Robert Bauer

Today, we're sharing the full video and transcript of LibCon 2026's panel, Checking the Imperial Presidency, including the Q&A with the audience that followed.

The panel was moderated by Protect Democracy's Justin Florence and featured NYU's Bob Bauer, The New You can find every LibCon 2026 session on our YouTube channel, and we'll continue posting the videos and full transcripts right here at The Unpopulist.

The transcript has been lightly edited for flow and clarity.

Andy Craig.

Of course, Protect Democracy is one of our partner organizations that does some of the most important work on these issues for the past few years.

They've been somebody we're very happy to work with and very happy to have you here today, Justin.

Next up, we have Bob Bauer, who's a professor of practice at NYU and was previously the White House counsel under President Obama.

So somebody who's very much been in the room on exactly these kinds of discussions.

I mean, it was under a year, which is... pretty good.

I mean, the only time I've ever published a book myself was when Lawfare, you know, published Jack Oldsmith and Bob Bauer's book After Trump.

And that was, we did that in six weeks, and it was an enormous amount of work.

But we did do it really fast, and it was not a It was not undoable from the point of view of a, like, the problem isn't the tech.

One thing that I would say about that lack of distrust is that I think when people respond to pollsters, they sort of put on their team colors in whether they believe in elections or don't believe in elections and think they're, um, rigged and stolen.

One of the projects that I do with Bob Bauer, who was my adversary for 40 years, but now we do nonprofit work together, that Heather referred to, is going to the most contentious election jurisdictions.

And the encouraging sign is that that bitterness that you see on the national level is not really reflected on the very local level, even in the most contentious jurisdictions.

The people are much more concerned about peace and prosperity, uh, in the country and in their communities than they are about this national back and forth.