In one of the interviews for the new Frontline project Trump’s Power & The Rule of Law, one of the Donald Trump‘s most strident defenders, attorney Mike Davis, says, “I think retribution is an important component of justice.”
Another voice, Steve Bannon, is insistent that, as he looks to amass presidential authority, Trump “is not only not going to blink, he’s going to win.”
Their words may only give fuel to the president’s opponents, reflected in nationwide No Kings protests and dozens of legal battles, but their presence is also what sets the Frontline project apart from other documentaries that have tried to make sense of the Trump era.
Trump’s Power & The Rule of Law, debuting Tuesday evening on PBS stations, looks at the president’s effort to amass and wield power over his first six months since returning to the White House, via his efforts at mass deportations, the firings of tens of thousands of federal workers, even the takeover of the Kennedy Center. There’s also mention of Trump’s efforts to defund PBS.
Director and writer Michael Kirk and his team put the expansion of presidential authority into context, not as a response to the post-Watergate effort to rein in the White House, but as a once fringe legal theory that is making its way into the mainstream. Also interviewed are a number of Trump detractors from the right, including J. Michael Luttig, the former appellate court judge who has warned that U.S. democracy is in jeopardy.
Deadline spoke to Kirk about the approach he took to this project, the challenge of doing it amid an ever changing news cycle and whether he sees an ultimate showdown in the courts.
DEADLINE: Among Trump opponents, I’ve heard a lot of them say, how can Trump do this [under the Constitution]? But you outline one theory that has been percolating for quite some time on the right, and that is the ‘unitary executive theory.‘
MICHAEL KIRK: This is this goes all the way back to Thomas Paine and the founders of the democracy that we live in now, this idea that in order for the president, in order for anything to happen — we have the Congress, the courts and the executive. And a lot of people thought, ‘Well, okay, the courts can keep us on the straight and narrow. We’re not going to give them an army. We’re not going to give them any super control. They just have the power of public persuasion and the law to guide them. And we got the Congress, which will do the money and the laws, but it’s really the executive who has to enact them, and it’s really only the executive that is voted for by all of the people. So that executive should be vested with much more power than the other two divisions, and a kind of freedom to enact his or her legislation and make it happen. He or she has an army. They can take American desires to the world, but they can also keep everything on the straight and narrow inside the democracy, a very volatile place at the at the time that the original idea was raised by Alexander Hamilton and and others.’ [The idea was] we should have a really strong executive, because that’s what it’s going to take. That has been discussed. It had been poo-pooed. It has been laughed at. It has been the subject of great derision, depending on who the president was, and sometimes with great fear or trepidation, because why would we want Andrew Johnson to have all that power? Or, in some cases, it was, Why would we want Abraham Lincoln to have all that power? We get all the way down to Nixon, who … says in the famous statement, if the president does it, it can’t be illegal. It can’t be against the law. And that was the ultimate manifestation of the executive authority.
It is that idea that caused Nixon to be constrained, and the presidency to be super constrained in the aftermath of Watergate, and it comes all the way down to the president of the United States, Donald Trump to say, ‘Wait a minute, I want to test that. How far can I go and how deep can I go, and how much do I really have to listen, especially when my party wins the House and the Senate? How much do I really have to listen to the Supreme Court if I want to get the will, the mandate of my voters, put in place. It’s a tough world. I’m going to have to be tough, and I’m going to do it.’ And he does out loud what a lot of presidents did in the quiet, which is, ‘I’m brutal, I’m chaotic, I’m argumentative, I’m demanding, I’m uncouth, I’m whatever I am to get the laws passed that he believes his people want.’ And he’s supported this time around by loyal people who’ve worked with him for four years to get the agenda ready.
DEADLINE: You cover a lot of ground in the first six months of the Trump presidency. What was the what was the special challenge for you, given that this is an ever changing story. [The film starts with Trump’s wave of executive orders on his first day in office, including the pardoning of those who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021].
KIRK: When all of that happened, with what Steve Bannon once told me was muzzle velocity, I knew there was something more happening here than just retribution and revenge. It just felt too coherent. It wasn’t like the first Trump administration. Something felt different. And as soon as we connected to Bannon and Mike Davis and other people in close, we could sense … a cohesion in what they were doing. Independent of the outward appearances, there was a plan, and it was our determination to try to get at what the plan was that made it all make a kind of sense. And now, and for the last few months, it really has. We’ve watched the pieces fall in place, and we know what he’s doing, what he’s aiming for, what the stakes are, what the showdown potential is, and that’s what the film’s about.
DEADLINE: How did you choose which voices to represent, particularly on the right? You don’t have people in the administration and you you don’t really rely on elected officials.
KIRK: It’s a fight that happens independent of immediate policy, inside the White House, the day to day running of the White House. It’s a bigger idea, a bigger ideological idea, and it’s an idea that both Davis and Bannon have espoused and continue to be part of. It’s catch phrases like ‘Days of Thunder,’ but it’s also a kind of way of articulating what’s at the heart of Trump’s actions, which are not just theoretical. It’s a feeling that his voters, his supporters, his role as president, is ordained in some way and and should be practiced in some way, that no other president has really done it, which is with a kind of vengeance, a kind of saying out loud the quiet things that most presidents would never say. Those individuals, Bannon, Davis, others who we talked to but were not in the film, are in great contrast with other conservative voices like Michael Luttig and Peter Keisler, former acting Attorney General, other voices that are themselves conservative, former people at the Justice Department and in the government. And if the law is going to be where you’re going to focus the energy of the film, and where they’re going to focus the energy of the presidency, we needed those kind of voices on both sides. I mean, Davis, for all of his bombast, has been in the room where it happened for a long time in conservative causes, including over at the Senate. So they are the heart and soul of whatever the energy is behind Trump’s actions.
DEADLINE: Was there anything that surprised you about what Mike Davis said, or Steve Bannon said, or what other people said?
KIRK: Later in the film, you may remember the [The New York Times’] Peter Baker talking about the fact that he can’t get people anymore. After covering the White House for all these years, there are many people who will not allow him to quote them. They don’t even want to talk off the record. That fear is a big component of life in Washington now, for people who were formerly sources either on the left or the right, pro president or anti president. It is a very different place to try to do journalism and some of that is reflected in the the sense that you get from Bannon and Davis. Bannon says, ‘We don’t blink, we’re not going to blink, we’re not going to cave. We’re on it. We’re coming up full blast. Everybody else will collapse. We’re warriors.’ They use phrases like that. And you you can see from Bannon and Davis the intensity of their feelings and the certainty they have that this is a kind of war where words like retribution and revenge become concepts that are completely plausible. They are saying the things out loud. These things happened in the Lyndon Johnson administration in a lot of ways, but they they were for different reasons, but they were for sure as tough, as head knocking as it could be in the privacy of the Oval Office. The difference is these guys are out there announcing it and and cheerleading it, and cheerleading things that we would have been shocked nine years ago to hear coming from the Obama administration or even the George W Bush administration, and never from George H.W. Bush or Bill Clinton. These are things that are now out of the open and all by themselves, a signal to how things have changed in American politics and presidential politics.
DEADLINE: There is mention of Trump’s efforts to end funding for public media. How unusual is it for you to work on this project with that as kind of an aspect of what’s been going on?
KIRK: Well, the good news is, I’m a I’m a filmmaker, not a politician. I don’t have to have, or even want to have, a dog in that fight. [I’m not] a political kind of person. My job is to place what’s happening with public television in another context…He’s not the first President, by the way, who has presided over attacks on public media. It goes all the way back to Nixon at the very beginning of it, when I first started in public television. Clay Whitehead, one of his communications directors, was literally the first day I started, calling for the the end of public broadcasting. I spent enough time around Bill Moyers as a young producer to to hear his stories about the creation of public broadcasting, and that it was always going to be a political football in Bill’s mind. What’s different now is is what’s happening in an effort to remake many of the cultural institutions in the United States, from Smithsonian to the Kennedy Center to public broadcasting to universities. The president is testing his mandate and and and how far he can go when he also has control of the Congress. So what it will be is what it will be. It’s kind of not my job. I know others can go out and speak about that, but I like to tell the story of what’s happening, not be part of the story.
DEADLINE: Did you get resistance from people sitting down and talking to you, though, given that this project was for public media?
KIRK: One of the great advantages we have is we’re really perceived by the Steve Bannons and the Mike Davises and others in this world … as as fair and really trying to be rigorous. The films, I don’t think are are political in any sense other than the big P political. They’re about politics. But in order to cover politics, you need to be able to talk to every side. And I’m really proud of the fact that we have that mandate, that access, that Frontline wants us to do that, that we try to be as assiduously fair as we can be … So knock wood. We don’t have a lot of trouble getting voices across the spectrum to come and sit down and talk with us. I think it’s a testimony to who we are and a testimony to what Frontline is, which is you can’t quite pin down what the politics are.
DEADLINE: Do you feel pressure to take a side in some of your projects?
KIRK: It’s hard to be a citizen who lives in a country which is so divided and so openly divided now. It’s hard to be with family and friends from all parts of the country. I grew up in Idaho. Almost everybody I know in Idaho is a Trump supporter. And I’m from that environment, and when I go back to that environment, very strong feeling about the politics. I grew up around those politics. On the other hand, I’ve spent a lot of time in the Northeast, and a lot of time in public broadcasting and a lot of time and in journalism. I don’t know what you’d call it, I kind of formed a kind of worldview that says opinions of an awful lot of Americans are not at some moments in vogue, [and] when they are in vogue, they’re just as valid. They’re just as as heartfelt as other opinions. It’s not that I’m walking the line. It’s just, when I’m working, which I’m always doing, I’ve got to stay in the middle. I have to find a way to say ‘Yeah, but,’ and I think the interviews reflect that too. They know when they’re talking to us that we’re that we’re not ideological or ideologues. We we want to know, we want to get to the bottom of what’s going on and with respect.
DEADLINE: What do you think the next few months will be about? Your documentary kind of leaves it on the whole idea of whether the president will abide by court orders.
KIRK: It’s a complicated cliffhanger that we’ve talked about. I know a lot of people think the Supremes are going to be the moment. Is Justice Roberts going to be who a lot of people hope he’ll be, and finally, use the court to step up, and Trump will do something so far out that it’s impossible for the justices not to come up with an opinion that, in essence, says to him, ‘You must do this, Mr. President.’ And is this particular president feeling the mandate and the freedom of the immunity decision that Roberts wrote a year ago now, which empowered him to to be president without worry about whether anything he does is illegal? That, plus his feeling of a mandate, plus the energy of his supporters to be really aggressive, leads us to what feels like a showdown.
Is the Supreme Court, is Justice Roberts trying to avoid that moment where he and Trump look across the abyss at each other and the constitutional crisis actually occurs because Roberts writes an opinion and Trump can’t do it, won’t do it? … Are we headed to a moment where Trump will have to decide, does he obey an order? And Roberts will have to decide whether to issue that order. … Bannon says he will not blink. Trump will not blink. Davis would say the same thing. Everybody close to Trump says he will not blink. … That’s a constitutional crisis and if that happens, what happens?
