(upbeat music) From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. As we've noted on the show before, over the course of the year 2024, about half of the world's population will vote in an election. We've discussed a number of these elections on the show already in South Africa, India, France, the UK. For the next two months, we're gonna focus a little more closely on one election in particular. That is, of course, this November's in the United States. But before we get into more details about the candidates, the campaigns, and the voters, we're gonna start with a bigger picture look at one of the most discussed issues surrounding this election, what it could mean for American democracy. (upbeat music) Many Americans, including more than a few Republicans, see a potential Trump victory in this year's election as a threat to American democracy. Whether you share that concern or not, the rise of Donald Trump and the prospect of a second Trump term as Trump sits at the center of multiple criminal investigations has brought up unsettling questions about presidential power and the fragility of our democratic institutions. But as our guest on this episode explains, while these threats are very real and historic, they're not quite unprecedented. And the way our country has navigated such threats before has a lot to teach us as we look towards a potential second Trump presidential term. Throughout American history, we've had these crises. We're in one now and the possibility of Trump is destroying American democracy is quite real, but we've been here before. And the thing that saved us is really never the traditional checks and balances that we learn about in grade school. That's Cory Brett Schneider, a political scientist at Brown University. His new book is called "The Presidents and the People," five leaders who threatened American democracy and the citizens who fought to defend it. In it, he looks at five presidents ranging from John Adams to Richard Nixon, who have all challenged key features of our democracy. He also looks at how our country has recovered from these moments of crisis. On this episode, Cory Brett Schneider, on why some presidents seek to challenge our country's democratic institutions, what it looks like when they do and why, despite these threats, we've been able to defend against them so far. (gentle music) - Cory Brett Schneider, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally. - Thanks, it's a pleasure to be here, looking forward to the conversation. - So, I do wanna look at so many of the wonderful historical examples you have in the book, but I just wanted to start with the Trump presidency. How did Trump and his presidency affect how you approached these ideas of sort of presidential abuse, assaults on kind of democracy? Like, were you already working on this book? And then Trump came into the picture. Did he kind of inspire you? Like, how did he fit into your research on this? - Yeah, inspire in the worst possible way. I had a book called "The Oath in the Office" and the subtitle of that book was "A Guide to the Constitution for Future Presidents" and that came out two years after the Trump presidency. The idea really was, look, Trump is evading constitutional norms in such a drastic way that there's gonna be a book about what a president should do and how a president should think about fundamental issues in American democracy and fundamentally about the Constitution. And I think it was an important book and I used it as a jumping off point to think about a lot of the issues like the travel ban that were coming up, constitutional issues, or the question at the time of whether or not a sitting president could be indicted. But as Trump began to reshape the court and began to exert his power and to get away with a lot of his violations of constitutional norms, I wanted a book that spoke to the idea that really the history of the Supreme Court isn't the place where we find ourselves saved when it comes to the question of constitutional democracy. And so what I came to more clearly was the idea that throughout American history, we've had these crises, even though we're in one now and the possibility of Trump destroying American democracy is quite real, I'm happy to talk about that. But we've been here before. And the thing that saved us is really never the traditional checks and balances that we learn about in grade school. The idea, for instance, that the Supreme Court is going to be that check just has never really worked out. In fact, the court has often made things worse when it comes to crises of democracy or that Congress and the impeachment process, which is the formal check that many of the framers thought would save us, didn't work in crucial moments. And so I talked about a warning that Patrick Henry issued Patrick Henry, the revolutionary hero, opposed the ratification of the constitution. Why he said, look, the presidency is so dangerous it assumes a good person in office because these supposed checks are very weak. And what if you get not a good person in office but a really bad one, a criminal president? That person could collapse the system. And so that danger of a criminal presidency, I wanted to think about that in Henry's warning. And that came over time to really focus on these five cases of presidents really threatened democracy. And in each of them, it's never the formal checks. As I said, that save American democracy. It's the informal process of citizens forming what I call constitutional constituencies and kind of reclaiming democracy by enlisting recovery presidents, subsequent presidents after the crisis. I think it gives us an understanding of the system of American democracy and the way that that relates to the way American history is unfolded but also to understanding the current moment in a deeper way. - Absolutely. And I think your book sort of showed those echoes in our presence so clearly and the failure of the formal checks and balances. And I wanna talk about it all more and maybe let's just start with the first example sort of chronologically. Like, how long was it into the American experiment before we had a president who seemed to be pushing the, guardrails as we like to say nowadays? - Yeah, the second, I talk about Washington's second inaugural sort of paradigm of what a president should be. And he says, it's the shortest I've ever given. He says, look, I just took the oath of office but if I mess up, if I violate the constitution, subject me to criticism or even constitutional punishment. And then you get a very different understanding of the presidency and John Adams, the second president. He's often lauded but what I really wanna say is he was learning but had a deeply anti-democratic idea of the constitution and authoritarian idea. And so the Sedition Act is, in my opinion, it sort of defines his authoritarian idea of the constitution. - So this was a law passed by the Adams administration in 1798 that essentially became a way to put critics of the president and of the president's party, the Federalist Party at the time on trial. So what made Adams wanna create such a law? - The whole Sedition Act got started by the fact that the newspaper editors, one of them uncovered a plot by the Federalist Party, Adams Party, to cheat basically in the 1800 election. And he wanted to create an eerily similar actually to the way Trump tried to cheat with John Eastman to deny certification of legitimate electoral votes and Adams Party did a very similar thing. When that was uncovered, it triggered the attempt to shut down the opposition party. The Sedition Act shut down criticism of the president of the United States and there were prosecutions throughout the United States. And these weren't just any prosecutions, there were prosecutions designed to shut down the opposition party, editors associated with the opposition party. - Right, like the press. - The press and the press is of course a very divided partisan as it is now, but even more so at the time, there's an even pretension really to objectivity. But the law is really gerrymandered to allow for criticism of the vice president, Thomas Jefferson, a member of a different party, but to ban criticism of Adams, of the president of the United States. That shows you how much in its use, but also in its structure, it's an attempt to shut down the opposition. But Adams really doesn't believe in the idea of the sovereignty of the people over a president. That's just not the way he sees it. And at one point, he even talks about bringing back royal titles because he thinks that isn't so at odds with his understanding of the presidency. So he was a premier constitutional thinker, but it's a very different idea of the constitution and the one that we rightly think of as based in we the people and the people that we have to thank for that is not Adams. And it's certainly not the Supreme Court who took Adam's side lobbying for the Sedition Act and making sure that the editors on trial were convicted. But the heroes of that moment are the newspaper editors who use their own trials to put Adams on trial and to defend the idea that this newly passed First Amendment, which talked about that Congress shall not abridge the freedom of speech, that that really meant the right to dissent, the right to criticize the president. And we intuitively think that now, but that had to be created, I want to say, from by these editors. - So how exactly did that all play out? How did newspaper editors help really create our modern understanding of the First Amendment? - The way that it happened was that they used their newspapers. They made their trials public. They made Adams shut down a free speech and issue in the election of 1800. So what did they do? How did they prevail? Why were they heroes? Not just 'cause they stood up to authoritarianism. It's because they were able to focus the way they stood up into channeling the election of 1800 into a kind of referendum on the right to dissent. And when they win, when they prevail, Jefferson's one of the most famous lines in American history. He says in the first inaugural famously, "We're all federalists, we're all Republicans." Now, what does that mean? It means I'm not gonna shut down the opposition party. It gets its meaning because of what just occurred. And it's really a way of honoring this issue that brought them to power. - And Jefferson and then Madison sort of set a template, and I think especially Madison in some ways for what you describe as recovery presidents. And that often there's this crisis followed by some sort of recovery and maybe even adding stabilizers or guardrails to our system. What did Madison do to help kind of reestablish some of these principles even more? And kind of, did he set a model for future presidents? - Yeah. - My argument is that these democratic constitutional constituencies, and the first one that we're talking about are these editors prevail, not in court, of course, but through electing, through the election of 1800, in this case, recovery presidents. But the pattern of recovery takes time. So Jefferson isn't the perfect defender of the right to dissent, but the person who really does, I think, stand out as a kind of hero on the issue is James Madison, because during the war of 1812, Madison is prevailed on by members of his own party, this time the Democratic Republicans to shut down the opposition. And the fact that Madison refuses to shut down the opposition party, that's the heroic moment. He honors the commitment, basically, of those original editors, even though ironically, some of the original editors turn and start to demand a new Sedition Act, now that they're essentially empowered. And so Madison is the one that really takes his idea and solidifies it. And that's a pattern that we're gonna see throughout the book of Christ's partial recovery, and then a more full one. - And with it some moments of hypocrisy, where you see people arguing against a threat to democracy, that then there may be a little less against when it's their side of the partisan divide, which I thought was really fascinating. You know, that kind of brings up something I wanted to ask about later on, but I'll bring it up now, which is sort of the distinction between sort of democracy as a broad ideal or set of ideals and the Constitution as a specific kind of document. And at some points, especially surrounding, you know, the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, the Constitution was challenged in the surface of a broader idea of freedom and democracy and justice. President Lincoln, for example, suspended habeas corpus at the beginning of the Civil War so that he could suppress dissent and rebellion. And I guess I wonder, you know, how do you think about this tension? And, you know, when it's appropriate to sort of deviate from the letter of the Constitution in service of a bigger idea of democracy, even though, you know, that might not be how your opponents see it. - Yeah, that's a great question. And it pulls out a lot of the tensions in the book between what I'd say are two interpretations of the Constitution. First thing to say about the Constitution is very short, is language is often very broad and vague. And, you know, what that's meant is that we really have two constitutions throughout American history. One, authoritarian, that you see in Adams Buchanan and Johnson and especially Nixon, it's really blunt. Those pull out a certain dynamic of reading the presidency, reading the document to give the president enormous power and minimizing the rights of the people. And on the other hand, you have thinkers like the newspaper editors, Frederick Douglass, if I had to pick one person, I'd say he's the most important character in the book, figure in American history, defending the democratic Constitution. In fact, I often refer to him as the true founder of American democracy. - Listeners are probably familiar with Frederick Douglass as an abolitionist and a writer. But as Corey writes in the book, Douglass also played a central role in how we think about the Constitution and democracy today. - And I talk about Frederick Douglass as, in my mind, the true founder of the democratic idea of the Constitution, even though he's not writing and living in the 18th century, he's living in the 19th century, a formerly enslaved person. At first, he's a very skeptical of the Constitution. He thinks of it as a kind of pact with the devil that has to be thrown out. But over time, he comes to read it in a very different way. He looks at the preamble, to my mind, the most important part of the democratic Constitution. We the people and he says, it doesn't say we the white people. He looks at the ban on bills of a tanger and the corruption of blood and says, the Constitution bans inheriting the sins and crimes of parents and what is slavery, but that. And so he's really reading the Constitution as a principled way in an anti-authoritarian way to demand not just legal rights, as opposed to what Fred Scott says, but that regardless of race, that there are full entitlements to equal citizenship. And he sees that as grounded in the Constitution. Douglass's views ultimately ended up helping to shape the constitutional views of none other than President Lincoln. (gentle music) Douglass didn't initially see Lincoln as an ally in his broader democratic efforts. At first, as Corey explains, Douglass saw Lincoln as almost a continuation of President Buchanan, Lincoln's predecessor, who supported states rights and southern slavery. Not as bad Lincoln opposed Fred Scott if that was wrongly decided, but he said that he would enforce the ruling itself. And when the war, in the midst of war, early on, he insisted this wasn't a war about slavery, it was a war about union. Now for Douglass to save the union meant to save legitimate constitutional democracy. We the people, not we the white people. Lincoln was far from that view, as I said, and thought slavery was protected, for instance, within the States. But through a variety of means, Douglass really pushed him to change his mind, to evolve, to come closer to his view that the Constitution requires equal citizenship. And especially that the war should be infused with a moral purpose of ending enslavement and at least moving towards this idea of equal citizenship. How does he do it? He uses a different moral argument. He says, look, to Lincoln, you're willing to suspend the right to trial, the right to habeas corpus in order to save the union. So it's not that you're so devoted to every constitutional right. Why not infuse the war with the deep moral purpose of ending slavery? Even if you don't think it's in your narrow way legal, you're willing to do this to sacrifice specific rights for a larger purpose, do it again. And that is, I think, an effective argument for Lincoln that he starts to see that the purpose isn't just union, that the war should be about, but something bigger, a democratic idea of the Constitution. Eventually, Lincoln does come not fully to Douglass's view. In fact, Douglass in the eulogy for Lincoln talks about him as a white man's president, but it comes close. And he does, of course, Gettysburg is the most famous example, start to infuse the idea of the end of slavery with the purpose of the war. And that really echoes ideas that Douglass's is using. All right, I want to jump ahead to the example of President Woodrow Wilson. You know, I think a lot of people might know of him as the president who helped create the League of Nations, the precursor to the United Nations. But he was also an academic. And he had some pretty extreme views on race, which really tied into the crises you sort of attribute to him. So how would you describe those views? And how did they fit into the threats to democracy that he kind of initiated as president? I'll say here, we see what we saw in the previous dynamic with Adams, that he is a scholar, he's one of the premier constitutional scholars of his time as Adams was in his. He's a professor at Princeton, giving lectures on constitutional law and also university president. And with Wilson, I went into the archives of Princeton, preserved the students' notebooks that were sitting in his classes. And I wanted to know what was he saying in his constitutional law class. And so I found these, some of them are leather bound in the original handwriting. And they have little tidbits like about how at one point Wilson was sore because people are coming in late or something like that. But so it sets the tone. But what you find is really disturbing. I mean, he saw just to focus in, first of all, the Reconstruction amendments, the most important amendments when it comes to our democratic constitution amendments forged really by Frederick Douglass and his democratic constitutional constituency, the 13th amendment ending chattel slavery, the 14th amendment guaranteeing equal protection of law and the 15th amendment guaranteeing a right to vote regardless of race, at least for men at the time. And Wilson just wipes them all away, that whole history away by really saying they didn't add anything to the constitution, that the constitution even after the Civil War leaves it to the states when it comes to the question of our basic rights. And then at the same time, he has a really dangerous philosophy of both nationalism and white supremacy. His idea specifically is that the constitution is devoted to a national idea of efficiency and anything that stops that, that causes friction, that's his term, is the enemy of the constitution. Now, integration is the thing he thinks that will cause friction and we wanna avoid friction at any cost. - And so how does he enact this philosophy as president? So segregation nationally, not just locally, is the ideal for him. And so he re-segregated the federal government. This part is well known, but what's not well known is that that was really part of an overall philosophy of both white supremacy and nationalism. He really is, I think, our premier white nationalist president. It's well known that he showed birth of a nation and a white house, birth of a nation, which by the way is, of course, the first feature length film celebrating the Ku Klux Klan. And many of the scenes bear an eerie resemblance to what he's saying, and that's not just a coincidence, given the connection that he has to the author of the book, that Birth of a Nation is based on. He knew and was friends with the author of the Klansman. And the way the Klan is presented is not that they're great, but that they're kinda necessary evil, again, to reduce friction for this idea of stability. And then in the midst of what becomes known as Red Summer, the massive violence, massacres of black Americans throughout the country, he's far from quelling it, really stoking it and refusing to call out the National Guard in Washington, D.C., an eerie similarity with January 6th, and really talking about the danger of disloyal Americans and using kind of the encroaching fear of communism as he sees it, to criticize his critics. Black Americans, in particular, who are criticizing his racism. He didn't invent racism, I say, in the book, but he certainly tried to nationalize it and did more than anybody at the time to make that a reality and succeeded in it. But the rationales are interesting. The theory behind their authoritarianism for Adams, it is a kind of constitutional monarchy that he's defending. But with Wilson, it's a different idea. It's more populist. It's that the president is elected. The president is so figure elected as the head of the national government. And as such, as given by the people, a kind of power to do things that go beyond the other branches, he was the first to use the term leader, and he used it in a way specifically in reference to the president to suggest that, really, the president was an equal member of a three branch government, was the first among equals. Given the racist agenda that Wilson attempted to execute while president, it might not be a surprise that it was black Americans who formed the core of the democratic constitutional constituency that opposed him. In the book, Corey focuses on two figures in this constituency. - William Monroe Trotter from Boston newspaper editor and activist, and Ida B. Wells, an anti-lynching activist and writer and journalist and the editor of a paper called The Free Speech. And what they did was at first, they thought they could work with Wilson. And in fact, Trotter had supported Wilson politically, previously, and when they start to hear about the segregation in particular the federal government, they call him out in a meeting. And Trotter leaked the transcript. - This was a meeting in 1914 that Trotter and his allies had with President Wilson at the White House to discuss their objections to the segregation of the federal government. - It's really one of the most, to my mind, dramatic moments of the book where you see them going at it and really what Wilson is doing is saying, well, you're creating friction. You're defending friction, integration. I'm avoiding friction. And when he's accused of creating not just separation and reducing friction, but a system of second class citizenship, he says, well, you Trotter are imposing that on this situation, that's not true of it itself, echoing the language of Plessy versus Ferguson. So this is an incredible moment in the same way that Douglas had challenged Dred Scott Buchanan. Now you have this next generation of, it's a combination with all of these figures that they are writers and editors and activists trying to make change. And that's certainly true of Trotter and Wells in this meeting. - Wilson's example in the book also highlights how periods of democratic recovery after a crisis president are rarely simple or quick. The democratic constitutional constituents who challenged Wilson, like Trotter and Wells, they began a process that really only came to fruition in another era of American history. - So, you know, their legacy is really the civil rights movement. (gentle music) And there's sort of a series of handoffs, you know, this recovery takes generations, decades. - One figure Corey focuses on who bridges these periods is a woman named Sadie Alexander. She was born in 1898 and was the first black woman in America to get a PhD in economics. She also went to law school and then became the first female law graduate from the University of Pennsylvania. In 1946, she joined President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights. And that committee's work resulted in a report titled "To Secure These Rights," published in 1947. The report documented the extent of racial violence and daily humiliations that black Americans were facing in the country at that time. It also created a sort of roadmap for a lot of civil rights work to come. - Sadie Alexander is a brilliant figure in all of this, totally unsung and unknown, who orchestrates and makes sure that this report is a stunning rebuke of the 20th century process of nationalizing white supremacy, the legacy of Wilson. And it lays out an agenda of recovery across three branches, partly the reversal of Wilson's segregation of the federal government, which Truman complies with immediately. The desegregation of the military, that's the executive branch. They call for a reversal of Brown, certainly in the courts. But the most important thing she does is she designs and champions the idea that financial incentives have to be brought incentives and sanctions to bring about integration in the public schools. And what becomes title six of the 1964 Civil Rights Act is largely her design in the Civil Rights Committee report. And she's able to get that through, even though there are a lot of committee members who think this all goes way too far and through politics and argument and reasoning, she brings Thurgood Marshall in and kind of works with him to explain to this committee what's needed and brings Truman along from being a kind of casual racist to being a champion of civil rights. It's an incredible moment in American history, the combination of Sadie Alexander and Harry S. Truman. - A welcomed moment of optimism after the Wilson chapter. - Yeah, and all of these, I mean, the book is both a warning, definitely, about the danger of the presidency and how vulnerable we are to it, and especially to a criminally minded or authoritarian president. But it's also a book about hope and that's what these citizen stories do. They give us hope. - Corey's book explores these cycles of crisis and recovery. However, he writes that there is one president from history, one crisis of democracy from which we never fully recovered. (gentle music) - People have got to know whether or not they're presidents of crook. Well, I'm not a crook. - President Nixon's approach to the presidency was perhaps less philosophical or scholarly than Wilson's or Adams. President Nixon wanted to break the law to hurt his political opponents and face no consequences for doing so. The abuses allegedly committed by Nixon and his aides are extensive. Most famous, though, was the Watergate scandal, where, among other things, Nixon and his allies attempted to cover up their connection to a break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in DC. The break-in and the cover-up resulted in a grand jury being impaneled in Washington, DC, which indicted many of Nixon's inner circle, though it stopped short of indicting Nixon himself. In Congress, the House Judiciary Committee recommended articles of impeachment, but before the House was able to vote on these articles, - I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow. Vice President Ford will be sworn in as president at that hour in this office. (somber music) And soon thereafter, he was pardoned by his former vice president, now president Ford. (somber music) What was missing from the sort of recovery after his period of crisis? - That's a great question. Richard Nixon, you know, is famous, of course, for the Watergate break-in and for the cover-up. But the crime for so much more vast, what was being investigated at the time of the pardon included that Nixon ordered Henry Kissinger to do a break-in at the Brookings Institution on, quote, "a thievery basis." And that resulted in a plot to actually blow up the institution to get secret information that was in the safe that Nixon thought would be damaging about his illicit conversations with the Viet Cong before he was elected, promising to give them a better deal as they delay peace. The attempt to kill Daniel Ellsberg on the Capitol steps. And, you know, the attempt to kill your main political opponent, the main ball, as he called him, Daniel Ellsberg, is about as serious as you get when it comes to presidential crimes. So, you know, and that crime, as much as people say Trump is worse, I haven't heard any tape of them ordering the killing, or the incapacitation is the way Ellsberg puts it on the tape of a political opponent. And there was this attempt to recover by prosecuting him. And, in fact, the grand jury took a vote, straw poll to indict him. They decided instead to hand over all the information to Congress, which resulted in impeachment proceedings, and pressured Nixon to step down with the thought that they'd prosecute him after he left office. But the pardon ended that. And there's some indication that I have from one of the prosecutors that actually Ford was tipped off that this indictment was imminent, and that was part of what prompted the pardon. But, you know, the basic idea of the book is that we have these core pillars of American democracy, the right to dissent, which we've talked about, right, of equal citizenship, that Douglas Champion that we've talked about extensively. And the third idea is that no persons above the law, that's supposed to be fundamental to a government of we the people. And yet Nixon got away with it. He was never prosecuted. We never saw the extent for these crimes. That would have happened during a criminal trial. Instead, we got the pardon. And we also got a very dangerous idea that sitting presidents are immune from prosecution. And the day before the book came out, that idea, which I do talk about in the book, got extended into an even more dangerous idea. And that's the idea of immunity for former presidents. - Right, and this is now what we're grappling with as Trump seeks re-election at the same time that he is the subject of multiple criminal cases. I wonder, where do you sort of put Trump in the lineage of all these cases? As you said earlier in the podcast, you do see him as a threat to democracy, sort of in line with the way these other presidents were, who you have profiled in the book. Is there one that he is most like, or what's unique about him just sort of, where does he stand in your thinking of these types of threats? - I think he has the elements of all of them. I give a description of a president who threatens to shut down free speech, who really is complicit in white supremacy and who believes that the president is above the law. And it says, I'm not talking about recent events, I'm talking about these five, but it's also talking about recent events. It's also talking about Trump. He has every element of all of them. And what makes him so much more dangerous than before is those presidents all disappeared from public life. Trump remains and threatens to come back. And even though those other presidents were defeated by these democratic constitutional constituencies, it's very unclear that that's gonna happen this time as you noted. So he, because of the moment in history that we're in now, in some ways is much more dangerous. - Do you see a robust democratic constitutional constituency working to oppose Trump's threats, either while he was in office or today and sort of who or what makes up the core of that movement? - I've been asked this a lot in talks and the interviews about the book, who are they? Where's it gonna come from? Where's the new democratic constitutional constituency? I use that phrase, by the way, it's a little long democratic constitutional constituency because there are also authoritarian constitutional constituencies and the oath keepers and others are examples of that. So where's it gonna come from? And I see elements of it. Certainly there are people working to push back against the immunity decision and civil society groups calling for amendments and policy reversals. Biden is not a full recovery president, I think in an important way. But I resisted naming them because I'm really trying to say to the reader, like, it's up to us, it's up to you to find and that's where there is a kind of handoff. Who's gonna champion it? That's what I'm trying to prompt. - Well, as we get closer and closer to an election that could see President Trump's second term or not, thanks for helping us put some of these ideas and questions into a bigger historical context. - What a pleasure. Thanks for reading it so closely and for this great conversation. I really appreciate it. - This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards and Zach Hirsch. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield, additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. If you liked this episode, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps other people to find us. And if you haven't subscribed to our show, please do that too. If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for guests or topics, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that's all one word trending globally at brown.edu. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks. (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) (gentle music) [BLANK_AUDIO]
