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July 30, 2020 - Dennis Prager Show
07:31
Trump Became the Unexpected "Defender in Chief" of the Constitution - John Yoo
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John Yoo, professor of law at Berkeley, just put out a book, Defender-in-Chief, Donald Trump's Fight for Presidential Power, and he makes the case that in fact he has protected the Constitution to perhaps even his surprise.
Professor Yoo, welcome back to the Dennis Prager Show.
Dennis, thanks for having me, and I'm happy to say I'm not on Twitter, otherwise I'd probably be banned for writing this book.
That's correct.
I think that that is right.
Let me ask you, I always ask this of conservatives.
I ask this of black conservatives.
I ask this of conservatives in academia.
How do your colleagues react to you?
I think it's with mild curiosity.
Sometimes blending into disdain or even hate.
They don't know that many conservatives.
I think that's the most important function that maybe being the sole conservative on my faculty can be, is to always make sure conservative views get expressed.
Even though I know 99% of my colleagues might disagree, at least you can force them to confront a different perspective and different ideas.
That's what the university...
It used to be about, and I sometimes worry, not sometimes, and I worry a lot, that we're coming to feel or experience an orthodoxy on our campuses that seek to drive out conservative ideas and only teach a certain set of views.
And I really worry about the colleges and universities in our country, even conceding that they are the best ones in the world.
But if we keep this up, we're going to lose that advantage.
To places in China and Germany and even England, France.
Yeah, that is exactly right.
The book is Defender-in-Chief John Yoo, Professor of Law at Berkeley.
Why did you write it?
Why did you write the book?
I might have started out, I think, like you were, Dennis, back at the 2016 election, kind of skeptical or wary of Donald Trump.
And so...
The reason why I was was because he's a populist, and populists usually don't like constraints on their power.
They often try to find ways around the Constitution.
People like FDR would be the best example.
But over the last few years, as we've bounced around from issue to issue, controversy to controversy, I found myself agreeing more and more with the positions that Donald Trump was taking on the Constitution.
And I came to think...
That it was his critics, his opponents, who are the ones who are doing exactly what they accused Donald Trump of doing, of trying to overthrow the constitutional order or rip up our practices and institutions.
It's not Donald Trump.
It's his critics who say things like, let's get rid of the Electoral College, which is the method we used to pick presidents for over 200 years now, or let's pack the Supreme Court and add six new justices to the court because you don't like the way the court's moving under President Trump.
Or who say, let's have lots more independent prosecutors and councils who will criminalize our politics or who want to nationalize the economy in the service of some great Green New Deal.
And so when you look at it, it seemed to me that Trump, the populist, actually became the unexpected defender of traditional constitutional approaches and understandings in our institutions that we've had for hundreds of years.
Yep.
It makes perfect sense what you're saying.
Does he know it?
I know it's a funny question.
That's an interesting question.
Yeah.
No, no, that's a great question because some critics have said exactly that.
No, he's not standing up for constitutional principle.
He's fighting for his political survival.
I couldn't agree more.
You know, when he's fighting off the Mueller investigation and this now looks like more and more this imaginary Russia collusion claim or when he's fighting on impeachment.
Against the idea that he committed treason.
You know, he's fighting for his political self-survival, self-preservation.
But that's the point of the constitutional system.
It was well expressed by the framers.
James Madison said in the Federalist Papers, ambition must be made to counteract ambition.
And he said the interests of the man should be that of the interests of his place.
And by that they meant they expected...
The person we elected president, the people we sent to Congress to pursue their own self-interest.
What they wanted them to do was constantly fight.
And that constant conflict, that trench political warfare between the two branches, would be the real check on our government.
Not to rely on the courts, not to rely on what they call parchment barriers in writing, but to have one great branch of the government fight the other great branch of government.
And by doing that, it would make sure...
That system would make sure that our individual liberty would be preserved from an ever-expansive federal government.
So when President Trump fights for himself, yes, of course he's fighting for himself, but he's playing the greater constitutional role of checking Congress.
So it's part of the irony of this whole thing.
The populist fighting for himself is actually the constitutionalist.
By the way, you mentioned James Madison, so I have a question.
I have no idea what you'll say, and you may not even be able to answer it.
So you teach law, obviously, at UC Berkeley, correct?
Mm-hmm.
Okay.
What percentage of your students could identify James Madison?
Actually, I have a pretty good answer for this.
So when I start teaching constitutional law, when I teach a big class, You know, you new students, I do a poll because I need to know how much history they know because I don't think you can teach the Constitution without understanding our history.
So I say, how many of you have heard of the New Deal?
So about three-quarters to half the hands go up.
How many of you know what Reconstruction is?
Less than half the class's hands go up.
How many of you have read the Federalist Papers?
You know, less than a quarter of the hands go up.
So I'm afraid, and this is consistent with what we know from other polls.
For example, there was this important poll done at Yale, which polled freshmen entering Yale and then freshmen graduating from Yale about standard knowledge of American history and civics, and it found that after four years at Yale, student knowledge on those tests, their scores went down.
That's in keeping with my theory about college makes you stupid.
I didn't know that.
And you have to pay $200,000 to get stupider.
You're a live wire.
I really enjoy you.
The book, folks, is Defender-in-Chief about Donald Trump, and it's actually uplifting.
It's good to read at this time.
It's, of course, up at DennisPrager.com.
I want to ask you a number of other questions to get your views when we come back.
I'm very curious.
I want to ask him about John Roberts, who's somewhat of an enigma to me.
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