26 SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 13, 2020DEFENDER IN CHIEF
Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power
By John Yoo
320 pp. All Points. $29.99.
“Defender in Chief” lays out Yoo’s conserva-
tive case for an extraordinarily strong presi-
dent, virtually unchecked by Congress.
Readers familiar with Yoo (he served in the
George W. Bush administration and has
written extensively about presidential
power) won’t be surprised by the arguments
found in this book, except for the fact that here he de-
picts President Donald Trump as an ardent defender of
his originalist vision of the Constitution. Yoo, who didn’t
support Trump for president in 2016, now concludes that
“Trump campaigns like a populist but governs like a
constitutional conservative.”
This dense treatise makes clear how many actions can
be justified by proponents of unitary executive power —
a theory of constitutional law that claims presidents
control the entire executive branch and have virtually
unchecked powers in the realm of national security. With
this analytical framework, Yoo can legitimize almost
everything Trump has done. The president’s brazen use
of foreign policy for his own self-interest with regard to
Ukraine makes constitutional sense, as does the paper-
thin firewall separating his global real estate company
from his political authority. Somehow, Trump fits neatly
into the original vision of founders who feared corrupt
and centralized power.
Often, Yoo’s academic veneer falls away. At the same
time that he lambastes Democratic opposition to the
nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, he
breezes over Senator Mitch McConnell’s refusal to con-
sider President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee Mer-
rick Garland.
Yoo is most convincing when he argues that Congress
was complicit in expanding presidential power. It is true
that partisan considerations have led congressional
Republicans to support Trump’s flexing his muscle while
Democrats have often been afraid to take tougher stands
against this runaway administration.
Yoo makes clear that when one accepts a theory of
presidential power as grandiose as his, almost anything
— from the George W. Bush administration’s use of “en-
hanced interrogation” to Trump’s institution-breaking
behavior — becomes permissible.
WE SHOULD HAVE SEEN IT COMING
From Reagan to Trump — A Front-Row Seat
to a Political Revolution
By Gerald F. Seib
304 pp. Random House. $28.In a well-written if familiar account, Seib, a
veteran Wall Street Journal reporter, pro-
vides a history of the conservative move-
ment from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump.
Seeking to make sense of Trumpism, he
begins by conveying the atmosphere of the
Reagan era, tracing the multifaceted politi-
cal coalition that Reagan stitched together in 1980 as
well as the ideology that guided his years in the White
House.
Seib argues that the Reagan coalition remained intact
through the mid-1990s. Things started to shift when
Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich introduced America
to his blistering style of partisanship: “The face and tone
of conservative leadership had shifted from the sunny,
optimistic and gentle approach of Ronald Reagan to the
much harsher, angrier and more pugilistic approach of
Newt Gingrich.” But the real trouble, according to Seib,
began when Reagan’s coalition was supplanted by nation-
alist, populist forces that capitalized on middle-class inse-
curities. The fringe seized control, starting with the vice-
presidential nomination of the Alaska governor Sarah
Palin in 2008 and moving to the Tea Party victories in the
2010 midterm elections.
Seib’s history echoes the outlook of the #NeverTrump
movement. If the origins of conservatism were relatively
pristine, then there can be a version of Republicanism
that doesn’t tolerate a president tweeting out videos of a
supporter yelling “white power!” at protesters.
But Seib plays down what was there all along. The
decision to stir a white backlash dates back at least to
Richard Nixon’s 1968 “law and order” campaign. The
role of reactionary populism, including nativism and
anti-Semitism, was always relevant, even if past poli-
ticians used dog whistles instead of bullhorns. Gingrich
popularized his smashmouth partisan playbook in the
1980s right in front of the television cameras for all to
see. In other words, Donald Trump makes sense because
of the history of the Republican Party rather than in
spite of it.IT WAS ALL A LIE
How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump
By Stuart Stevens
256 pp. Knopf. $26.95.In “It Was All a Lie,” Stevens, a political
consultant, admits there is nothing new
under the Republican sun. In his bare-knuck-
les account, Stevens confesses to the reader
that the entire apparatus of his Republican
Party is built on a pack of lies. President
Trump isn’t a “freak product of the system,”
he writes, but a “logical conclusion of what the Republi-
can Party became over the last 50 or so years.”
This reckoning inspired Stevens to publish this blister-
ing, tell-all history. Viciousness and hypocrisy are every-
where in his story. Stevens’s troubling chapter about
racism shows clearly how party operatives have capital-
ized on white resentment for decades. When Lee At-
water admitted in 1981 that Republicans were just using
code words to keep talking about race, he was finally
being honest. The Republicans whom Stevens worked
with championed “family values” while living Hustler
magazine lifestyles. Fiscal conservatism? Republicans
never cared about balanced budgets — unless a Demo-
crat was in the White House. The one-time “party of
Lincoln,” Stevens explains, is now beholden to a Fox
News propaganda network and powerful interest
groups. His power-hungry party, Stevens says, is willing
to sacrifice the integrity of vital democratic institutions.
Although this book will be a hard read for any commit-
ted conservatives, they would do well to ponder it. We
see how the modern Republican Party wasn’t “taken
over” by Donald Trump. Rather, the party created him.
And regardless of what happens in November, it won’t
look very different unless there are fundamental
changes to the coalition that brought conservatism into
the halls of power in 1980.ILLUSTRATION BY JOHN GALLJULIAN E. ZELIZER,a political historian at Princeton University, is the author of “Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, the Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.”
The Shortlist/Trumped Up/By Julian E. Zelizer