The euphemism customarily attached to him is that he is “transactional” he does not look at politics, let alone the constitutional framework in which politics plays out, in ideological or theoretical terms. It is not unheard of for the president to mangle fundamental principles in the stray tweet or ad-lib. As Yoo recounts, Trump could only guess at the number of articles in the document (it is seven, not the eleven or twelve he estimated). Even the most ardent Trump supporters acknowledge that their man, a non-lawyer, is no expert on the Constitution, let alone on the Framers’ conception of executive power. The first is that this is not Trump’s conscious objective. Two things must be borne in mind about that. Yoo’s thesis is that, by waging these battles, Trump has safeguarded the presidency as the Framers envisioned it when they crafted our founding law. He has had to fight for it against an opposition party that has labored to cast doubt on his legitimacy against a judiciary teeming with progressive activists who have portrayed him as sui generis and thus without entitlement to the comity and presumption of regularity accorded to other presidents and against the sprawling administrative state, including executive branch agencies he nominally controls. Impeachment is not the only reason that Donald Trump has had to fight for the right to wield the presidential power he won in 2016. Fair because he says so himself, right up front: “If friends had told me on January 21, 2017, that I would write a book on Donald Trump as a defender of the Constitution, I would have questioned their sanity.” It is fair to say that Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power is a book Yoo never thought he’d write. Bush grappled with the vexing challenges of international jihadism, often with ferocious partisan opposition in Congress. He played a pivotal role in national security policy development in the post-9/11 era, when President George W.
He is a prolific author, his grasp of his core concentration immeasurably enhanced by service as a high-ranking Justice Department official. Professor Yoo is a nonpareil scholar of the presidency-in particular, of executive power as conceived in the Constitution and practiced through more than two centuries. John Yoo is the Emanuel Heller Professor of Law at the University of California’s Berkeley Law School, where it is not easy to be a conservative academic, but anti-Trumpers are welcome. For present purposes, here is the most striking one: Through all of this, President Trump’s most compelling defender may be John Yoo, a brilliant conservative thinker who appeared to have both feet firmly planted in Camp Never Trump when the president took office in 2017. We’re not through with the ironies, though. Is it any wonder that these four years have aged most of us tenfold? But Democratic partisanship proved so devoid of appeal outside the activist Left that impeachment, though it happened just a few months earlier, rated nary a mention in the Democratic National Convention. Trump was impeached anyway by Democrats who were pushed into the exercise by partisans. He submitted to investigation by a special counsel whom he reviled but who nevertheless cleared him. Trump is the president who upheld the rule of law by firing the FBI director. Donald Trump is the populist who lost the popular vote, owing his ascendancy to the Electoral College, an institution designed to temper popular excesses and which Trump himself, while pondering a presidential bid in 2012, rebuked as “a disaster for democracy.” Trump has been condemned as the Constitution’s scourge by progressives for whom the Constitution is mostly a nuisance to evolve beyond, framed by white racists in a time before Wokeness. To join the debate, please email us at from now, when historians assess Donald Trump’s presidency with sobriety and dispassion, the ironies are apt to stand out most. We also invite responses from our readers. Whenever we publish an article that advocates for a particular position, we offer links to other perspectives on the issue, including ones opposed to the position taken in the article.
Any expressions of opinion are those of the author. The Federalist Society takes no positions on particular legal and public policy matters. A Review of Defender in Chief: Donald Trump’s Fight for Presidential Power, by John Yoo.
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