Episode 1: After The Fall | The Kingmakers

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Clever. China's President Xi Jinping watched a huge parade, flanked by Russia's Vladimir Putin and North Korea's Kim Jong un eat by Myanmar's military authorities are using brutal violence and intimidation to force people to vote in forthcoming elections. The Pentagon is readying 1,500 active duty soldiers.

For possible deployment to Minnesota, where President Trump has threatened to invoke the insurrection act. China, Russia, North Korea, Myanmar, all led by dictators known for cracking down on their citizens. And then there's Wait. The United States?

It's been just over a year since the return of Donald Trump to the White House, and sending armed federal agents into American cities is just one item in a long laundry list of increasingly authoritarian moves. President Trump has overseen America's largest military parade in decades. Trump's actions have put the K word on the tip of many Americans' tongues, and I don't mean K pop. I mean...

King. So we don't serve a king. Honey, you serve the people. You are not a king. You will never be a king. No kings means that it's government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Now that word king has often been thrown around as a compliment. You're the best man. You are the king. Бо вонец Американ демокрасі.

King is a dirty word, describing a president that many believe is out of control. He feels like he's, you know, he's a king. He can do whatever he wants. And that's just not how America runs. During the No Kings protest, Millions of Americans flooded into the streets to express their genuine fear that the president is literally trying to become a king. You know, this country is a

I feel like Donald Trump is trying to be a dictator. That's what we have our declaration for, so we don't have kings anymore. And their concern is valid. People are truly worried about a king or a dictator. Because Donald Trump has spent the last year acting like one. Under the Trump administration, you will pay a tariff. We have hit hundreds of targets in Iran, Venezuela, Los Angeles, Chicago, Minnesota. If we go to Portland. We're gonna wipe them out. Have some of these raids gone too far?

I think they haven't gone far enough. We're getting rid of programs that we didn't like. Four years you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good you're not gonna have to. Now, it may be comforting to tell yourself that this is all new and sudden and just the product of a reality TV star president and a historically shitty opposition party. But I have some bad news for you. This isn't new at all, and it's not an anomaly.

This is more of a culmination, or really a well-planned coronation, that's been a very long time in the making.

You see, what Donald Trump is doing is part of something way bigger than Donald Trump. Something that's been gaining traction in recent decades that has a specific name. Unitary executive the unitary executive. This unitary executive theory. But when we asked people about it at the No Kings protests, have you heard of anything? The answers were pretty consistent. Unitary executive theory? No. Never. The unitary executive theory.

That's the technical legal term for the carefully sculpted plan to give the president limitless power to do whatever he wants. Of a master plan to subvert democracy. Season one of this podcast uncovered one part of that plan, the plot to legalize corruption, so that public policy would not reflect what most people want, it would reflect what big money wants.

In this season, we reveal another part of that master plan. We expose the master planners, or really the would-be kingmakers, whose unitary executive theory is designed to turn the president into a king so that he and his minions and his Donors can do whatever they want, regardless of any other democratic check on his power. And don't take my word for it, these master planners are now cheaper. I have the right to do whatever.

Now, you may be thinking, what's the big deal here? Sure, some people may not like what Trump is doing, but he did win an election. He's just using his power to do what he promised. And if folks don't like that, then maybe the problem isn't kings, it's that America just needs to elect a better, nicer king. Maybe like James Earl Jones.

In the movie Coming to America. I am King Joffe Joffer, ruler of Zamunda. Or James Earl Jones in The Lion King. A king's time as ruler rises and falls like the sun. But here's the problem. For every mythical, nice, King Joffy Jauvir, You'll get a King Joffrey instead. Sir Illen, bring me his head. Two centuries before HBO's Game of Thrones, America's founders seemed to understand this axiom.

They seem to understand that things tend to go wrong when a society gives all the power to one person. You know, like Mad King George III. That's one of the reasons those founders wrote a constitution chock full of checks and balances. But over the last 50 years, those checks and balances have been weakened. And that started well before Donald Trump was ever. And I decide what is best.

I will. In this season of Master Plan, we're gonna reveal the hidden history that happened right under our noses, from legislative throwdowns to international scandals to the rise of the surveillance state. We'll uncover obscure memos and courtroom arguments, unearthed Manifesto, all of which, when pieced together, have created a Frankenstein esque monster.

In the process of telling this tale, we're gonna reveal how a country based on the King's ended up with a presidency on the verge of obtaining absolutely. Power, regardless of what the law says and what the rest of us need. And like season one, this saga starts with cold, hard cash. And specifically, who gets the power to decide how that cash is? Spent. I'm David Sorota. Welcome to season two of Master Plan, the Kingmakers.

Ving firar 70 år av resor som är svåra att släppa taget om. Och det gör vi med massor av erbjudanden som är omöjliga att motstå. Boka redan nu på wing.se. De bästa resorna försvinner först. Semester. Jud, jag skulle ju köpa några nya palpställt i lagret. Det kanske blev lite mer grejer. De hade ju allt, skribord, jag köpte en sån, och kontornstolar, och så hade de en skit snygg tipp. Vi har inredning för hela arbetsplatsen. Välkommen till AGP.

Just eight days after being inaugurated in front of a room full of billionaires. Donald Trump did something that seemed unprecedented. It may be the most far reaching executive action this White House has taken yet. Hundreds of billions of dollars in federal spending on everything from assistance to farmers.

This was money Congress had already legislated, and that's very important. You see, the Constitution is really clear, like crazy explicitly clear, that Congress gets to decide how taxpayer money is spent. called power of the purse that you maybe learned about in high school civics clinics. George. So this Trump move to grab the power of the purse, yeah, it definitely seemed unprecedented. Except It wasn't. Donald Trump was reprising a role.

He was merely the new leading man in a reboot of an old movie franchise. Here we go again. Again. In this case, Trump is the shitty sequel of another president. the peak master planner from season one, the one with the jowls from California, the man who insisted, I'm not a crook. Yep, we're talking about Richard Milhouse Nixon.

In nineteen sixty-eight, Nixon won his election with support from what was billed as the silent majority, the Americans who felt alienated by the upheaval of the nineteen sixties. In a speech that Nixon gave shortly before the election, he made it clear that he would be a firm hand on America's tiller. The days of a passive presidency belonged to a simpler pass.

Let me be very clear about this. The next president must take an activist view of his office. And soon after Nixon won that election in 1968, he started a spending fight that looks like a roadmap for the future we're now living in. And roadmap is actually a perfect metaphor, because that's where our story about the power of the purse is going. To a road in Missouri in 1970. Picture this, it's summer.

Packed up your brand new wood-paneled Ford LTD Country Squire station wagon, and you're on a cross country road trip. Vacation through the Show Me State. See that kids? That's the St. Louis Arch! The gateway to the west. There are snacks and Cokes in the cooler. The kids are crammed in the backseat. Dad, what river is this? The Mississippi. You're cruising along the smooth of Interstate 44. You're singing dumb road trip songs to pass the time.

But then Clark, I think this is the wrong exit. Wait, where did the interstate go? Why are all those other roads also unfinished? Are we lost? I saw some detour signs. Audrey, when they close a road, they put up big signs like this one.

Okay, okay. So while I can't prove that this exact scenario happened, the car, the kids, the snacks, the crash, We do know that in nineteen seventy, construction on I forty four through St. Louis had stalled out, because when Missouri asked for the money that Congress had allocated to finish the road,

Richard Nixon said no as part of his State of the Union pledge to slash government spending. Now millions of Americans are forced to go into debt today because the federal government decided to go into debt yesterday. We must balance our federal budget so that American families will have a better chance to balance their families. So despite the fact that Congress had already legislated money for these programs, including Missouri's highways. Richard Nixon withheld the funds.

Again, this is a huge deal, and not just for Missouri. Think of it this way. You order something on Amazon, something you absolutely need, like a mounted singing fish or a laboooboo dump. Your credit card clears, the confirmation email arrives in your inbox, you've got mail. And then you get a note from Amazon saying that they're actually not gonna send you the stuff that you just ordered.

They have it in stock, you've paid for it. But Amazon thinks that money could be better used elsewhere, so you can't have the fish or the doll. And they're not gonna refund your money either. They're just gonna hold on to it until they decide that what you're spending it on is appropriate. That's kind of what happened to Missouri.

Congress ordered resources for a road, the state began construction, and then Richard Nixon decided not to deliver the rest of what Congress had promised Missouri. Nixon was trying to do this thing called impoundment. which is a technical term for a president blocking the release of money that federal law requires him to spend. Put another way, Nixon was refusing to follow the spending legislation already passed by congressional lawmakers. Article one of the Constitution says

that they're the ones who decide how much money to spend and on what. This is historian Rick Perlstein, author of the book Nixon Land. Richard Nixon did what other presidents again had done before him, but to a much greater degree, in which he said, I'm just gonna Not spend the money. I'm gonna make this decision myself. Remember, Congress is supposed to have the power of the purse.

They're supposed to decide where the federal government's money is spent. And that's not some small footnote of the Constitution. It's in Article One. One of the first things the founders wanted to make clear, because they understood that spending power is the real power, and one guy doesn't get to decide that for the rest of them.

And the president gets the discretion of administering that money, but not deciding how much. Now, Missouri likely didn't care which branch was in charge or making spending decisions. The state. just wanted its damn money so it could finish its roads. I want my two dollars. So in August nineteen seventy, Missouri filed a lawsuit against the Nixon administration on behalf of all state highway agencies. It was the opening salvo in a flurry of lawsuits against so-called impoundment.

But even though Article I of the Constitution is really clear about Congress having the power of the purse, Richard Nixon insisted that impounding funds was his constitutional right. He also insisted that he could levy tariffs. Along with the power of the purse, Article I says that Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes and duties.

But in nineteen seventy-one, Richard Nixon chose to ignore that too. I am today imposing an additional tax of ten percent on goods imported into the United States. Citing an economic emergency, Nixon used a 1917 law which had originally been aimed at the Germans during World War I. he appeared to have no qualms about bypassing Congress yet again. In case you didn't get that, that's Nixon saying the import duty delights him.

It did not, however, delight America's trading partners who filed a lawsuit. But Nixon didn't care. Emboldened by his nineteen seventy two re-election victory, bought with the bags of illegal campaign cash that we talked about in season one, Nixon made the audacious argument in nineteen seventy three.

Would mean either increasing prices or increasing taxes for all the people. That right is absolutely clear. Nixon argued that his job was to balance the budget for the American people, which meant he could rein in spending as he saw fit. If the legislative branch was what Nixon's White House called a credit card Congress,

He, Richard Nixon alone, was cutting those cards up. Congress got word today on another White House economy move. The president served formal notice that he is withholding a total of eight point seven billion dollars. in assorted appropriated funds on grounds the money cannot be properly spent at present. Congressional lawmakers in both parties were not pleased. Senator Ted Kennedy might have said it best.

To relegate the legislative branch to a position of inferiority. Both the House and Senate pushed back in April nineteen seventy-three with legislation that made it abundantly clear above and beyond what was in the Constitution. That the president could not impound funds. The measures were bipartisan, sponsored by both Democrats and Republicans.

Let's just take a second here and imagine seeing that kind of action from Congress right now. Ah, wouldn't that be nice? Bookmark this moment. We'll be coming back to Congress's money battle with Richard Nixon after we take a little detour. Hey Captain Willard, where are we headed? We're going upriver about 75 clicks above the Dolong Bridge. But that's Cambodia, Captain. That's classified. Not anymore. That's coming up after the break.

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We're not supposed to be in Cambodia, but that's where I'm going. Around the time that Richard Nixon was first trying to usurp Congress's power of the purse in that Missouri road squabble, he was also usurping the other power. Exclusively too. The power to declare War. Specifically, Nixon was secretly expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia.

despite having won the White House on this promise. I pledge to you we shall have an honorable end to the war in Vietnam. Congress had authorized the Vietnam War with the infamous nineteen sixty four Gulf of Tonkin resolution. Which was based on false pretenses. It was one of the first modern examples of a government lying its way into a war. What's that thing that Matthew McConaughey says in True Detective? Time is a flat circle.

You can go watch an 18-hour Ken Burns documentary on Vietnam to learn about the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. The point here is that in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Nixon absolutely was not ending the Vietnam War, and he was not remaining within the confines of the resolution that Congress had passed. Nixon was doing the opposite. He was actually expanding the war. Inklings of this started trickling out.

In May 1969, when a New York Times article exposed actions carried out during Operation Menu, a secret carpet bombing campaign in Cambodia. The story didn't get much notice. Less than a year later, on April 20, 1970, Nixon insisted that he was ending the war. I am therefore tonight announcing plans for the withdrawal of an additional 150,000 American troops to be completed during the spring of next year.

Ten days later came the betrayal and the power grab. In a White House address, Nixon announced that he was officially expanding the Vietnam War into Cambodia, and he was doing so without any new authorization from Congress. We take this action, not for the purpose of expanding the war into Cambodia, but for the purpose of ending the war in Vietnam and winning the just peace we all desire.

Despite the Constitution, Nixon was telling America what he was doing. He was not asking Congress for approval. And members of Congress from both parties were pissed. Here's Republican Senator Jacob Javits the day after Nixon's speech. I think the Congress will seriously consider what measures it ought to take in respects of restraints on expenditure or in some other way to assert its responsibility equally with that of the president.

The ire was echoed by the public. As Javits and other congressional leaders criticized Nixon, the anti-war movement intensified, kicking off the largest demonstrations so far. Thousands of people marched in Washington, D.C., and nationwide, university students staged massive strikes.

Earlier in the day, the trouble began on campus after a rally to protest the U.S. involvement in Cambodia. Students went to the university armory and ransacked it. They broke furniture and burned uniforms. And then three days later, on May 4th, 1970. National Guardsmen fired on anti-war demonstrators at Kent State in Ohio, killing four students. Have we come to such a state in this country that a young girl has to be shot because she disagrees deeply with the actions of her government?

I want my daughter's death and those of the other three children as well as the wounded not be in vain.

In response to the violence, the protest movement went into overdrive. Campuses closed all over the country. A hundred thousand people marched in Washington, D.C. Under intense pressure Congress made an initial move to rein Nixon in. The Senate voted overwhelmingly today to repeal the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, the legislative act used to justify the step up of the war in Vietnam. That repeal was significant. but mostly symbolic. It did not deter Nixon from continuing the war.

it would be two more years before Congress knew the full extent of Nixon's unauthorized war in Cambodia. In nineteen seventy two, a former Air Force major named Hal Knight Sent a letter to a Democratic senator named William Proxmire. And in this letter, Knight alluded to Menu, that secret bombing campaign that was the first time. forty. Proxmeyer shared the letter with his colleagues on the Senate Armed Services Committee.

They in turn demanded that the Pentagon hand over all of its records on Cambodia, and during that subsequent investigation, it came out that the military had been falsifying their reports. Cover up the extent of their actions in Cambodia. Here's Major Hal Knight testifying in front of Congress. The purpose is to hide these raids. And uh I said, Well who are we trying to hide them from? And he says, Well I guess the uh foreign relations committee. So to review.

We've got a president in his second term after a landslide win bought with dark money. He's strutting around saying he gets to make all the budget decisions and he gets to expand wars wherever and however he wants. Can we get that true detective clip again? Dime is a flat circle. So what did Congress do? Did they roll over and play dead like they typically do these days? Or did the Congress of the 1970s do something different? Did they actually stand up to the president? That's after the break.

What did the president know? And when did he know it? In nineteen seventy-three, Watergate was breaking open. If you want to learn more about that scandal, listen to season one of Master Plan. For this season, it's only important to understand that

Nixon's attempt to commandeer Congress's power of the purse and its war-making power was happening at the very same time the public was learning that the president and his minions also seemed to believe they could break laws to sabotage their political opponents. I deeply regret that this situation has arisen because I think that the Watergate tragedy is the greatest tragedy this country has ever suffered.

Taken together, Watergate, the budget impoundment fight, and the Cambodia bombings were all part of a massive expansion of presidential power. Nixon had become an imperial presidency in practice. This is Pomona College Professor Amanda Hollis Brusky, who explained that unlike today, this power grab prompted a very real backlash from Congress. This wave of congressional reforms.

aimed to prevent another president from doing what Richard Nixon had done and to take back Congress's power. And how did lawmakers of the time try to do that? Let's start with Cambodia. After several failed attempts, the U.S. House finally passed a resolution about the bombings in the summer of 1973.

The bill was designed to require the president to consult with Congress before introducing the military into any conflict. It was known as the War Powers Resolution. That is the way to leash the dogs of war. And that's what the people who wrote the Constitution said they wanted to do. When the bill then quickly passed the Senate, Nixon started freaking out. At a press conference, he implied that Watergate was being used as a false pretense.

To curtail his power. This administration was elected to control inflation, to reduce the power and size of government, to achieve peace with honor in Southeast Asia, and to bring home our prisoners of war. If you want the mandate you gave this administration to be carried out, then I ask for your help to ensure That those who would exploit Watergate in order to keep us from doing what we were elected to do will not succeed. Huh. Mandates. Reducing the power and size of government.

This shit certainly sounds familiar, doesn't it? Two months later, in october nineteen seventy three, Congress submitted the War Powers Resolution to the President. Nixon, true to form, He vetoed it. In a letter to Congress, he wrote that congressional lawmakers, quote, attempt to take away

By a mere legislative act, authorities which the president has properly exercised under the Constitution for almost 200 years. Now look, I'm not a constitutional scholar, but I'm pretty sure there's nothing in the Constitution about secretly Secretly bombing neutral nations for years on end without a declaration of war, but maybe I need to reread it. Anyway. Both the House and the Senate, in an extremely rare move,

Overrode Nixon's veto on November 7, 1973. The Congress of the United States in a historic action today made effective a limitation on the powers of the President to make war. Then, just to make sure there were no shenanigans or end runs from schemers like Henry Kissinger, lawmakers did a belt and suspenders move. They followed up by smacking Nixon with their power of the purse.

Lawmakers added a provision to the military budget cutting off all funding for combat operations in Southeast Asia. Look at Congress standing up for itself. It's kind of hard to imagine, right? Here's Amanda Hollis Brusky again. The burden of proof is then on the president, who under the War Powers Resolution is allowed to initiate hostilities for 30 days. And then must notify Congress and

It can be extended for another 30 days. But at the 60-day mark, if the president has not received authorization by Congress, The president must cease all military activities. Boom. Just like that, Congress had wrested some control back from Richard Nixon.

But there was still that issue of spending, and Nixon's attempt to say the White House had the power of the purse. Remember our ill fated summer drive on that road in Missouri? Hey hey, see that, kids? That's a St. Louis Arch. Well, right around the time Congress passed the War Powers Act, A federal court handed down a decision in that lawsuit that Missouri had filed.

The court ruled that such funds cannot be withheld for purposes unrelated to highway building. The president had impounded the funds on grounds that the spending would be inflationary. The House and Senate passed a bill to enshrine their power of the purse and prevent presidential impoundment. The legislation had overwhelming support. The House voted in favor by a whopping four hundred one to six, and the Senate supported the bill seventy-five to zero.

With numbers like that, and with Nixon on the ropes because of Watergate, the imperial president in the White House bent the knee and signed it. One month before he resigned. The bill gives Congress a much bigger say in spending and budget control, and it limits considerably the president's power to impound or refuse to spend money appropriated by Congress.

And what was the most important part of that new law? The bill basically reiterated that if a president doesn't want to spend funds already legislated by Congress, He has to first ask Congress's permission. The huge bipartisan support for the bill seemed to indicate a consensus in the legislative branch. Allowing the executive to consolidate so much power was dangerous.

Even the Conservative Party darling, Senator James Buckley, agreed. I would say that the Watergate episode and others leading up to it illustrate th the fundamental conservative principle and that is if you uh concentrate enough power, especially discretionary or arbitrary power in any one place, at some point or another it's going to be abused. Never thought I'd be aligned with a Buckley, but here we are.

Congress would also rein in the executive's power to levy tariffs, as Nixon had done back in nineteen seventy one. Lawmakers wrote new legislation time limiting import duties unilaterally imposed by presidents.

So here we have not one but three examples of Congress pushing back on the president's attempt to concentrate power. And if you search the legislative history from that time period, you'll find a ton more examples. Congressional committees that exposed abuses by the CIA and the FBI, a law that protected the privacy of individual Americans. And federal election campaign laws, just to name a few. You could even argue that Nixon had done Congress a favor.

His actions forced a recalibration of our system of checks and balances and kicked off an era of reform. Congress, bolstered by public opinion and anger. Had clawed back powers given to them by the Constitution, and Congress could argue they had their own mandate to do all of this. Thanks to the 1974 elections. You had the midterm elections, which saw the election of what are known as the Watergate baby.

Right, so this is a generation of kind of young energetic reformers who run on an anti-corruption platform and vow no more nickname. If you're in Congress, what a time to be alive. You've repelled an assault on your constitutional powers. You've forced the resignation of a crooked president. You've passed legislation to curb future presidential overreach. In short, you've done what Walter Sobchak told the big Lebowski to do. I'm talking about drawing a line in the sand, dude.

That line that Congress drew didn't last. Today in the air controller strike, President Reagan started firing the strikers, and the government claimed it was ready to rebuild the whole system without them. As Walter would say. Over the line!

And presidents have been crossing that line ever since. One AM Wednesday morning, H hour. U.S. troops hit the commendancia, the headquarters of the Panamanian Defense Forces. The president announced today some of the worst citizens on this planet, those apprehended in the war on terrorism.

Are now being housed at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They were once held in secret CIA prisons, but no longer. The Obama administration's internal legal justification for assassinating US citizens without charge has been revealed for the first time. The end of the Nixon era did seem like a victory over the imperial presidency, but it catalyzed a backlash to the backlash. Amanda Hollis Brusky again. As much as the Watergate babies and the congressional rebuke of Nixon was a real victory for reformers.

It sparked a significant backlash. amongst those who saw the efforts of these reformers as encroaching on the president's legitimate power. These moments of victory were only fleeting. Since Nixon, almost every president has pushed the limits on the budget, on war, on privacy, on citizenship. to the point where one of the current president's top aides said this at a recent White House press briefing. The whole will of democracy is imbued into the elected president.

That president then appoint staff to then impose that democratic will onto the government. That's Donald Trump advisor Steven Miller at the podium in the White House briefing room. Notice that there's no mention of the two other coequal branches of government. It's just the king or the president imposing his will. So how exactly did we go from rescuing democracy from an imperial presidency to

to now the imperial president, arguing that any restrictions on him are an assault on democracy. Stephen Miller at that press conference provided a clue. Listen carefully to what he said. The Constitution, Article 2, has a clause known as the Vesting Clause, and it says the executive power shall be vested in a president. Singular. That word vest.

That is not referring to Marty McFly's sleeveless jacket. It bifted over this guy's life preserving. No. Vest here refers to the seemingly non-controversial line in Article II of the Constitution that says, the executive power shall be vested in a president. Seems small, right? But after Watergate, the master planners got to work on a project using that one little line to try to turn the president into a monarch. Why? Because like the campaign finance master planners from season one,

This group of ideologues felt that democracy was an obstacle to their agenda. They could not enact all the unpopular policies they wanted using the normal channels of passing legislation by a Congress full of politicians. Who have to answer to communities throughout the country? They could only really get what they wanted. If they got the presidents they wanted and then made those presidents into all powerful kings.

On this new season of Master Plan, we'll learn how that one line in the Constitution about executive power became the weapon of American kingmakers. I have an article too where I have the right to It's the kind of power that Richard Nixon only dreamed of. Our next stop on this journey begins a few years after Nixon left the White House.

Stewing in exile in California, the disgraced former president sat down for a televised interview. And during that conversation, he defiantly reignited the fight for executive power. And the master planners took note. So what in a sense you're saying is that there are certain situations where the president can decide that it

In the best interest of the nation or something, and do something illegal. Well, when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal. That's next time on Master Play. Master Plan is a production of the lever. Me, David Sirota, Jared Jacang Mayer, and Laura Kranz. Fact-checking of this episode was done by Emma Wilkie. Original music is by Nick Byron Campbell. Our director of podcast production is Ron Doyle. Special thanks to Amanda Hollis Brusky, Rick Perlstein.

Earlstein and the fine folks at the National Archives and the Nixon Library. For a list of the books and other materials that we used in our research, go to masterplanpodcast.com or check the link in our show notes. You can listen and subscribe to Master Plan on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, YouTube Music, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, please leave us a review or a rating. It really helps. For ad-free advanced, Exclusive bonus gets.

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