bill giving DOGE the kind of authority that it’s claiming, giving DOGE access to these agencies, giving it a gloss of congressional legitimacy. They could even say, you can’t unilaterally turn off programs or destroy agencies, but you can make recommendations. And they’ll go to the DOGE committee in Congress, and they’ll be written up into a bill, and then we’ll vote on the bill.

Can we pause for a second just to recognize the amazingly evil sound of DOGE?

I hate it. I’ll be totally honest with you.

Let’s just have a linguistic moment here.

I hate saying it because it’s a reference to a stupid meme, and I just don’t — and Elon Musk — so the thing about Elon Musk —

Not a reference to the Venetian Republic?

Not a reference to the Venetian Republic. People floated that. And it’s like Elon Musk is not that smart, I’m sorry. He is thinking of the dog meme from 15 years ago. And he thinks it’s really funny still. That’s —

I’m going to come back to Elon Musk because when we’re talking about delegating power and the Constitution, I want to talk about him and the Appointments Clause. But before we get to that, there is resistance brewing within the executive branch. Last week, Danielle Sassoon, who was then the acting US attorney Southern — well, US attorney in the Southern District of New York — refused to drop the case when she had been ordered to by the Department of Justice in Washington. But the woman who actually did that, she was not a liberal.

No, no, no.

She was appointed by him. She was a Federalist Society — I don’t know if member is the right word. She’s clerked for Scalia. So is it possible that that is one area where not a resistance in the Women’s March sense, but a resistance and an important reassertion of judicial power will occur, or is this a fleeting moment of conscience that, actually, we shouldn’t put too much stock in?

I think it’s really hard to say at this stage. If Trump is trying to run roughshod over the judiciary, as well as Congress, I have to imagine that they would be jealous of their authority and jealous of their power, and would, on that basis, want to push back, especially since they would not suffer any political consequences. It’s not like they have to run in a primary or anything. It’s not like they can be pressured out of the job. It’s their job until they don’t want to have it anymore.

Musk said that there had to be a lot of impeachments, but that’s not the same as offering to bankroll primary opponents.

Right. As far as within the executive branch, I mean, this is where it gets interesting because you can assert this hierarchical control of the entire executive branch. And I say that — and I feel like it’s worth saying that I think that many Americans do imagine that the executive branch is structured in the top down pyramid.

Like a company?

Right. And that kind of —

You can fire anyone.

And honestly, the least sinister version of where Trump is coming from is just that he’s been at the head of a company his whole life. And so he imagines that the corporate structure can be — or that not even the corporate structure could be — the closely held firm, you can just transport it over to government. One way you can describe what Trump is doing is trying to make the government look like a closely held firm.

But as I was saying earlier, the executive branch really isn’t hierarchical in that way. I’m trying to think of a good analogy for it. It’s more like the president represents one especially powerful and influential magnate. It’s like a board with lots of metal filings. And all the metal filings are the various agencies and bureaus and employees and everything.

I’m liking this. Yes.

And there are just various — there’s the president magnate, there’s the Congress magnate, there’s the court magnate. And depending on positioning, depending on area, depending on relative strength, all these things, the files will go in one direction or the other. But it’s not something top down in a way like a company is.

I mean, this is Trump’s worldview, right? He’s got this — and here I’ll tap into your film expertise. It’s like this Rat Pack film noir idea about the world. Everybody screws everybody else, and that’s it. That’s all there is. No one is an idealist. No one is — it’s the anti-Frank Capra idea. And you see it in a million ways with him. And you see it with Greenland. You see it with Mexico, Panama. And now we’re saying, oh, Ukraine, you’d like some help. We’re going to take all your minerals or, OK, we’ll settle for half.

That’s connected to all of this. And, in fact, it precedes any kind of constitutional authority or assertion of power. So how do you see all of this coming together in Trump?

I mean, I think what fundamentally drives Trump is his belief that might makes right, that if you are big, you have a right to dominate everything around you. The US can have Greenland and Canada because it’s big. Can have Panama because it’s big and they’re smaller. Russia can have Ukraine because it’s big. Perhaps China can have Taiwan because China is big, right? This sense that simply being the biggest entitles you to whatever you want.

It’s, quite frankly, a child’s vision of power and a child’s vision of how things should work. And what it misses — this desire to impose rigid hierarchies and dominate them — is that, even in autocratic systems, power is reciprocal, even in authoritarian countries, leaders cannot act with total impunity. They have to be attentive to public opinion to some extent. They have to be attentive to subordinates, to potential rivals, to all sorts of people within the regime.

And if you have that cynical view, you see them everywhere.

Right, right, right. There’s no way to actually have a stable hand, hold stable authority and run roughshod over everyone, or suppress your opponents this way. You can’t do both. One thing I do think is interesting is there will be mounting legal efforts. You can sense that the public, that maybe the demobilized opposition is beginning to get mobilized again.

Yeah. Just very recently, his approval rating is also starting to slip a little bit.

So maybe his — and here’s the thing. Right now, you could say that all this stuff that is happening is really only capturing the attention of people like us. But there are these large layoffs happening that are affecting just ordinary federal workers. If there are enough of these things in a short enough period of time, that’s a real economic hit.

That’s people — maybe they’re not paying rent. They’re not paying mortgages. They’re not buying as much. It’s an actual economic hit. Maybe he gets these tariffs that he wants and doesn’t back down finally. He just rips off the Band-Aid and does it. It’s not hard to imagine, within the next month or two, all of this coming to a head to produce outcomes that regular people notice and feel.

Cutting Medicaid perhaps most strongly of all.

And then what happens?

Truly barbaric.

Right? You’ve done none of the work to prepare the ground. You’ve done none of the work to build political support. You’ve acted like an autocrat. But public opinion still exists. Other political actors still exist. The society still exists. And so shock and awe was successful in March 2003, and it meant nothing six months later.

So before we close out, I want to talk a little bit about Musk’s role, because it’s also connected to these constitutional issues. He is clearly acting as a principal officer of the federal government, so he should be subject to the advice and consent of the Senate. On Monday night, in a court filing, the administration asserted that he actually wasn’t the head of DOGE, that he’s just a special advisor to the president.

They’re doing that, I assume, because they’re trying to slip out of any danger that he would have to appear before the Senate, or just publicly disclose his finances, or I’m not sure exactly what the reasoning is there. But that part of the constitutional crisis is some guy — if I could use that phrase — has gone under the radar somewhat, but is actually perhaps the most obvious manifestation of the constitutional crisis right now.

Right. It’s been, actually, quite strange to me to see how little discussion this has gotten. So if he’s a special —

Maybe explain the Appointments Clause because let’s live on planet Earth. Not everybody knows what the Appointments Clause is. [LAUGHS]

So the Appointments Clause of the Constitution simply empowers the president to nominate and, with the advice and consent of the Senate, appoint public officials. It comes from Article II, Section 2, Clause 2, and states, “and the president shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law. But the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers as they think proper in the president alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.”

Let me back up. For early American public through the 19th century, basically the way things worked is that there were cabinet heads and bureau heads for smaller agencies. There wasn’t a big White House staff as we would recognize it. That really only emerges in the 20th century because of the rise of the administrative state and the rise of a large —

Right. And could we pause for a second to say that the rise in the administrative state, the rise in the state came in the response to seeing what happened when unfettered capitalism was allowed to reign free.

Right. One way to think of the administrative state, and I’m sure people who hate it are going to be like, this is a biased way of thinking about it, but hey, you’re listening to us and not them.

One way to think of the administrative state is that the advocates for a larger and more rational and more expansive federal bureaucracy were looking out at economic society and civil society and seeing large concentrations of wealth, seeing large corporations that had, in effect, the power of states. And there’s just no way to control them. There’s no counterbalancing force in the society.

So the federal administrative state is a counterbalancing force. It is a force of comparable size and complexity and strength that can work its will on concentrations of wealth, on concentrations of economic power, and so on and so forth. And so, yeah, it makes sense that these people would hate this thing because it was designed to be in the way of their predecessors.

But in mid-century-ish, Congress essentially passes a law that allows the president to hire all kinds of advisors, all kinds of aides, and so on and so forth, to really expand out the White House staff and make it bigger and more able to actually manage things. These weren’t Senate confirmable positions because they weren’t really exercising power. They were advisors to the president. They are helping run the White House. But Musk is not a chief of staff. He’s an advisor, but he’s an advisor whose agents can destroy entire federal agencies.

Yes the world’s weirdest sleepovers.

Who has been granted extra legal and extra constitutional authority over critical parts of the federal government. And so I would say that if the Appointments Clause is about presidential officers who are exercising direct presidential power, then Musk, who was exercising presidential power — I mean, and that’s a nice way of putting it.

I feel like, in a real sense, you can make a real case that Musk is serving as a kind of co-president. If that’s the case, then he has to be Senate-confirmed. I mean, if that’s the case, then the Congress needs to pass a bill creating the Office of DOGE or something, and vesting it with authority, and then confirming him.

But as it stands, it really is, I think, an extra-constitutional assertion of power. It certainly seems to me like Musk is just being the president right now and looking back over his shoulder every so often to be like, OK, Trump, and Trump is like, I don’t care, sure. They’re kind of co-presidents. And that muddies the lines of responsibility tremendously.

And if Elon Musk is going to be issuing orders to the members of federal bureaucracy, he does need — there needs to be some formal — he needs some formal Senate-confirmed role. And if there isn’t one, if he’s going to be acting as co-president without any accountability, that is — I mean, that is — it’s not great. It’s bad.

We’re going to have to come back to this because we didn’t even discuss the just massive inherent conflicts of interest —

Oh, right, of course.

— which is like — it’s just — I mean, it’s actually billions of dollars of contracts that Musk’s businesses have with the federal government.

They’ve successfully been able to demagogue public health measures that cost pennies on the dollar to the American taxpayer. Meanwhile, Elon Musk could, and probably has at this point, awarded himself hundreds of millions, billions of dollars in valuable contracts, to say nothing of what he’s doing with all the data that people have access to.

It’s like, pay attention. Hey, look, we’re spending on literacy in Iraq, a country we invaded, by the way. Don’t pay attention to the fact that it looks like the official car of the State Department might be Tesla.

That’s the next step. Jamal, thanks very much.

My pleasure.

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