Imperial presidency

History as it Happens, September 18th, 2026.

Origins of the Imperial Presidency.

We must be the great arsenal of democracy.

For us...

The Constitution created what were supposed to be three co-equal branches.

Congress, not the president, has the authority to declare war.

Yet here we are, living in the age of the imperial presidency.

Of endless war, executive orders, government secrecy in the absence of accountability.

I'm your host, Tim Miller.

Delighted to welcome to the show, it's been way too long, White House reporter for The New York Times, co-author of Regime Change, you might have heard of it, Inside the Imperial Presidency.

It was number one for, what, like 19 weeks? I've got my trusty copy right here.

Nine weeks.

Visit spinquest.com for more details.

Um, the first reference to the imperial, the quote imperial presidency emerged right around the end of Wilson's administration.

Even, even among media people who were otherwise sympathetic to the kind of progressive enterprise, at least the stripe represented by Wilson.

The, uh, the fact that executive power had been growing steadily with a dramatic spike, obviously, um, during Roosevelt's tenure.

But it wasn't, again, it pretty rapidly mutated into something totally unrelated.

The Democrats had majority congressional control.

So this was kind of their perfect opportunity to assault the imperial presidency, which had become their boogeyman, as we've been talking about the last two episodes.

And what they singularly focused on first was the White House tapes.

I am absolutely thrilled today to have Maggie Haberman on the show.

Maggie and Jonathan Swan are the authors of the new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

Um, it is a big bestseller, and it is full of, of, of insights that Maggie and Jonathan are particularly uniquely, uh, positioned to, to pull out of the, of the insane, uh, sort of madness around Trump at all times.

And Maggie, I wanted to bo- A, both welcome to the show.

It's, it, it's terrific.

It's great inside reporting.

Folks, uh, the book is Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, uh, by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.

Uh, I read it in, in the beta version, um, [laughs] and I think it is fantastic.

This time, they decided they were covering a change of regime at home.

The book is called Regime Change, Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.

Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan wrote it.

It arrived in the summer of 2026 and sold half a million copies almost before anyone had finished reading it.

It was not finished in a few days.

Thousands of Iranians dead, thousands of Lebanese, Americans among them, And the trade ends up effectively in Iranian hands, held against the most powerful navy on the planet by speedboats and mines and cheap drones.

The imperial presidency, standing at the very top of its reach, ends up sitting down to pay billions to put the world roughly back the way it was before it started.

Four years earlier, Haberman wrote a different book about the same man, called Confidence Man, and that book was answering a different question.

By welcoming to CounterPoint, Michael Sozan, a senior fellow for democracy and government at the Center for American Progress.

He's co-author with Ben Olinsky of the recently published article, The Trump Administration is Interfering in the 2026 Midterm Election to Entrench the Imperial Presidency.

Michael, thank you so much for making time to join our CounterPoint audience this evening.

Appreciate it.

And so a lot of my work is about just trying to make sure that people can be represented in this democracy and that people can achieve the American dream because of that.

Thank you for that, Michael.

So your recent article, the Trump administration is interfering in the 2026 midterm election to entrench the imperial presidency, provides a critically important and comprehensive examination of Donald Trump's multi-pronged schemes to interfere with and manipulate the results of this November's midterm election.

And I find it very helpful because week after week I go on the show and, you know, there's one sort of outrageous policy or executive order or investigation launched by the FBI against voting rights groups, what have you.

We've seen Trump amass enormous powers, pull powers into the executive that have broken norms, in some cases broken actual rules and laws across the spectrum.

And in ways that even as people complained in the past about, oh, the imperial presidency, oh, this kind of executive aggrandizement has been happening, Trump seems to have taken it to a completely different level.

And so to try and understand how he was able to do

this, but even more deeply how he

So I guess my question is, what can we do about this? Right.

Let's say future elections go in a way that is good rather than bad.

What can we do to try and rein in the imperial presidency and maybe establish a more satisfactory balance of power between Congress and the executive and the courts?

So I would say one thing that we can, that's more of a sort of cultural piece of this, right, is people need to sort of become more accepting of congress right people need to understand that actually congress is sort of um uh the the you know ought to be sort of uh uh uh primus inter pares in our government and um uh that they're not always going to like what that looks like um right because um so there's a there's a there's a great book by uh john hibbing and elizabeth eastmore's called congress as public enemy And the basic point they make is that people say that they want democratic governance, but the reason that throughout American history, this is not a new phenomenon, but throughout American history, people have sort of hated Congress is because it's the institution that most visibly instantiates that.