Frances E. Lee (Princeton): Trump Presided Over the Biggest Bipartisan Crisis Intervention in American History
Understanding Congress Podcast, Jan. 3, 2023
According to Frances Lee of Princeton University, President Trump presided over the most historically vast (in inflation-adjusted terms) federal crisis intervention in American history in 2020, far bigger than both the federal intervention in 2009 recession stimulus and the ENTIRE NEW DEAL combined, only rivaling the war production efforts in 1943 as we fought on both sides of the world simultaneously. And it was bipartisan.
Aspects of that response have been roundly criticized in partisan terms, including on this podcast. He should have fired Fauci, no doubt about it, early on. That was one of the worst aspects of his presidency, the bipartisan part. But it mitigates a view that Trump is Hitler.
Richard A. Epstein, no fan of Trump (he calls it, Trump ala carte, like at Furrs Cafeteria), worried with his co-host of Reasonable Disagreements podcast in January of 2021 that Trump would pardon himself after the January 6th protests.
Turns out, that never happened. It never happened because it doesn’t look like he thinks he did anything wrong.
Richard A. Epstein was singing an entirely different tune 2 years later on the Law Talk podcast with co-host John Yoo (himself a guest on TRP podcast), if you take a look at his January 25th Law Talk episode , 2023, as Colorado tried to keep Trump off the ballot.
Trump is going to be far more favorable to protecting the Electoral College and to Separation of Powers/Federalism generally (we see this with abortion).
The Electoral College is essential to preserving individual liberty as much as Separation of Powers, for without it, Separation of Powers would most certainly tip toward a president unaccountable to huge swaths of geography unprecedented in American history, as cities would begin to rule the country based on how city people think, while railroading suburban and rural areas and how they tend to think. The Electoral College preserves the diversity of both the city/urban mentality and the rural mentalities in the selection of the Executive Branch (and political appointments, including to the Judicial Branch). Without it, individual liberty would take a major hit from which we would not likely recover.
The Democrats want to take it out, and to consequently make the presidency more powerful than its co-equal branches as bare majorities would rule, without the mollifying and moderating influence of the structural impediments to unreasonable but passionate bare majorities of a moment.
Trump stands, strangely, as a bipartisan guard dog against that presumed threat to American Constitutionalism.