Clip: Trump's unchecked power and unapologetic impunity

Jeffrey Goldberg: I want to start with an apology. We pride ourselves here in our accuracy, but we realized very late in the day that our backdrop is no longer correct because it still features the East Wing of the White House. Let me show you where it used to be. So, this right here, that was the that was the East Wing. Now it's a hole. That's just a hole next to the White House over here. That's the West Wing that's still standing, as far as we know, although I'm not there right now to prove it. In the back here, you got the -- that's the Empire State Building. And over there that's LAX. And also we have we got a cold front moving in from Ohio. So, break out your sweaters. Anyway, we'll fix the picture to reflect the new reality once Congress restores our funding.

The list I read at the top of the show, that's not even all of the norm-busting news from this week. Tonight, our overall subject is impunity. How does a president get to knock down the East Wing? Is that even legal? By what authority does he do the things he does?

Here to provide us with some insights are our guests, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent at The New York Times, Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, David Ignatius is a foreign affairs columnist at The Washington Post, and Toluse Olorunnipa is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

Thank you for participating in my fantasy camp. I've always wanted to do the weather. I've always wanted -- and I have a laser pointer. I'm going to call on you with a laser pointer from now on.

You know, Washington week, you know --

David Ignatius, Columnist, The Washington Post: You got to love it.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Yes. You know, like, you know, challenging times call for a different approach.

Peter, let me start with you. I want you to listen to something that President Trump said a few years ago. I want you to listen to this?

Donald Trump, U.S. president: If the radical Democrats take power, they will take a wrecking ball to our economy and to the future of our country.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Now we know where the wrecking ball was headed.

So, the White House is called the people's house. We send somebody there for four years to live in it, rent free, and then pass it on to the next person who we choose to send there. So, I just don't frankly understand how a temporary occupant who pays no rent could just knock down a part of it without Congressional approval, without anyone's approval. How does that happen?

Peter Baker, Chief White House Correspondent, The New York Times: Washington's a historic city. And if you try to change your door or your front yard in a lot of different parts of the city, you would have to go through a whole, big, bureaucratic process that would take months and months and months. Not if you're president of the United States, it turns out. You just call a demolition company from Maryland, you get them down there and whack away without tell anybody or asking.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It wasn't a government agency that took down the --

Peter Baker: No.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Well, of course we're in a shutdown anyway.

Peter Baker: That's right, exactly. And he said he is paying for this with private funds.

Now, look, there's an, the argument that he's making is that there needs to be a ballroom sufficient to presidential, you know, needs, and it's true, the state dining room only seats about 140 people, and presidents in the last few years have been using the south lawn, putting a big cathedral tent there because it isn't big enough, fair enough. And there are a number of people who think that's not a bad idea necessarily. But the way he went about this, the sort of unilateral way, the sort of, I'm doing it by fiat way, the people's house is now suddenly my house and I get to decide that we're getting rid of this structure.

Part of the structure that's been there since Theodore Roosevelt put it up in 1902, that really struck a lot of people, Republicans and Democrats, this week. And I think it really lent to the metaphor that you've played with here, which is a guy who's taking a wrecking ball to Washington writ large.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. Toluse, you are a former White House bureau chief. It's no -- you know the building and the people who run the building. This has to be one of the most shocking things to happen to the physical structure certainly that you can remember.

Toluse Olorunnipa, Staff Writer, The Atlantic: For sure. I spent a lot of time in the East Wing. There are a lot of memories that people have there, from Republicans and Democrats who've worked at the White House, who have spent time in that building. And seeing it defaced and deconstructed in a matter of three days was really shocking to the conscience of a lot of people, especially people who have worked there.

But it's also for people who admire Washington, who admire the presidency, who admire the White House. It's a sign that this president is not doing things the way previous presidents did. He's doing it his own way, and he's doing it in a way that really thumbs his nose at the idea that, you know, checks and balances actually work, that I have to consult Congress or history or historians to do anything that I want to do. And he is acting with a lot of impunity.

This is something that struck a nerve in way ways that other things that he's done, from the tariffs to other policy, things that maybe people couldn't really understand, but seeing the White House being torn down in a way that was never expected in the way that he promised that he wouldn't do. I think that was a big shock to a lot of people.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Susan, stay on this theme of impunity. He just -- he didn't go to Congress. He didn't say, you know, I have this idea. He didn't send it through a historical preservation commission. He didn't do any of that. What does he know about checks and balances right now that we don't?

Susan Glasser, Staff Writer, The New Yorker: Well, I think Donald Trump heard the message loud and clear from the United States Supreme Court even before he returned to office in the summer of 2024 when the Supreme Court ruled essentially that the president has immunity for almost any act that could occur in the course of his presidency. Since Congress controlled by Republicans in both the House and the Senate has proven to be essentially supine when it comes to any of the kind of sweeping acts of executive, you know, overreach that we've seen so far. It's not really a reach for Donald Trump to conclude that he had the unilateral power to do whatever he wanted.

He's -- at this point, he's the man saying, you know, come and get me if you dare. And it strikes me that, you know, when you give already the most powerful office in the world, you know, the sense that there's literally no one who's going to say no to this person who has raged his entire life at the idea that there are rules and constraints and, you know, people trying to stop him from doing what he wants. Right now, he's on a tear in part because there's nobody who's going to stop him. He's constructed an administration with people around him who are there explicitly because they are yes men, and in some cases, yes women.

And just to this point about, he still feels the need to mislead, right? He did say when he rolled this out originally this summer, oh, no, there's not going to be damage to the existing structure, and then boom, he creates a new set of facts overnight on the ground.

I would also point out that the new ballroom that's envisioned, while there could be a strong argument to say this, you know, should be done, not only is there no process, but the design that Donald Trump has personally green lit is for something like 90,000 square feet. It is going to overwhelm the White House itself.

Jeffrey Goldberg: The White House, the main building of the White House is 55,000 square feet.

Susan Glasser: Correct. So, it's going to overwhelm the White House itself, again, approved by no entity aside from Donald Trump himself.

Jeffrey Goldberg: David, you've covered Washington for a little while. Have you ever seen anything like this?

David Ignatius: So, this does feel different and I've been trying to think why does it, it feel so different? Peggy Noonan, who's a, you know, fairly conservative columnist, wrote on The Wall Street Journal this morning a very angry, you know, emotional piece. The headline was a republic, but can we keep it ruminating on this?

I think part of it is just this feeling that this is the people's house and he's treating it like his own personal property. He's treating every part of the government like his own personal property. It's almost a compulsive desire to blow through limits, you know, in every direction, involving the military, the CIA, Justice, you know, campaign of retribution against his enemies.

And I think it's begun to worry more and more people. This is such a symbolic moment with a steam shovel, you know? If that photograph on the Washington Post, my beloved newspaper hadn't, appeared, we might not have known about this for a day or two. I mean, they were doing this stealthily.

Peter Baker: Which is shocking, right? They didn't announce it. They tried to hide it. They knew. They knew there'd be a reaction. I don't think they knew quite the reaction that they would be.

But what's really remarkable too is how anathema it is to the original design of the White House. The original idea of the White House was to produce a relatively modest home for a president compared to the palaces of Europe. They didn't want a Versailles. George Washington and the group that brought us the White House wanted something that was the people's house. It was of a certain degree of modesty and certainly not a palatial, ostentatious kind of thing.

And what's remarkable about this is that, you know, you saw all the gold that he's added in the Oval Office, and, of course, he's paved over the Rose Garden and things like that. He's done other things. Those are things that could be reversed, right? The next president could come along, take that gold out of the oval office and restore it to a more of a simple grace that it's meant to be. They could replant the Rose Garden. They're not going to be able to do this. This is a decision of the ages.

Jeffrey Goldberg: It's so large as to be irreversible.

Toluse, let me ask you a question, David hinted at something there. There's a lot of -- it is an unusual thing in Washington. It almost feels tribal. Like, wait, you're not allowed to just do that to our most famous buildings, but it's not as if Congress is up in arms right now about this. How do you explain that?

Toluse Olorunnipa: Yes. Well, when we think about the White House, we think about the founders, we think about the 250 years of this country's history going back to the Declaration of Independence, one of the reasons that the founders, as we wrote about in The Atlantic, and the most recent issue, one of the reasons they didn't put all of these things in writing that was because there were checks and balances. They thought that there would have a co-equal branch of government with Congress speaking up against these things.

Now, Democrats have been able to speak up, but, you know, they have limited power. They're out of power. But Republicans who, in the design of this country and the design of our government, Republicans are supposed to be able to speak up against a president of their own power just as Democrats are supposed to be able to do the same thing. President Trump has broken that system. He said that if you're a Republican, you speak out against me, I'm going to get you out of the party, out of Congress. And that has been shot across the bow for a number of Republicans who are not speaking out, even when they know that what he's doing in many cases is a shock to their conscience.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Right. So, what you're suggesting is that the Bill of Rights should have had an amendment stated future presidents may not turn the White House into Mar-a-Lago. Because no one would have done this until -- and, by the way, the Mar-a-Lago thing is very -- I mean, when the last time I was in the Oval Office, I mean, he actually has filled the Oval Office with leftovers, as I understood it from him, leftovers from Mar-a-Lago, gold fixtures and the like. So, it does seem almost psychologically --

Susan Glasser: Even if they put it in the law, Jeff, I'm sure he would find somebody to argue that, you know, that strict definition of Mar-a-Lago is a geographic entity, so therefore it's actually fine to do this. And, you know, just to the point about the wrecking ball, right, that it's metaphor made real, that the Republicans, of course, in this term versus the first term, are remarkably quiescent and quiet. And actually --

Jeffrey Goldberg: Because they're scared or because they agree with him?

Susan Glasser: You know, it was actually the first person who ever told me they thought Donald Trump was a human wrecking ball, was actually Bob Corker. At the time, he was the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And this was in early 2017. I found it to be a remarkable statement at the time. It presaged, of course, the falling out that Corker and Trump had. And what's the result? He's no longer in the Senate. And I think that, for me, is a difference between 1.0 and 2.0 is that Donald Trump feels that he can be an actual wrecking ball as well as a, you know, sort of wrecking ball of institutions and there's no Republicans to speak up.

Jeffrey Goldberg: You know, Corker is one of the many people who got out of dodge, essentially. We don't really have the Corkers and the Romneys and Flakes and McCains certainly to say like, this is what you're not --