Philip Klinkner’s Warning: Democracy Doesn’t Defend Itself

Guy Kawasaki:
I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is the Remarkable People Podcast and we have another remarkable guest for you. His name is Philip Klinkner, and he is the professor of government at Hamilton College. Welcome to Remarkable People, Philip.

Philip Klinkner:
Thanks, Guy.

Guy Kawasaki:
I have so much to ask you because you're an expert in government and I'm having such a difficult time wrapping my mind around what's happening here.

Philip Klinkner:
Join the club. You're not alone. It's been quite a few weeks.

Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think we are living in maybe the most interesting period in American history?

Philip Klinkner:
Well, no. I think there have been many interesting periods in American history. We're certainly living in a very interesting and consequential period in American history. We have never seen a president come in and attempt to create so much change so quickly using such unorthodox means outside of a period of war or crisis. You can go back and talk about Franklin Roosevelt when he first came into office, but that was during the Great Depression.
Unemployment rate was 25 percent. It’s nowhere near that now. Abraham Lincoln came into office in 1861 in the midst of the breakup of the country. These were all crises in which there was a great demand for the government to act and to act very quickly in the midst of really existential crises.
When FDR came in, the banking system was collapsing. Banks were closing right and left. There was no deposit insurance. People were seeing their savings wiped out in a matter of hours. Obviously, with Abraham Lincoln, roughly half the country was attempting to succeed to create a new country.
I don't want to say that there are no problems now, but they pale in comparison to what we saw in those periods. So the juxtaposition of Trump's activity, attempting to do all sorts of different things outside of a major crisis, as much as they might want to talk about a crisis, really, I think is what's most jarring.

Guy Kawasaki:
Wow, I feel better already.

Philip Klinkner:
I'm not here to make you feel better. In some ways, that makes it worse. One can understand in a period in which a chunk of the country is attempting to succeed and set up a new country in which there's a looming civil war, the government might need to act and might need act and some unorthodox ways. In the midst of a depression, there was a huge demand for the government to act, but in those presidents, acted in somewhat unorthodox ways.
But in this case, there isn't any overwhelming crisis. Unemployment is incredibly low. Yes, we have problems with crime. Yes, we have problems with the economy. Yes, we have problems with immigration, but it's not the existential crisis we've seen before. But nonetheless, Trump has assumed a mandate to make these vast changes and has attempted to do it relying solely on executive power thus far.
And that's something that really outside of war that presidents have been reluctant to make huge changes. There's been a steady increase of executive power actions by presidents and things like that, but this is just a quantum jump.
And it seems so clearly designed to be done not to save the union in the moment of civil war, not to save the economy in the moment of a great depression. It seems to be done to enhance Trump's political power or to extract vengeance on his enemies. So it's very hard to say that this was something that's being done, whether for good or bad, but nonetheless in the national interest.

Guy Kawasaki:
And I don't understand. So if your party controls Congress and the Supreme Court and the Executive branch, why do you have to go outside and do these things with just brutal raw power?

Philip Klinkner:
One thing I think Trump and many people in Trump's movement like the exercise of raw power, it's something that they see as good and necessary and that one has to show strength and domination. So exercising power for its own sake, I think has its own attraction for many people in the MAGA movement. But in this case, there are a number of things that Trump can do by executive action.
And you can sign executive orders, and essentially, executive orders says the law has been passed and we interpret the law in this way and we're going to carry out the law in this way.
Now, many of those are being challenged in court, and there is been so far beginning to see a lot more pushback by the courts. A lot of what Trump is attempting to do, he is finding out that he can't do it, that the courts are pushing back, that you can sign an executive order and you can try and do this, but it may in fact be illegal.
The other thing is that in order to really move policy, there's only so much you can do in executive orders. You have to pass legislation. At the end of the day, it all comes down to dollars and cents, and the power of the purse is in the hands of Congress. And if Trump really wants to enact major policy, so for example, if he really wants to make good on his goal of rounding up every undocumented immigrant in the United States, it's going to cost a lot of money and that money has to come through Congress. Whether or not Congress, even though Republicans control it, can actually do that is an open question. And we're seeing the limits of that because they have very narrow majorities in the House and it's not clear that they can put together a majority in the House to achieve the things that they want to do. They can also pass the Senate.
The other thing that's going on though is that Trump is making noises and making some motions that he doesn't necessarily have to follow what Congress says when it comes to spending money. That he can, the fancy term for this is impoundment, that if Congress says we're going to spend one hundred million dollars on this, I don't have to spend it, I don't have to spend it.
And executives have played little tricks with the budget and things like that, but they seem to want to make a full-on assault on the power of the purse, that even if Congress says you have to spend X amount of money, then the president can choose not to do it. That would be really a major constitutional issue, and that's something that the courts are going to have to weigh in on.
But again, the Republicans have very strong control of the Supreme Court. Many of them on the court have been very sympathetic to Trump and the MAGA movement, and so it remains to be seen. To what extent will the court go along with Trump's effort to really aggrandize executive power with him and the people around him, including Elon Musk and others?
And if he succeeds, it really would be a constitutional revolution and would essentially take what had been three co-equal branches and really make it into two co-equal branches, the courts and the President.
I think the other thing that's coming perhaps is if the courts decide that at some level definitively the Supreme Court, they're going to slap down Trump, does Trump follow a court order? And there's a famous saying back in the 1830s, John Marshall was Chief Justice of Supreme Court. Andrew Jackson made a decision that John Marshall didn't like. John Marshall said it's unconstitutional.
And supposedly Andrew Jackson said, "Well, Justice Marshall has made his decision. Now let him go and enforce it." And what we're finding out is that many of the things we thought were fixed constitutional legal guardrails are just norms in established practices.
If Trump says, "No, I think the Supreme Court has not properly interpreted the Constitution. I think the Supreme Court has decided to interfere in something that is what I consider to be the proper and necessary purview of the executive branch, and therefore I'm going to ignore a Supreme Court order," I think that's a possibility, and that would really be unprecedented. That would really be unprecedented.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, and then what happens?

Philip Klinkner:
We'll see. The only check on that really is impeachment. And right now, as we learn, Trump was impeached twice, but impeachment doesn't mean anything unless you can remove from office, and the bar to removing a president from office is extraordinarily high. It's two thirds. So as long as Trump can keep the support of thirty-four senators in the United States Senate, then he can't be removed from office.
So again, I hope this isn't going to happen. We've moved in that direction. How far we've moved? I don't know. But if Trump was to ignore a court order, the Supreme Court has no mechanism for enforcing it. Andrew Jackson is absolutely right. There aren't a legion of Supreme Court police who are going to march down Pennsylvania Avenue and go and arrest Trump and throw them in their jail or something like that. The only mechanism they have is impeachment.
And then again, now we're catastrophizing, but let's say they impeach him. Trump says, "I'm not leaving." Then it's just a question of who the generals side with. And like I said, all these things that we thought were these fixed parts, oh, in our constitution, the President could not possibly install themselves in power and things like that, these are just guidelines, and that at the end of the day, it comes down to power and who has the power and what side are they going to line up with?
And this is why people have been incredibly worried about, first of all, Trump's putting loyalists in charge at the Department of Justice and at the FBI, and then also for the purge that he just had at the Pentagon this last weekend. And is he attempting to put loyalists in power in the Pentagon that will essentially follow whatever he says without any consideration of whether or not it may be constitutional?

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, theoretically, didn't those generals take a vow to the Constitution as opposed to Trump?

Philip Klinkner:
Yes, but we also have a very strong tradition of civilian control of the military, which says that if the president gives you an order, you in the military, you say, "How high?" And they may say, "It's not my job to interpret the Constitution over and above what the President says because I'm a general. I wasn't elected. The president was elected."
And this is where it gets extraordinarily dicey. And again, these generals might say, "Okay, the Constitution is a good thing, but we're in a crisis." And essentially what Trump has said that the tweet he had about essentially anyone who saves the nation cannot violate the law.
And this goes to a line of thinking about presidential power, that presidents are entrusted to maintain the nation, the safety of the nation, and therefore, anything they do, and that exercise cannot be unconstitutional. Richard Nixon years ago said, "If the President does it, it's not against the law. It's not illegal."
And what we see is Trump pushing that Maximalist vision of executive power. And the question is, how far is he going to go with that? So far, he's pushed it farther than any other president has done, and we'll see if the courts rein him in. Maybe they'll say, "Okay, I tried. Won't happen." Maybe the courts won't rein him in and they'll try and do more. We don't know. We're really in untested ground here.

Guy Kawasaki:
You had me feeling better for about thirty seconds, and that whole feeling is gone now, Philip. Oh, my God.

Philip Klinkner:
That's why I call it Remarkable People. I seem to have that ability to just make people feel really terrible after the first thirty seconds.

Guy Kawasaki:
I wonder how your students feel after taking a class from you. My God.

Philip Klinkner:
Oh, I've been making my students feel awful for years, long before Trump was on the scene. So that's a constant throughout my career. They'll tell you that.

Guy Kawasaki:
This may sound like a dumb question, but man, we're down that rat hole already. Tell me if I'm nuts. Let's suppose that California refuses to enforce some Trump DLJ Musk ICE order. So Trump calls up the California National Guard, tells them to enforce. California National Guard goes rogue and refuses. Trump calls up Hegseth, tells him to send SEAL team six to arrest Gavin Newsom, Kent State happens again, four dead in Sacramento. Is this just like a movie or can this kind of thing really happen?

Philip Klinkner:
Yeah. I do American politics. I have colleagues who do comparative politics, who look at other types of regimes and governments and things like that. And what they tell you is that, yes, you can have a democracy until people decide that they want something more than they want democracy and things spin out of control very quickly. I think it's Fitzgerald has a famous quote that they went bankrupt first slowly and then all at once.
And you have a democracy, and you lose a democracy slowly and then all at once. And the question is that, at what point will Trump be restrained? And really, the history of his entire career is the ability to avoid constraints and accountability and legal ramifications. And he essentially mounted a coup attempt in 2021.
It failed, but he was never held accountable or responsible for that. And he was impeached twice but was not removed from office. And so he feels that by being elected president again, that these things are in the past and that the attempts to constrain him failed and therefore he has a mandate to go and do even more.
And again, there's nothing in the history of Donald Trump where he said, "Gosh, I probably pushed it too far. Lesson learned. I'll rein it in next time." His whole history is I'm going to do it even more next time. And he effectively attempted a coup in 2021, and there's no reason to think, given the fact that he was never held accountable for it, that he wouldn't try and do it again and again.
Nothing he said should lead us to believe that he thinks that it was a mistake. He said it was a glorious day. They're wonderful, and he pardoned all the people who were involved in it. So he thinks it was a perfectly fine thing to do. People like that, they'll do it again.

Guy Kawasaki:
Do you know about the work of a professor from Harvard named Erica Chenoweth?

Philip Klinkner:
I know of her name. I can't say that I know her work all that well.

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, the gist of her work is she did an analysis of popular uprising, and she's not saying that this is necessarily 100 percent this is going to happen and it's all succeed, but she says something to the effect that if three and a half percent of the population revolt, regimes fall and a little bit less than half of the people in the United States voted against him, there's a lot more than three and a half percent of Americans are against him, do you think that ultimately if he ignores the courts and all these conventions and all this, ultimately if the people protest a regime can still be brought down?

Philip Klinkner:
When you say the regime can be brought down, the question is, which regime? Is it the democratic regime we've had in the United States for quite a while now? Or is it the Trump administration that's brought down?

Guy Kawasaki:
Trump administration.

Philip Klinkner:
I think there's very little chance of the Trump administration being brought down in the sense that he would be impeached or feel the need to resign from office. Like I said, in order to avoid being removed from office, he only needs thirty-four Republican senators. Honestly, I can't envision a circumstance where that happens.
Years ago, Trump said, "I could shoot somebody in Fifth Avenue, and they still support me." And in every piece of evidence that we've gotten in the last decade since he said that, it's true. So I just can't imagine a circumstance. They could get them on video robbing a Seven-Eleven and they'd probably say, "Seven-Eleven needed robbing," or whatever. It's just not going to happen.
And even less likely than that is Trump says, "Yeah, I screwed up. I screwed up and I got to pay the price and I'm sorry. So I'm going to resign." Not going to happen. He's going to double down. He's going to stay in office. And again, in 2020, he lost the election. Everybody told him he lost the election, but he decided, "Nope, I'm not going to give up. I'm going to stay here and I'm going to try and figure out a way that I can stay in." And it didn't work and that's why he had to leave office.
I wrote another piece. We originally made contact, but for a piece I wrote for the conversation, I wrote one a little more recently about how the Twenty-second Amendment of the Constitution says you get two terms in office and that's it. I don't think that's going to constrain Trump. I think come 2029, Trump will try to stay in office.
And he's already talking about this. He's supposedly joking, but a lot of things with Trump start out as jokes and then he decides that he wants to act on it. And I think he's going to try and find a workaround around the Twenty-second Amendment, is a way of staying in office or staying in power. Even if he's not formally the president, he will want to stay there and exercise power.

Guy Kawasaki:
Wow.

Philip Klinkner:
We're in for a very rocky four years, and we're only a month in.

Guy Kawasaki:
Well, I'm speechless to hear that.

Philip Klinkner:
This is bad to do to podcast hosts, is make them speechless. I'm sorry.

Guy Kawasaki:
At least I am admitting I'm speechless. This may sound like a facetious question, but I'm dead serious. Do you ever think, my God, we must be living in a simulation and God has a sense of humor? Is that the only explanation here?

Philip Klinkner:
I don't see much sense of humor. I have a pretty dark sense of humor, and this is not my sense of humor. There are many places around the world in contemporary politics and certainly throughout history in which there were democracies, republics that slipped into some form of authoritarianism.
My colleagues in comparative politics talk about democratic backsliding, and that's exactly what's going on now, democratic backsliding, that many of the democratic rules and norms and legal principles that we once held are being challenged and many of them put aside.
Now, does that mean that Trump is Hitler and tomorrow people are going to be marched off to camps? No, that's not going to happen, but there are ways in which you see democracy erode and you get what people call competitive authoritarianism where you have one party that is authoritarian that uses the instruments of government to try and hold themselves in power.
And that's, I think, exactly what Trump is doing. And again, given what he did in 2021, I think there's no reason to think he wouldn't try it again in 2026 when we have midterm elections, that he wouldn't try it again in 2029. There's an old saying when people tell you who they are, believe him, and he told us exactly who he was. You're going to get a lot of messages on this podcast, I think.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, I had four Republican listeners and I'm going to lose them now.

Philip Klinkner:
This is the thing, that there are many Republicans who may disagree with me that this is a bad thing who argue that, no, this is exactly what we need, that democracy has failed, that normal politics has failed, that we have this deep state that's working within government against the interests of the American people. You've obviously associated with a lot of people in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. There's a lot of talk about tech authoritarianism and these sorts of things.
So there is an element within the Republican Party, within the MAGA movement, the conservative movement more generally, which has said that, no, we need to have an authoritarian system, that this system of pluralist democracy that we've had has failed us and that we need to think about ways of restraining democracy. So they may disagree with how I interpret this, but they would say, "No, it's accurate and we need to do this, but it's a good thing," whereas I'm saying it's very much a bad thing.

Guy Kawasaki:
In 2004, George W. Bush won by more than Donald Trump did in 2024. And so there was doom and gloom for the Democratic Party and stuff. And then there was Katrina, there was the Iraq war, the financial crisis, and the Democrats retook both houses in 2006. Obama wins in 2008. Could there be factors like this that happened shortly?

Philip Klinkner:
Absolutely. You just don't know what's coming down the pike. Events are unpredictable. We just don't know what's going to happen. What I think is with one huge caveat that I'll get to in a second, I think Trump has gone way beyond where his mandate was, like you pointed out. He won a plurality. He didn't get a majority. He was only about 49.8 percent.
He only won by about the popular vote by about a point and a half. This was not a landslide election as much as Trump might want to point it out. And we look at those maps and we see all the red and it makes it look like a landslide, but most of that red is trees, not people.
And we're already seeing pushback, all these people saying, "Geez, I voted for Trump because I didn't like the price of eggs. I didn't think I was going to lose my job with the park service." And you're starting to see a backlash. And this is political scientists talk about what they call the thermostatic quality of public opinion. You elect a Democrat, the public gets more conservative. You elect a Republican, the public gets more liberal.
And people don't necessarily like a lot of policy change. And what they're getting now is a lot of policy change and you're seeing reaction. Trump, he was the second most unpopular incoming president. The most unpopular incoming president was Donald Trump, first term. He was only slightly more popular, and that popularity has been going down. There's a big thermostatic reaction coming here if Trump keeps trying to do what he's doing.
Can Democrats do much in the short term to affect that? Probably not given that they just don't control any branches of government, but I think what is going to happen is there's going to be a big reaction at the polls in 2026. And it wouldn't take much at all for Democrats to win back the House. There are only a couple seats down.
Senate's tougher, but it's not outside of the realm of possibility. They could also get back to the Senate. The big caveat is does Trump say, oh, there's a national emergency, and therefore we're going to suspend the election in this key state because blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever reason. You can always gin up a reason for something, right?
Again, it goes back to, where is Trump willing to exercise his power? When is he willing to be restrained? And so far, we didn't see much evidence of that. And my concern is that come 2026, he is looking at a potential wave against him that he's going to lose control of Congress, that he'll do something to try and influence that election even to the point of calling it off or whatever. Again, I hope the probability is very low. It's probably very low, but again, with Donald Trump, you just don't know.

Guy Kawasaki:
And then we come back to the issue of the allegiance of the generals. Right?

Philip Klinkner:
Exactly. And again, my comparative politics colleagues say it always comes down to the generals because that's where power is. Mao said, power flows from the barrel of a gun, and at the end of the day, that's right.

Guy Kawasaki:
Do you think that from the outside looking in obviously that these are classic mistakes that parties in power make? Are they overplaying their hand?

Philip Klinkner:
No, I think what we've seen is, around the world, the reaction against governing parties. There's been a number of things. The demise of the Cold War I think began it. I think the rise of immigration into Europe and the United States over the last twenty years, thirty years. I think COVID. I think changes in the structure of the capitalist economy in the West have led to this right-wing, populist, authoritarian, whatever phrase you want to use to describe it.
And that's gone on in every industrialized country around the world. We just saw it in Germany with the AfD, but even there, the center-right won the election. They got the most votes, but they've moved significantly to the right from where they used to be even a few years ago under Angela Merkel when they were actually fairly pro-immigration. So we've seen that everywhere.
And sure, you can always say, oh, if they'd only done X or they'd only done Y, but parties in power lose. They just eventually are going to lose. And I think, sure, were there things the Biden administration could've done that might've helped them? Yeah, maybe, but I don't know what they were. And sometimes the economy goes up and sometimes it goes down, and when you're in power, you're going to be held responsible for that.
And so we saw the British Tories get kicked out of power a year ago. We saw Biden get kicked out of power in office. We saw it in Germany. In France, it's happening. It's all around the world. There's this upsurge in these right-wing populist parties, which has been going on for decades. And then there's just this short-term reaction, I think, to COVID, inflation, economic dislocations because of COVID and inflation and so on that has led to just being a terrible time for incumbent parties.

Guy Kawasaki:
Yeah, you open a door here with Germany, so can you help us understand this Germany election? Some people say that AfD lost. It's proof that right wing is not taking over Germany. Other people say, "But the right wing came in second. They had 20 percent. That's better than they've ever done." So is it good news or bad news, this German election?

Philip Klinkner:
Well, it's a glass half full, half empty. I think at the end of the day, this is an explicitly right-wing neo-Nazi party that for years in Germany, they were around, but they were very marginal. They were very marginal, and there was just such a strong bias against them within the German public that they never got more than a few percentage points. And the AfD has broken through that. They got to 10 percent in the last election. Now they're at 20 percent.
Right now, all of the other major parties have said, "We will not enter into a government with the AfD, that they are, as Germans say, verboten," all right, "that we will not do that." But there's the possibility at some point in the future that you can't form a government without the AfD or that they decide that, "Okay, we don't like the AfD, but we want to be in power and we'd rather be in power with the AfD than with the socialist," and so on.
And we've seen that in other countries where these right-wing populist authoritarian parties were once outside of acceptable discussion, acceptable political discourse. The idea of having a coalition with them is impossible, but yet they grew and they grew and eventually they grew enough that they could exert power on their own, or because they grew in power, other political leaders basically had to make a decision that, okay, we're going to have to deal with them that we cannot just ignore.
Right now, the Germans can ignore 20 percent of the electorate. If it gets to 30 percent, could be difficult. That's essentially what happened in France, but they can't put together a coalition among the anti-national front types in France. And so far there doesn't seem to be anything that is causing the decline of these right-wing populist groups. They're growing in many, many countries.
They're becoming more powerful. You see this in France, you see this in Germany, you see it with reform in Britain. The Trump MAGA movement has essentially replaced the traditional conservative Republican Party, and there doesn't seem to be anything that's topping this out. So I think we're going to have to get used to this.

Guy Kawasaki:
You just said that you cannot ignore an AfD party that has 30 percent, 35 percent, but in America, we're ignoring the Democratic Party that has 47 percent, 48 percent, depending on your count, 50 percent. So how come that doesn't work in America?

Philip Klinkner:
The difference is we just have different political systems. So in Germany, it's much more proportional representation that if you get 15 percent of the vote, you get 15 percent of the seats. It works the other way that effectively the MAGA movement got 50 percent of the Republican Party, which gave them 100 percent of the Republican Party, that they controlled primaries and therefore able to exert control over the entire party.
And we only have two parties. And if you get control of one party, then you're in power. In Germany, I can't remember the last time a party actually got a majority of the vote. They have proportional representation, and so either they have to go into a coalition with other parties in order to govern. Here in the United States, we have what they call single member districts. We only elect one president, we only elect two senators from our state, and then we only elect one House member for each district.
And so only one party can have control, and that tends to leave you with two parties. Whereas in these other things with proportional representation, if you get 15 percent of the vote, you get 15 percent of the seats. And therefore, somebody might want to go out and vote for a party that's a minor party because they at least get some representation.
In the United States, that vote is lost. So if you vote for the Greens in the United States, except for a few very rare local circumstances, you get nothing. Even if the Greens get 15 percent, which would be great for them, they get nothing, no representation whatsoever.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay, so if I'm a Democrat and I'm listening to this and I'm basically shitting bricks, do you have any advice for effectively mounting opposition to this?

Philip Klinkner:
In the short term, there's not a lot that Democrats can do. All right. They can protest. They can attempt to move public opinion, and I think you're seeing that. You're seeing a number of protests that are going on.
And when you say the Democrats, I'm talking not just about elected Democrats, I'm talking about people who are affiliated with the Democratic Party, both at the elite level as elected officials and then also people who are just ordinary people who believe in the Democratic Party. So I think they're beginning to find their voice. They're beginning to find their voice, and that's happening.
You also seeing Democrats organizing more and more legal challenges. For example, I think one of the most egregious things that Trump did was his attempt to unilaterally through executive order, rewrite the Birthright Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, and you saw fifteen Democratic attorney generals go into court to try and get that struck down as quickly as possible.
So that's going on. You're seeing Democratic governors in a number of places. I think the lead on this has probably been Pritzker in Illinois, so denouncing what Trump is doing saying, "We'll follow the letter of the law, but we're going to fight out exactly what the law means."
The other thing I think has to happen is that Democrats have to raise a lot of money and recruit the best candidates that they possibly can for 2026, and they have to make sure that they regain power in 2026 by as large of margins as they possibly can. And that's not an immediate thing. That's a slow thing, and it remains to be seen how they're doing.
I've seen some things that say that essentially large liberal donors have backed off, that they're not donating Democrats in part because they're so upset with Trump and they feel Democrats are being silent, but it's not clear what they can do. Again, I think the main thing you can do now is prepare for 2026.
What Democrats in Congress do, they have very limited leverage. They really have to wait for an opportunity in which the Republicans, because of their freedom caucus wing, can't get a majority. In order to get necessary government business done, they're going to have to come to Democrats and the Democrats are going to have to negotiate the best deal they can, or not.
Or they might just say, "Nope, you're in charge. And if you can't raise the debt limit and that's going to collapse the economy, that's on you," or, "If you can't keep the government open, that's on you." But again, I think both of those things you might see Trump. The fact that the government can't stay open if they run out of funding is because of a decision made by an attorney general back in the 1970s. Trump could just direct his attorney general to say, "No, we can keep spending. We can keep the doors open."
The debt limit. Trump could get a lawyer to say anything, and certainly Trump can't, that says, "No, the debt clause of the Fourteenth Amendment means that we can issue debt, and therefore, we don't have to follow this law." Or he can just mint the twelve trillion dollar coin.
There's a provision of the law that says the Secretary of Treasury can mint coins of any denomination. It was meant for commemorative coins and things like that. And people have said, "Well, just mint a twelve trillion dollar coin and the debt limit goes away."
So I think in push comes as though in those circumstances, I think Trump would be very tempted to take unilateral executive action. Again, I'll say one good thing about that is that I think the debt limit is absolutely a stupid thing. If the government says we're going to spend this much and we're going to tax this much, and that means we have to issue debt, then they have to issue debt.
And we shouldn't have to go through a separate vote to say, okay, we're going to raise the debt limit in order for that. It's just a weird clause we've had, and it's just led to all sorts of brinksmanship in Congress and it's a terrible thing and they should have gotten rid of it years ago, but they never have.

Guy Kawasaki:
You are just a bowl full of cherries today, Philip, my God. So you're obviously a historian and expert in government. So fast-forward 200 years, what are people going to say about what we're living through now?

Philip Klinkner:
Oh, I couldn't even possibly imagine that because like going back and saying, "Oh, let's go back 200 years to 1825, and what would Andrew Jackson have thought about TikTok?" It's impossible. Who knows what's going to happen 200 years. No idea if you do that. I can't even think about tomorrow.

Guy Kawasaki:
So in a sense, this may be existential for accommodations, but what's the point of studying history then and studying government if everything is on the table, anything can happen, it's totally random, you cannot predict? Why study it at this point?

Philip Klinkner:
200 years is very different than say two years or twenty years. By willing to posit certain things that I think may or may not happen within the next two years, even four years, gets out beyond that. It's a little dicier. And again, you just never know. If we were doing this five years ago, maybe we would've talked about the pandemic. Maybe not. You just never know.
Global events happen, things happen that totally scatter the table and you don't know where it's going to go. But I think we are in an exceptionally, what's the word I want to use for, fragile, plastic state in world history. And things that we're probably not that far apart in age that were just established norms and accepted part of the way the world was, it's going away and it's going away very quickly.
The idea that, I don't know, when we were younger and say when Ronald Reagan was president, one day, the United States president would ally with Russia on the independence of Ukraine, it was just impossible to think of that. And that happened in essentially seventy years, eighty years of a post-war western order and alliance structure in a matter of weeks is gone.
And we're seeing all sorts of things, not just in foreign policy, but in domestic policy. Things that we thought were established, accepted, just out the window. And is it the ancient Chinese curse? You may live in interesting times. We are living in interesting times.

Guy Kawasaki:
I wish it was a little less interesting.

Philip Klinkner:
Yes.

Guy Kawasaki:
When I think of the Republican politicians and so much of what he's doing is completely contrary to traditional Republican doctrine, do you think they just say, "Well, I just got to bite the bullet if I want to be re-elected and it is what it is," or what goes through their brains when they see what he does?

Philip Klinkner:
I think there are different types. There are true believers. There are people who say, "Yeah, this is great. Go, go." They're cheerleaders. This fits with what they want to do. Others, it's like, "Maybe I don't like it, but I like this job. I like being in Congress." And everybody in the Republican Party who has crossed Trump, with very few exceptions, is gone. They are out of politics. They are certainly out of the Republican Party.
And so they have to say, "I don't like Trump, but I like my job. I feel like I can do this. I can do that. That's good, and therefore, I've got to support him." People do a really good job of justifying the things that help them keep their job. Upton Sinclair, it's very hard to convince somebody of something when their job depends on not believing that, or something to that effect. I know I butchered the quote, but it's that effect.
And then I think it's even more crass than that. We've heard of Republican politicians who have gotten death threats for crossing Trump or not being sufficiently MAGA. Apparently Mitt Romney, who's now out of politics. The idea that this was the Republican standard-bearer thirteen years ago, that he would be out of politics, that would be totally cast out of the Republican Party.
He probably would've lost a primary in Utah if you decided to run again. Not only is he out of politics, but he has to spend money for personal security because he voted to impeach Donald Trump. And that crossed a line.
And I think one of the things, like we're talking about things that have changed since we were younger, the normalization of political violence in this country. And again, it's not a civil war that's going on, but more and more people are talking about resorting political violence.
And effectively, we normalize the worst episode of political violence in the last few decades, American history, by not holding people accountable for January Sixth. That was an episode of political violence. And Trump, who orchestrated it, got off scot-free and he pardoned everybody else who was involved in it.
And so now it's very clear that the political violence works and that it can be used in strategic ways. That's something that's very new. And again, that's something that you're hearing Republicans, they don't talk about it on the record very much, but that's something you're hearing Republican politicians say is, "Geez, if I go against Trump on this, my God, my kids are going to get death threats at school," and nobody wants that.

Guy Kawasaki:
Okay. My last question for you is just from your historical perspective and from your studies of government, what's a citizen to do? What's the normal, just a regular guy or regular gal listening to this podcast, having heard all this, what should that person do?

Philip Klinkner:
Don't sit back. Don't assume that things will get better on their own. Don't assume that the guardrails that are there will hold, that you need to get involved, and that means opening up your checkbook. That means going out and marching. That means running for office. That means supporting people who run for office. That means campaigning, knocking on doors. Do anything and everything that you possibly can do.
Like I said, it's a very plastic time, and I've laid out all these terrible scenarios of what might happen, but that also means that some really good things could happen, and it really does require people to get involved and get active. And if you just assume that things are going to be bad, then they will be.
And again, there are no guarantees in life, but you've got to go out and you've got to make a difference. And there are a lot of different ways to do it, but you've got to find something to do. The sitting back is not an option anymore.

Guy Kawasaki:
All right, Philip, this has been a most interesting episode, I have to say.

Philip Klinkner:
Sorry to ruin your day, Guy.

Guy Kawasaki:
It's better to hear this and take action rather than just thinking that, oh, things will be fine. So this is a good wake up call, I think, for people who want to be remarkable and live in a remarkable country.

Philip Klinkner:
Let's hope so.

Guy Kawasaki:
Thank you, Philip Klinkner from Hamilton. And this has been the Remarkable People podcast. And I want to thank Madisun Nuismer, producer, Tessa Nuismer, researcher, my A sound design team, Jeff Sieh and Shannon Hernandez. And until next time, take action. Mahalo and Aloha.