Pete Buttigieg warns democrats can't go back to pre-Trump status quo

Pete Buttigiege contends President Trump is destroying American institutions.

Which is wrong.

It is also wrong to imagine that we should have just kept everything going along the way it was.

How would he have Democrats change their approach?

I'm Steve Inskeep, and this is a special edition of Up First from NPR News.

We had an extended talk with the former transportation secretary and presidential candidate.

His party looks for a reset and presses President Trump on Jeffrey Epstein.

You shouldn't have to be a Republican or a Democrat to care about making sure there's transparency on something as horrific as the abuses that happened.

Also, he's one of several possible presidential contenders with a beard.

If you were to run, would you shave it?

That's a double hypothetical.

Stay with us.

We'll have a talk with the man once known as Mayor Pete.

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Democrats are debating their future, and here is one of the voices in that debate.

My name is Pete Buttic.

They call me Mayor Pete.

That's the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, when he declared his run for president a couple of campaigns ago.

He stepped aside in favor of Joe Biden, became Biden's transportation secretary, and was notable as one of the Democrats who took up the challenge of talking on Fox News.

Sorry, is this an interview or a debate?

Can I at least finish this?

Well, I just can't let you throw out fallacies.

It's important.

Excuse me?

Name one statement that I just made that you would say is factually inaccurate.

Now his party is out of power.

Buttigiege has moved from Indiana to Michigan for personal reasons, he has said, although it is a presidential swing state.

We met face-to-face in New York City for an NPR video interview.

The conversation started late.

As he crossed the city to our studios, people kept stopping him to ask for selfies.

I saw this myself as I led him into and back out of the building.

This was all last week, as President Trump and his allies were trying to fend off Trump's own supporters.

They are demanding that the government release more information about Jeffrey Epstein, the late financier convicted of sex offenses and connected to many of the rich and powerful, including, in the past, Donald Trump.

And that was where our conversation began.

As we're talking, the House of Representatives has stepped aside for a number of weeks rather than address this issue.

What do you think the public interest in that particular topic tells you about President Trump, about voters, about America right now?

Well, I think the public interest just got a lot deeper because one of our branches of government, the U.S.

House of Representatives, has been shut down because the Republicans would rather close that half of the Congress than allow the Epstein files to come out or somehow impede President Trump's decision to block those files.

So I think what that tells you is, first of all, obviously something very sensitive for President Trump.

But also, I think it speaks more broadly to this pattern of events where the president has said he would do something when it suited him to say he would do it.

And then when it's his interest to do the reverse, he'll do that.

He said he was going to cut prices on day one.

He did the reverse.

He said he was going to bring peace to the Middle East on day one, bring peace to Russia and Ukraine on day one.

And he said that he was going to release these files right away.

And now it's more in his interest to block them.

So he's blocking them.

I guess we should note that Republicans say they shut down the House because they believe your party is cynically trying to exploit this issue that you don't actually care about.

Is it true that you don't actually care about it?

Well, I think that every American American now has a stake in this, if only because the Republicans would rather shut down the entire U.S.

House of Representatives than have to vote on allowing these files to come to light.

So, yeah, I think it's safe to say this was historically more of an area of interest for the MAGA base and conservatives.

But you shouldn't have to be a Republican or a Democrat to care about making sure there's transparency on something as horrific as the abuses that happened.

And to want to understand why an administration that promised to shed light on this decided not to.

There's never been any real explanation of that.

I want to look at this in a little deeper sense as to what it says about the public, about people who are interested in this.

I'm imagining that you would rather be talking about infrastructure.

or talking about economic fairness or affordability or something like that.

This seems to be the thing that has captured the attention of a lot of the public.

And according to surveys, a lot of people simply do not believe they've been told the truth about that.

What does that public skepticism tell you more broadly about where voters are right now?

Well, I think it's a touchstone that reflects something much bigger about people feeling that their government isn't telling them the truth.

And it's easy to see why frustration about that has reached a boiling point in this country.

But look, we've got a broader issue of a breakdown, a collapse really, in societal trust.

This has been going on for years.

I wrote a whole book about this five years ago, and I think it's even more important now.

And unless there is a higher degree of fidelity between our institutions, our leaders, and the people they serve, then issue after issue will become volcanic, as this has.

And

it's just not sustainable.

On that matter of trust, somebody listening to this is going to say, well,

Biden didn't release the Epstein file when he had the chance.

Yeah, he also didn't campaign promising that he would.

I don't know how decisions were made in DOJ.

That was different from my world.

But what I know is that Donald Trump made a big deal about this, promised to bring this to light right away, and now he's blocking it.

There are also Republicans alleging that you and others in the administration did not say all you knew about President Biden's condition, how his age has affected him over time.

That's not true.

In my case, at least I told the truth, which is that he was old.

You could see that he was old.

And also, when it came to my ability to do my job and have my boss, my president, support me in that job, I always got whatever I needed from him, from the Oval Office.

You never had a moment before that famous presidential debate where you worried about whether he was all there?

There were moments where I thought he's looking tired today or where I noticed that he was aging, but there was never a moment where I thought this decision, this policy, or this process is going worse or is wrong because of the fact that he's old.

Let me put a proposition on the table, and we'll see if you agree with it or not.

I think it's possible to say, looking at the last election, looking at the last last several years, that the country has changed, that politics have changed, that Republicans figured that out and captured the moment, and Democrats have failed to do so up to now.

Do you agree with that?

I would mostly agree.

Yeah.

I think that Democrats have been slow to understand the changes in how people get their information, slow to understand some of the cultural changes that have been happening, and maybe most problematic of all,

too attach to a status quo that has been failing us for a long time.

Right now you've got an administration that is burning down so many of the most important institutions that we have in this country, which is wrong.

It is also wrong to imagine that we should have just kept everything going along the way it was.

And I think that my party needs to do a better job of addressing the fundamental problems that have led people to mistrust everything.

But we are already in a dramatically different world than we were six months ago, let alone four years ago.

And that's about to change that much more, in my opinion, because of the rise of artificial intelligence.

And I think even now,

even though it's a hot topic and people are discussing it all the time and there's a lot of hype, I think even now we are underreacting in a big way.

politically and substantively to what this is about to do to us as a country.

Artificial intelligence, you mean?

What do you mean?

What's the danger?

Well, in addition to the dangers that do get talked about a lot, the kind of apocalyptic scenarios of running away taking over machines, which is-the economic implications are the ones that I think could be the most disruptive the most quickly.

We're talking about whole categories of jobs where not in 30 or 40 years, but in three or four,

half of the entry-level jobs might not be there.

And if that happens as quickly as it might happen, it'll be a bit like what I lived through as a kid in the industrial Midwest when trade and automation sucked away a lot of the auto jobs in the 90s, but 10 times, maybe 100 times more disruptive because it's happening on a more widespread basis and it's happening more quickly.

And you don't think that we're really reacting to that.

We talk about it, but we're not doing anything.

I don't think we're asking big enough questions about what we would do if that many jobs got disrupted.

We're talking about changes that might be

bigger and faster than anything we've seen since the 17th century, the Industrial Revolution, which is before the United States existed.

And yeah, I think we're underreacting to that.

You talked about the status quo and Democrats getting stuck defending the status quo.

One of your fellow Democrats, Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut, has talked a lot about this recently.

And I can summarize his argument by saying Democrats need to be more populist.

We need to acknowledge that people are profoundly dissatisfied with the status quo.

We also, as Democrats, he would say, need to be tearing things down,

need to be talking about the very few people who seem to be benefiting in this situation.

He also wants Democrats to be louder, a little more disruptive in government.

What do you make of his approach?

I think it's certainly true that we can't be wedded to the old ways or the status quo.

It is wrong to burn down the Department of Education.

But I actually think it's also wrong to suppose that the Department of Education was just right in 2024.

You could say the same thing about USAID.

It is unconscionable that children were left to die by the abrupt destruction of USAID.

Unconscionable.

It is also clear that USAID developed into something that nobody on a clean sheet would have designed the way it was.

There were a lot of problems with development aid, how it was structured.

My point is, it's wrong to burn these things down.

But it's also wrong to suppose that if Democrats come back to power, our project should be to just tape the pieces together just the way that they were.

We should be unsentimental about the things that don't work.

We should be fearless in defending the things that do work.

And yes, we should be naming the forces, entities, people, often corporations who stand between a lot of Americans and a better, freer life.

There's a particular small slice of that that I worked on when I was in transportation as, for example, a tough regulator of airlines trying to make sure that they treat their passengers better.

But across our entire society and economy, we could be doing better on that because

this president has come to power promising to do that.

Now, what he's actually doing is exactly the reverse, a tax bill that makes it easier for the wealthiest and corporations and harder for the working class that he claims he represents.

But they're talking a good game, and we need to be much more responsive to that.

What is the cultural change in America that you said you felt Democrats had missed?

Well, I think there's a perception that Democrats became so focused on identity

that we no longer had a message that could actually speak to people across the board, or that we were only for you if you fit into a certain identity bucket.

And the tragedy of that is that I believe the right kind of democratic vision is one that lifts everybody up.

It pays specific attention to discrimination or mistreatment of people because they're black or because they're women or

LGBTQ or whatever reason that might be.

But you don't have to be in this particular combination of categories to benefit from what we have to offer.

And I think we really struggled to communicate something a bit more universal.

And that's been costly.

Pete Buttigiege, the former transportation secretary and former presidential candidate.

Coming up, how does he respond to some of the other critiques of the Democratic Party?

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Their defeat to President Trump has prompted Democrats to challenge some of their party's strategies.

And that was part of our discussion with Pete Budajech.

Rah Emanuel, former White House chief of staff and holder of other significant positions as a Democrat, gave an interview to Megan Kelly just the other day, and she asked a series of questions about trans people.

He ended up contradicting most Democratic Party orthodoxy about trans people, ended up by saying agreeing with the idea that a man cannot become a woman, and then said he was going to head for the witness protection program because he was aware that some Democrats would be unhappy.

What's your approach to that and how would you try to appeal to people who disagree with you about it?

Well, I think the approach starts with compassion.

compassion for transgender people, compassion for families, especially young young people who are going through this, and also empathy for people who are not sure what all of this means for them, like wondering, wait a minute,

I got a daughter in the sports league, is she going to be competing with boys right now?

And just taking everybody seriously.

And I think when you do that, that does call into question some of the past orthodoxies in my party, for example, around sports, where I think most reasonable people would recognize that there are serious fairness issues if you just treat this as

not mattering when a trans athlete wants to compete in women's sports.

Meaning the parent who's complained about this has a case, in your opinion.

Sure.

And that's why I think these decisions should be in the hands of sports leagues and school boards and not politicians, least of all politicians in Washington trying to use this as a political pawn.

When President Trump says something like, no boys and girls sports, which is a phrase that they use, it sounds like you're not signing on to that.

I think that chess is different from weightlifting, and weightlifting is different from volleyball, and

middle school is different from the Olympics.

So that's exactly why I think that we shouldn't be grandstanding on this as politicians.

We should be empowering communities and organizations and schools to make the right decisions.

Let me ask about another argument that's been made about the Democratic Party and where it ought to go.

Let's call it the Ezra Klein-Derek Thompson School.

There are a number of books that theirs is maybe the most famous one that argues that government isn't working, isn't delivering for people, and a large reason is because of the way that progressives have approached government, burdening people who want to build things with too many regulations, too many opportunities to stop something, NIMBYism.

As somebody who was a transportation secretary, you may be familiar with this argument.

Maybe you were familiar with it before.

What do you make of it?

I lived it.

Look, it is too hard to build things in this country.

Definitely my experience with transportation is that it is too expensive, too complicated, too lengthy to get things done.

And that's also true for a number of things that matter enormously to the fight against climate change, or I'd say the fight to slow climate change.

The need to build more clean power transmission and generation, just to take a couple of issue sets.

So I think that they pointed to a number of things that are inarguably consistent with what I experienced.

At the same time, I think it would be a mistake to suppose that that's all you have to do, that there's a set of burdensome regulations, and if you just got rid of them, everything would go along just fine.

It does not relieve us of other things that need to happen in terms of adequately funding clean energy, transportation, housing, the other things that we need to build.

And recognizing where

the issue has more to do with industry structure, especially, again, I think back to transportation where there's a lot of monopolies or oligopolies, railroads, airlines.

How much of a disaster from your point of view is the administration creating by canceling so many projects in the middle, by ending subsidies for clean energy, on and on?

I think it's hugely costly.

I think it will destroy jobs.

I think it's going to lead to ⁇ we already know it's leading to higher costs of living.

Health insurance premiums are coming out for next year.

They're higher because of the Trump budget.

Prices, obviously, are higher.

I think that's partly because of the Trump administration's policies.

Interest rates are going to be higher because of how much they've added to the national debt to make room for these tax cuts for the wealthiest.

Jobs, I mean, take where I grew up, South Bend.

One of the biggest things to happen, in fact, the biggest thing to happen in terms of a new auto industry investment since the 1960s when Studebaker stopped making cars,

is a facility going in in St.

Joe County to create electric vehicle batteries.

It was, even just building it, even before it opens, has employed members of the building and construction trades trades in that part of Indiana where I grew up at a level not seen, I think, in my lifetime.

Now the fate of that project and so many like it have been called into question in ways that are going to hurt our economy and, of course, also set us back in terms of dealing with climate change.

Have we surrendered to China when it comes to clean energy, electric vehicles, wind, solar, the whole bit?

Yeah, the Trump administration is surrendering to China right and left.

from pulling out of UNESCO so that China can exert more cultural control over how the world relates to its own heritage, to very specific dollars and cents economic things.

And I think the tragedy of that is

China is trying to corner the market on green and clean tech for a strategic reason.

I do not think that the Chinese Communist Party is

sentimental about climate change.

I think they just recognize that this is a way to dominate the economy of the future.

If you give those markets up to them, as Trump seems determined to do, the result is they will win.

I want to remind people that we're talking in New York City, where the Democratic candidate for mayor, the nominee for mayor, is Zohran Mamdani.

What do you make of him?

I think that what he achieved is extraordinary.

And a big part of how he did it was by relentlessly focusing on affordability.

No matter what the context, the topic, the news of the day, he went straight to the thing that was on New Yorkers' minds, which is how hard it is to afford anything, rent, groceries, you name it.

I think that he also, just as a matter of campaign strategy, was

omnipresent.

He was everywhere.

He's going on podcasts.

He was doing social media.

And so I think a lot of more conventional political operatives didn't see him coming.

Andrew Cuomo had a more conventional media campaign.

For sure.

And I think in many ways, in addition to the moral

disqualifications that went with his history, he just didn't,

if anything, he reminded, I I think, a lot of people of the status quo.

So I think a lot of people are focused on the leftism, the ideological leftism that I think we shouldn't be so surprised that prevailed in a New York Democratic Party primary.

But I think if my party wants to learn lessons from Mamdani's success that are portable to a place like

Michigan, where I live,

it's less about the ideology and more about the message discipline of focusing on what people care about and the tactical wisdom of getting out there and talking to everybody.

I was talking the other day to a Democratic member of Congress representing part of New York City who said to me, essentially what you're saying, Mom Dani in many ways is the future.

He knew how to campaign.

He's doing everything right.

There's a lot to learn from him.

And this lawmaker said, I haven't endorsed him yet because I have a lot of Orthodox Jews in my district.

What do you make of that contradiction?

Yeah, I mean, again, it's kind of distinguishing between tactics and ideology.

And I would say, you know, he's further left than I am.

But also,

I think that what he's been able to do is something that our party ought to learn from.

Would you endorse him?

Say, Big Ten Approach.

I don't agree with him about everything, but I endorse him.

He hasn't asked me to endorse.

I'm not really a player in New York City municipal politics, but I'd say that's the thing that he asked.

You would talk to him about it, sure.

You would talk to him about it.

Meaning you're not sure that you would or wouldn't.

Yeah, I mean, I would want, I mean, to be honest, as somebody who follows this from afar but hasn't exactly dug in on it, I haven't kind of dug in on these policy proposals he's put forward and how they would actually work.

I'd want to kind of talk through that.

I think the most important job, though, of any mayor,

and by the way, I also emerged as a very young, some would have said untested, disruptive figure running for mayor, right?

The most important job of any mayor is to pull a community together.

You are the walking symbol.

of what all of the diverse, disparate people in your city have in common.

And if I get a chance to talk with him, I'll want to talk with him about how he aims to do that.

I've often felt that New York City mayors come to embody their city, and that mayors in general come to embody the city in some way if they do the job well.

Yeah, which is this amazing thing that happens.

I mean, even in my city where I served of South Bend, Indiana, you really do gradually feel like you're sort of becoming the city you're morphing into it, which means you kind of rise and fall with the city.

And sometimes it means you you take on board this

pain when things are hurting in the city.

But it also means you just extend yourself to other people in this beautiful way that I think is one of the reasons why mayor might

be the most important

and unique office in American politics.

I want to ask a little bit about his policy proposals.

There's been so much discussion.

on NPR and elsewhere about his identity and what it means, but I wonder what some of his actual proposals mean.

I think of a proposal that he has, because of affordability, It's impossible to live in New York.

He proposes a rent freeze.

And when I hear that, as a former resident of New York City who lived at one time in a rent-stabilized apartment, I think about the fact that New York has had various forms of rent control and rent stabilizations.

So for generations, the government has tried this in various ways, and still nobody can afford to live here, and it's extremely expensive.

And his proposal now is to freeze rents at the level at which people already say they can't afford.

Does that make sense?

I think there's some very logical questions to ask about both who that helps and what comes next.

Because if housing is unaffordable, one of the reasons is there's not enough housing.

I mean, that's just, you know, that's a basic kind of clear fact.

So

what are you doing to make sure that there's more housing as well as making sure people can afford to live?

But then, of course, another part of it is there's always the price side.

When we talk about affordability, there's price and there's income.

So getting prices under control is a big deal and very important across our economy.

Obviously one of the most, probably the most important, economically important broken promise of the Trump administration is they said they'd lower prices and instead they're actually artificially increasing them with tariffs.

Tariffs, yeah.

But the other side is income.

So what is it going to take to make sure that people have income that meets the expenses that they face?

And

I'm not a detailed student of how those policies have been put forward in this New York election, but those are the questions that I think would need to be answered for this to hold together.

I guess if Mamdani were here, and in fact he was interviewed in this very studio, he might say, no, no, I also have a plan to build more public housing.

He wants the government to be engaged in building housing.

Does it make sense for the government to be doing that as opposed to the private sector?

It can, if there's a market failure.

And I think there are market failures certainly applying to housing in cities.

But in some ways, this also brings us back to some of the things that

the people in the abundance debate have pointed out, that it is too expensive, also it is too expensive for the government to build housing in many jurisdictions.

It is more expensive for the government to build housing in California than it is in Texas.

Understanding why and dealing with those is going to be vitally important, just like it was in transportation, for any public investment to actually deliver the results that it's supposed to.

Otherwise, people will get even more angry because you spent the money and you haven't solved the problem.

Now, when Buttigieg ran for president in 2020, he was seen as new and interesting, a candidate under 40, and also considered more centrist than some others, a Midwesterner who knew how to talk talk Midwestern.

And you can hear his reluctance to sign on to Mamdani's campaign substance, even as he praises the campaign's style.

When we return, the Democrat talks about the politics of fear, the politics of courage, and his beard.

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Here's the last part of our talk with Pete Buddhajuch in New York.

I want to zoom back and ask how you think about the president that your party is now facing.

I presume you don't think Trump is a good president.

Do you see him as a bad president who's wrong about a lot of things or as an existential threat to democracy in this country?

I would

go well beyond bad president.

There are presidents who you disagree with and presidents you agree with.

This is, I think, categorically different.

We have not had a president, left, right, or center,

who has tried to destroy companies, universities, and broadcasters who criticize his government.

There's been rough and tumble politics all through U.S.

history, but that is

not just different, it's different in a way that offends

every

fiber of American civic values, left, left, right, and center.

We have

had disagreements over court rulings, but never had an administration that has been so ready to just say no when a court says you have to do this.

That is threatening at a different and much deeper level than

the regular kind of push-pull of the separation of powers between the executive and the courts.

We have a president who really is attempting to become an autocrat and in some ways has succeeded.

Has succeeded.

He has succeeded in changing the conduct of private actors,

universities, companies, broadcasters, I think.

That is

as big a part or bigger of what autocracy looks like.

than that self-editing that he's causing to happen, than kind of direct government control.

So yes, in some ways he's succeeded.

Now, whether that holds or whether that changes, that's up to the rest of us, especially because he's doing it in the service of a very unpopular agenda.

Tax cuts for the rich, cuts to Medicaid and Social Security, empowerment of corporations that are already too powerful.

But I also think, to come back to what I was saying earlier, that some of the things that are underway and about to accelerate, like the rise of artificial intelligence, will create completely novel challenges that the next round of American leadership will have to contend with, that even the intense persona and concentrated power that Donald Trump represents cannot respond to on today's terms.

Does the situation call for Democrats to make some kind of extreme or emergency response?

And if so, what is it?

I think a lot of people feel as a kind of emotional matter that more has to happen.

I think it's been harder to explain or express what that actually looks like, largely because it's hitting up against the simple fact that we are out of power.

What I think we need to do is connect with the people we haven't been reaching and aspire not to get 51%, but 60%.

You know, real landslides used to happen.

We used to have 60-40 presidential elections.

Now it's always 51%, 49%.

We should aim much higher, especially because most of our policies actually have 60-70% support on most issues.

You name it.

Taxes, healthcare, choice, even stuff like marriage or background checks on guns where we've been a little bit afraid of our own positions.

Like most people are with us.

So obviously, our

ambition is not matching where we ought to be.

And that's going to take intellectual ambition, too.

How do we redesign these institutions that we inherited from basically the New Deal period and that have been smashed to pieces domestically and internationally?

How do we contend with something as fundamentally novel as AI?

But it's that.

It's not theatrics.

I mean, theatrics have their place in politics, I guess.

But it's not that you have to go out and set yourself on fire to get attention.

It's actually having a good response to what's on people's minds and then taking it everywhere.

As you're talking, I'm thinking of the historian Robert Dalek, who wrote a biography of Franklin D.

Roosevelt,

who was president at another time when a lot of people were losing faith in democracy.

And Roosevelt, he says, seemed to be conscious of that and went for 60-40 positions.

He often refrained from doing things things he might like to do.

In fact, history later criticized him for some things he did not want to do because he always wanted to be on the side of 60% of the people.

That's what you're talking about, I think.

I would put it this way.

There's some things that 100% of people should be able to get behind, including freedom of the press and free expression and the rule of law and equal justice before the law.

And all of us should just agree on that.

Then there's the level of kind of contested policies, what I'm talking about here,

where

we could start right now focusing on the things where most most people are with us and at least try to deliver those first before we get into things where we might have a little more persuasion to do.

Most people already get that we should have paid family leave in this country.

Most people already get that your health care should be taken care of one way or the other in this country.

And so on and so on and so on.

And then there are some ideas that maybe do need more pushing to get people used to them.

Things I tried to advocate for back when I was running for president.

We should spend most of our time and effort, I think, on things that we really know should happen, that Republicans are against, but Americans are for, and

be asked to get a chance to implement them.

Aaron Powell, as you're talking, I'm thinking about the fact that Democrats warned that the president would do a lot of these things if he was elected.

He has done a lot of these things.

Many of his policies have been unpopular, and yet he still has this fundamental base of support.

It's somewhere in the 40s, according to surveys.

And a lot of other people don't seem that alarmed, don't seem as alarmed as you are about what the president is doing.

Why do you think that is?

Well, in terms of what it would take for him and his supporters to break faith with each other, I think we have learned it's a very high bar because Trump has become a worldview unto itself.

But I think there are moments where he has revealed how

little respect he has for his own supporters.

That's one of the reasons why I think the Epstein saga is especially relevant, because by telling them that this was important and that he would do something, and then by turning around and saying he won't do something and that they're stupid if they care about this,

he's putting his thumb in their eye even more than usual.

Basically, he's saying that he thinks they're gullible.

But we do have to look at what we're doing that makes it hard to hear what we have to say.

Too often we talk in terms that are academic.

When we're talking about deeply important things, like freedom and democracy, We still have to have a way of talking about it that relates to how everyday life is different and how your everyday life is different and worse if

you, for example, are paying more at the store because of tariffs that were implemented, even though most Americans don't want them because we're no longer democratically responding to the American people.

Or, you know, pointing out that it's not just autocracy is bad, though it is.

It's that when you have

an autocrat in power, he can get away with appointing incompetent people over very important things in our lives.

So right now we have the Secretary of Defense in charge of defending the American people who is

accidentally texting military strike information to journalists.

We have the person in charge of American public health who is a quack who doesn't believe in medicine and now measles is on the rise in America.

We have a Secretary of Education in charge of your kids' educational well-being who has spoken about the importance of A1, which means she does not understand that the acronym is AI, which means she does not understand the most important developments affecting education in our lifetimes.

We have a Secretary of Homeland Security who sat on funding and did not allow it to go to Texas during the floods for at least two days for no good reason.

And my replacement over at the DOT was an airline lobbyist.

So these things do affect you, not for academic reasons, but because of what happens if you have a loss of accountability.

Those are the kinds of things I think we need to talk about before anybody can hear us in these high-minded academic discussions about freedom and and democracy.

It's not clear to me that it's broken through the idea that it would be undemocratic for a president who was elected, who did get the most votes, to do what he wants.

And that, of course, is Trump's argument.

I'm president, I won, I should enact my policy.

And if there is a law or a rule that stands in my way, that must be unconstitutional.

I should get to do what I want.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And look, we have things happening now in terms of, for example, broadcasters having their licenses threatened because they disagree with the government.

Yeah.

Or people being snatched off the streets by masked federal agents.

Things that I would have thought of as the fever dreams of libertarians and conservatives that I was arguing with back when I was a student who were warning darkly of government overreach and I thought that was overcooked.

And now it's happening.

Only it's happening under a supposedly conservative government.

So yeah, these things can happen.

Even if the president was elected democratically, even if he came to office by legitimate means, obviously these things can happen, but they shouldn't.

The founders thought long and hard and somewhat disagreed about whether to create the presidency at all, because they were afraid of how much power it would have.

And it turns out that two things kept the presidency from having too much power.

One was the Constitution and all the checks and balances and the systems and separation of powers.

And the other

was a certain level of fidelity to that idea on the part of every other person who has become president except this one.

It turns out you need both.

I need to ask about one other thing along these lines.

I hear conversations from people who bring up the factor of fear.

Political leaders, Republicans as well as Democrats, who are afraid of crossing the president.

afraid of future consequences to their careers, afraid of the future ability to get a job, afraid even of physical violence.

In your conversations with people in your party, how large a factor is fear?

I think it's real.

It's more real than at any point in my lifetime.

Whether we're talking about fear of violence that reportedly affected how Republican senators voted on the last impeachment of Donald Trump.

to fear of loss of funding that I think is already impacting who gets invited to speak at a university or who gets hired at a law firm.

That's real.

And

we can't allow that.

The thing about politics of fear is the more you give into it, the worse it gets.

The only antidote to a politics of fear is a politics of courage.

One last crazy question is on my mind.

I studied the 19th century and there's an interesting bit of trivia about presidents in the 19th century.

In the early generations of the United States, no president had a beard.

And then Lincoln had a beard.

And then there was a period of 60 or 70 70 years where the overwhelming majority of presidents had beards.

Beards were more popular in society, and there are even people who have written about the deep societal meanings of that.

I notice you have a beard.

Vice President Vance has a beard.

A number of other prominent political figures have beards.

Do you think a future president will have a beard?

Well, my beard is less related to deep societal meaning and more related to not feeling like shaving for

the first time in 15 years where I'm not in office or

on the ballot.

But yeah, I don't know.

These things go through seasons, I guess, or cycles.

If you were to run, would you shave it?

That's a double hypothetical.

The big swing vote on my beard comes from our son, who has yet to weigh in.

My husband Chastin is strongly pro-beard.

Our daughter is pretty anti-beard.

She says it's too scratchy when I kiss her good night, when I tuck her in.

Our little guy, Gus, has yet to weigh weigh in, so we'll see what he has to say.

Mr.

Buddha Judge, thanks so much.

Really enjoyed it.

Thank you.

Likewise.

Appreciate it.

This has been a special edition of Up First from NPR News.

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