Washington Week with The Atlantic

No one knows for sure how Washington and America are going to change come January 20th, but we do know that the Supreme Court's ruling earlier this year that grants presidents broad immunity makes Donald Trump among the most powerful and emboldened U.S. presidents ever to take office.

Change, radical change perhaps, is coming.

Tonight, I'll talk about what to expect with three of Washington's most esteemed journalists, Dan Balz, the chief correspondent at The Washington Post, Elizabeth Bumiller is the Washington bureau chief at The New York Times, and Jonathan Karl is the chief Washington correspondent for ABC News and the author of Tired of Winning, Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party.

Thank you all for joining me.

Elizabeth, first of all, congratulations nine years as Washington bureau chief.

ELIZABETH BUMILLER, Washington Bureau Chief, The New York Times: Nine plus.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Nine plus, to be accurate, and you're stepping down as Bureau chief to be a reporter again.

That's great.

Are you going to run again for the office, you think?

ELIZBETH BUMILLER: No, I think I'm done.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: No, like a Grover Cleveland/Donald Trump.

Do you think you're done with the leadership role?

Well, congratulations.

ELIZABETH BUMILLER: Being a New York Times reporter is one of the great jobs.

I had it for a long time.

Yes, I'm going back.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, congratulations on a great run.

ELIZABETH BUMILLER: Less meetings, more journalism.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And more Washington Week, I hope.

Dan, let me let me start with you.

You wrote a few days ago that, quote, President-elect Donald Trump is coming for the executive branch.

What does that mean?

DAN BALZ, Chief Correspondent, The Washington Post: Well, it means that he has his eyes on trying to radically transform the executive branch, to get his hands around the executive branch in a way he was never able to do in his first term.

I mean, he wants the executive branch to carry out what he wants to do.

He sees the executive branch as resistance rather than being part of his team.

And so he's got two things in mind.

One is, I would say, a kind of a transformation of how the executive branch works.

And the other is to potentially cut it significantly, cut the spending significantly.

He's enlisted Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to lead that effort as outsiders, not as part of the government.

Musk has said we can cut $2 trillion in spending out of a budget of about $6.7 trillion.

People who've looked at this say to do that, you would have to go after entitlements, which Donald Trump has promised not to do.

But in a variety of ways, it looks as though they are trying to install loyalists in all of these agencies to make them work for him rather than for -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: You could only eliminate the Department of Education so many times before you have to find something else to talk about.

DAN BALZ: There are -- I believe there are like 4,000 employees in the Department of Education.

They spend a fair amount of money, but a lot of that money would probably end up in some other agency to be spent there, the student loan program, for example.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, how -- Jon, how successful do you think they're going to be this time in transforming the government the way that Dan is talking about, JONATHAN KARL, Chief Washington Correspondent, The Washington Post: well, I think there's a potential for much more disruption.

I mean, are they going to get $2 trillion out of a budget of $6.7 trillion?

I mean, if you look at the budget and you take away Social Security and Medicare, and you take away defense spending, which also they say they don't want to touch, you basically have to cut everything.

I mean, you have to basically cut all this what's called discretionary spending.

But, look, I think this is going to be much more disruptive.

I think if you look at what Trump is doing here in his -- arranging his White House staff and his cabinet, is he wants to have people and he is going to have people who he truly knows and who are personally loyal to him.

What does he not want to do?

He doesn't want to have a Jeff Sessions or a Bill Barr or a Jim Mattis or a John Kelly anymore in his cabinet.

These were people who, you know, he believes got in his way, ended up, you know, being harshly critical of him, but more importantly stood in the way of what he wanted to do.

I mean, Jeff Sessions allowed the Mueller investigation to go forward by recusing himself from that.

Bill Barr refused to use the Department of Justice to help him in the bid to overturn the election.

Those were his two confirmed attorneys general.

Now he has Pam Bondi who was there on the campaign trail with him, and who was there with him, trying to challenge the election results four years ago.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

Elizabeth, talk about this in the context of immunity.

The one difference Trump 2 has from Trump 1 is that during Trump 1, he put three people on the Supreme Court.

It's a conservative court now or Republican-oriented court.

They did him a huge favor that no president really has gotten from the Supreme Court in the modern era, which is like, you know, you basically can't be prosecuted for anything you do as president.

What does that mean in terms of impunity?

ELIZABETH BUMILLER: Well, he has been announcing that he's had a la he won a landslide election, and that he has been given these vast powers by the American people to do what he wants, and he's not going to be restrained by the Supreme Court, at least in sort of presidential official acts.

And as you mentioned in the beginning, he didn't actually win by a landslide.

It was the third smallest margin in American history since 1888, I believe.

But he doesn't -- his supporters don't know that and he's barging ahead.

I would say that, monetheless, there are some guardrails, and one of them is simply that the Department of Government Efficiency, DOGE, you know, that Vivek Ramaswamy and Elon Musk are running, it's not an agency.

It's going to be totally voluntary.

They say they want people, volunteers, to sign up for 80-hour work weeks.

I don't know exactly who they're going to get.

Perhaps other billionaires, I don't know.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: I can't wait until DOGE is unionized.

That's going to be an irony.

ELIZABETH BUMILLER: But much of what they want to do has to be approved by Congress, and they have to have meetings about this government efficiency agency in public.

They can't engage in private, you know, deliberations.

So, it's unclear to me how much they're actually going to be able to do.

JONATHAN KARL: And he has control of the House and the Senate, which is -- JEFFREY GOLDBERG: For two years.

JONATHAN KARL: Which is, yes, for two years.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: We'll see what happens, right.

JONATHAN KARL: But the margin in the House is effectively one seat, as you have the three.

And it's going to be -- it will be three seats, but you have three Republicans that are in his administration who will be stepping down, one already did, Matt Gaetz.

Actually he's no longer going to be in the administration, at least as of now.

But you have -- and then in the Senate, you have just a three-seat majority, and it's effectively, you know, a majority that is not a full Trump majority, because you have Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins, who are certainly not all-in on MAGA, to say the least, and you also have a former leader, you may have heard of him, a Mitch McConnell, who is still now a backbencher, and owes absolutely no loyalty, personal loyalty to Donald Trump.

And, you know, you have the new senator from Utah, Senator Curtis, who already you have Trump supporters attacking as Mitt Romney with bad hair.

You know, but you have a, you know, a group in the Senate that's not going to go along with everything that Trump wants to do and he's going to have to find a way, you know, for anything he has to do statutorily to get through this tiny majority in the House and a majority in the Senate that might be less than it appears.

ELIZABETH BUMILLER: And there are some questions about some of his cabinet picks, like Tulsi Gabbard.

She's going to face -- I mean, you know, you only need three or four votes against you, and you're in trouble.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, this is a question, Dan, the liberated Mitch McConnell, right, who doesn't like Donald Trump.

Donald Trump certainly doesn't like him.

It's always been -- it's been a difficult marriage to the extent that it's a marriage at all.

DAN BALZ: To say the least.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Does Mitch McConnell literally go Romney on this, or is that not in his character?

DAN BALZ: I don't think that's in his character.

I think he will kind of pick his shots.

I don't think he's just going to be, you know, an anti-Trump wrecking crew in the Senate in any way, shape, or form.

But he will put up some resistance to things.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

He is liberated from leadership.

DAN BALZ: Yes.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: And Just like Elizabeth Bumiller, in a kind of way.

DAN BALZ: Well, we'll see what she does.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: People often confuse the two on the street here in Washington, yes.

DAN BALZ: You know, I think he's made clear that he has some apparent differences with Trump on foreign policy.

He may try to exercise his voice on that rather than some of these other things.

But it wouldn't be surprising if he voted against, you know, one or two of the nominees who've been put up.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

So, one thing that they've said is they want to upend this government and cut trillions, theoretically, out of the budget.

Something else that they've talked about is, well, I want to show you this.

It's a semi-oldie, but it's a goodie.

It's from it's from last year.

It's Donald Trump making a promise to his followers.

Let's just watch this brief clip.

DONALD TRUMP, U.S. President-Elect: I am your warrior.

I am your justice.

And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.

I am your retribution.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: So, Jon, what does retribution look like?

JONATHAN KARL: Well, first of all, we'll see how far Trump really wants to go with it.

But there are people around him who want to see a special counsel named that would basically investigate the previous special counsel, Jack Smith.

And, you know, I mean, and there are lots of, I mean, you've heard the criticism they say this was a politically motivated investigation.

They say it was coordinated out of the White House.

No evidence at all that that is the case.

In fact, lots of evidence that it wasn't.

But you could see an investigation into the investigators that Trump and his allies have said were simply motivated to take down their political opponent.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Is it just focused on -- JONATHAN KARL: By the way, that could be like a guy like Matt Gaetz.

I mean, we'll see how far I mean, there are people close to Trump that are pushing for him to do something like that.

Whether or not he will do it, whether or not his new attorney general, if she is confirmed, Pam Bondi would go along with that, with whether or not Todd Blanche, who is nominated to be the deputy attorney general, goes along with it, remains to be seen.

But there are, you know, people that have Trump's ear that really want him to go all-in on prosecuting the people that were against him.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, let me ask you a specific question about one job that we haven't really heard as much about, that's FBI director.

Obviously Chris Wray was a Trump appointee the last time, but, obviously, Trump is soured on the FBI director.

Now, post-Watergate especially, Washington has treated by the norms of Washington, treated the FBI job as an apolitical job, ten-year term, regardless of who's president.

Does Chris Wray survive?

Is that another target of retribution?

And what would that mean for the culture of the Justice Department, the culture of the FBI if Trump removes Chris Wray?

DAN BALZ: One, one would have to assume that Chris Wray will not be FBI director very long in the Trump administration, just given everything that Trump has said and what we think he wants to do.

I think what we know about what Trump has talked about is to make the Justice Department an extension of the presidency as opposed to being what we've traditionally seen as somewhat independent from the president and to be able to carry out things without the president dictating and carry out cases in which in some ways the president doesn't really know what's going on.

Trump doesn't want that kind of a Justice Department.

He wants a Justice Department and an FBI that will do the kinds of things that he wants done.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Right.

JONATHAN KARL: I mean, literally, it's like the Trump law firm in terms of the -- I mean, you have Pam Bondi who represented Donald Trump in the first impeachment trial.

The deputy attorney general nominee, Todd Blanche, represented him in the criminal trial in New York and in his other trials.

Emil Bovey, who is the nominee for the number three position, was also there beside Todd Blanche and Donald Trump in that New York courtroom on his legal team.

So, you have the top leadership that he wants to put in place, assuming they're confirmed, will be people who have literally worked for him as his defense counsel.

And then you have a third, John Sauer, for solicitor general.

He argued the immunity case on Trump's behalf before the Supreme Court.

So, he's putting his personal lawyers in to now be the lawyers at the top of the Justice Department.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Elizabeth, it sounds like what Jon's describing is quite literally the end of the post-Watergate era.

ELIZABETH BUMILLER: Correct.

And he will -- absolutely.

And I think in addition to going after the investigators who investigated him, you know, people -- there's people at the Pentagon who angered him a lot, General Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Chiefs of Staff, Trump has a vendetta against him.

He was very angry about the generals who wouldn't do what he wanted and who tried to thwarted him.

There's also potentially the Bidens he could go after, and although that has turned up nothing so far in this administration.

But, yes, it's odd that he -- and I guess that's what his supporters want.

I just don't see it as being a very popular thing to do with the rest of the country.

JEFFREY GOLDBERG: Well, stay on that for a moment.

Jon, just jump on this question.

You mentioned the Pentagon.

General C.Q.

Brown, Air Force general, four star, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs, many of Trump's supporters think of him as one of the, quote, woke generals.

He is black.

He has spoken about BLM and racial justice and obviously has enforced some policies that generally were bipartisan until the Trump era, bipartisan in understanding.

Does he fire the chairman of the Joint Chiefs when he comes into office?

JONATHAN KARL: I mean, one of the executive orders that they've drafted, again, whether or not he will actually, Trump will decide to go through with it, is an executive order to review all of the three and four star generals, and to -- you know, for whether or not to see who's woke and who's not, and who needs to be removed and who needs to be fired.

So, I think it's certainly possible.

You know, look, the way Trump looks at this is when he was in office last time, he was repeatedly thwarted in some cases by people that he had put in positions of authority, in some cases by people that he had inherited.

You remember the famous op-ed in The New York Times, the resistance by anonymous, no longer anonymous, but who talked about within the government, there are people trying to stop Donald Trump from doing harm to the country, his own people inside his White House, inside his cabinet, inside his military leadership.

He doesn't want that to happen again.