Book Interview: Terrence L. Johnson Interviews Corey Brettschneider about Presidents and Democracy

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: I'd say two things. One is the presidency of Donald Trump. And I started writing it during the Trump presidency. A presidency that I summed up in a piece for Politico with the title Trump versus the Constitution. In my view, so many of the proposals, including the proposal to have a complete and total shutdown of Muslim immigration into the United States, the proposal during his first election campaign to torture the families of suspected terrorists, weren't just proposals to violate the Constitution in some specific sense, but more generally were an assault on the rule of law. 

And of course, when January 6th happened, that way of framing things just became even clearer. But in my view, it wasn't a one off. It was something that really called for a more serious historical examination. And it turns out that the danger of Trump isn't just Trump, it's the American presidency itself. But I also wanted to tell a hopeful story. 

And that's the second part of this. That for me, the question of how we recover was as important as identifying the threat. And throughout American history, there have been heroes who have rescued American democracy, not by turning on the Constitution as some have recently suggested, but really by reviving it and in some cases reinventing it. And so those heroes, people like Frederick Douglass, the newspaper editors that we'll talk about who challenged John Adams, and unknown figures like Sadie Alexander really were people I wanted to highlight. Because they took the Constitution and reclaimed it in the name of We the People. So it's a book about threats, but it's also a book about hope. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Well, that's a wonderful combination. So I'm wondering, can you say more about the threats? And is there-- is a Donald Trump possible without a certain social context? And explain what is fueling and in some ways supporting his rethinking and his threats to the Constitution?

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Yeah. If he was just some person out there talking about these proposals and threatening to become a dictator without supporters, there wouldn't be a reason to talk about them. But, of course, there is a context in which he is enabled. Part of it is through constituency that's not devoted to real democracy, but devoted to a kind of authoritarianism. They like, some constituents, the promise to shut down democracy. 

And of course, the other story, which is also part of the American story, is that he's not acting alone. That the supposed checks and balances that we learned about in grade school or middle school that are supposed to check a president, impeachment, and then of course, the Supreme Court, far from having that role that they're supposed to play and that the framers thought they would have been totally dysfunctional. We have seen, even in January 6th, the failure to remove Trump or disqualify him from office as our procedure of impeachment and then removal and disqualification would allow. And we've seen a Supreme Court that rather than stop him, for instance, in the Colorado case, about his eligibility to run for office under the 14th Amendment have just enabled him in cases like the immunity case. 

So the context that makes him possible is partly his demagoguery does pull people in. And then, also, we have the side of what's supposed to be the rule of law and the courts that are supposed to stop him that have made things worse. So in the absence of these checks, I wanted to write about how you do stop a demagogue, how you do restore the Constitution to We the People. And that, of course, is the story of these heroes and the constituencies that they've mobilized. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Sure. Let's talk about both the heroes and some of the folks who threaten it. What I found very powerful about your book is that you're forcing us to say, look, the moment we were witnessing and experiencing now is not new in American history. That the threat to the Constitution and to democracy started with its founding. So say more about how George Washington-- and I was also surprised about John Adams, because he's kind of, in many ways, sort of the darling in so many people's eyes. And yet, you really challenge the narrative of these two presidents. So say more about that. 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Well, I'll say about Washington that there are, of course, many, many flaws with Washington, including his participation in the evil institution of slavery. But he does give us an idea of the office, which I think, speaks to the possibility of the presidency as it should function in a democracy. And that idea is given to us in the second inaugural, where the shortest ever given, 135 words. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Yes. 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: And what Washington basically says is, I just took the oath of office. But if I violate it and what the oath requires, of course, is a commitment to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, if I violate it, I want the American people to subject me to upbraidings, that's the word he uses, or criticism. And if I really violate it, I want them to subject me to constitutional punishment. 

What's brilliant about that idea is that it pushes-- makes the office and the rule of law above the person who occupies it. But John Adams, the second president, has a very different idea of the office. And when he takes over, he really thinks that the presidency is more akin to a kind of monarchy. And justified not with reverence to popular sovereignty or We the People, but with reference to the idea of stability. And he thinks that the newly passed first Amendment, with its guarantee of freedom of speech, really doesn't do anything to alter the rights of subjects in England. 

And that didn't include a right to criticize a king. So when a plot is reported on by newspaper editors that Adams is really trying to, I would say, steal the election of 1800 in a very similar scheme to what Donald Trump comes up with, denying the certification of electoral votes with an aim to, as the Constitution requires-- to illicitly, I should say, deny the certification with an aim to throwing things to the House of Representatives where he thinks he has the votes to win. When that's discovered, what follows is the Sedition Act that really threatens to punish those who criticize the president. 

And just to show you how partisan and how different it is from that Washingtonian idea that I laid out of the second inaugural, what the law says is that if you criticize the president, you go to prison. If you criticize the vice president, a member of a different party, Thomas Jefferson, nothing happens to you. So it really is a gerrymandered, partisan piece of legislation. 

And for a long time, it was discussed as seldom used. I think those who laud Adams and talk about him as a great learned person. They underestimate how much it was used. But it looks like 135 times as the most recent research that there have been prosecutions for criticism of a president, including Matthew Lyon, sitting Congress person. And including the newspaper editors, the heroes who fought back. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: And say more about the heroes. I mean, because, again, they were faced with the threat of imprisonment. How did you determine these heroes? And what are the characteristics that they possess? 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: They-- and history repeats itself, but the first that I profile is that-- let's remember, these people were facing imprisonment. They were in a system that didn't protect the right to dissent. And yet, what these editors, people like Duane and Cooper did is-- and [? Baki, ?] is they use their own trials for criticizing the president to put Adams on trial. 

They used the trials to emphasize the idea that they were being prosecuted for exercising a right that should have been enshrined, should be acknowledged as enshrined in the First Amendment right to free speech. And they say, essentially, this isn't just a right, as Adams party claimed, to not have newspapers shut down before they publish. But it's a right to publish free from punishment, free from criminalization. 

And the way they did it is by Cooper, for instance, published his own trial, the transcript. And you saw firsthand what it was like for these editors to be prosecuted. But the way they won, ultimately, was not by going to court. In fact, Samuel Chase, a sitting Supreme Court justice, lobbied for these acts and sat on some of the trials to make sure that these editors were prosecuted and others were prosecuted. 

So going to court is not going to work. You can't just say, oh, my First Amendment free speech rights are violated. Instead, their strategy was they turn the election of 1800 into a kind of referendum on democracy, into a referendum on the right to dissent. And they prevailed upon essentially-- at the time, presidents don't campaign in the way that they do now. 

Jefferson gave one speech. It didn't go well and basically is home waiting for surrogates to campaign for him. And so they use the whole there, the opportunity to turn that election into a referendum on the right to dissent. And when Jefferson says in his first inaugural, "We're all Federalists, we're all Republicans," it's really a way of saying, I'm not going to allow this Sedition Act to return. I'm affirming what the editors stood for. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Wonderful. And I was really struck by how you highlight Frederick Douglass as of extension of these editors. 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Yes. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: And I'm curious in terms of how do you characterize sort of his fight for democracy? And you said something very powerful earlier in terms of he has a very important role in America and democracy. Say more about that. 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Yeah. I mean, I believe, and the book makes the case that he really is the true founder of American democracy. He's not an 18th century founder, but he teaches us how to read the Constitution. And he has several techniques in doing so that I think give him that title. He says, for instance, that the Constitution in its preamble is the most important moment. We the People doesn't say we the white people. And so in responding to the Dred Scott case and the theories that back it, the idea that somehow Black Americans are not citizens under the Constitution, have no legal personhood. 

He says that's not-- the document doesn't say that anywhere. And in fact, its principle. If you read it, not in a way that's textual, but that's also principled, you see the idea behind We the People. You see it is an idea of multi-racial democracy. And in other examples, he says, for instance, when it comes to the ban on the so-called corruption of blood, inheriting the crimes of parents and the punishments of parents, that's banned under the Constitution. What is that but an anti-slavery principle? 

And then most powerfully, I think, what he says is the declaration and its guarantee of equality frames the Constitution. It's the principle by which we should read all of it. And that, of course, ultimately is the idea of the Gettysburg Address that Lincoln comes to. But Lincoln is far from Douglass when he is making these points for the first time. It's going to require persuasion over time to get to that idea. It's Douglass, not Lincoln, that's the founder, to me, of true American democracy and its ideals. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: No, very fascinating point. And I'd love for you to say more about this idea that Douglass is sort of reading of the Constitution is both, quote, "textual and principled." 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Yes. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: And explain what that might mean for us today, because this idea of principle, I'm thinking in terms-- are you thinking about principles in terms of ethics? And what in terms of textual, what does that mean for an audience today, that he read it textually and with principles?

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Well, the first move that he makes, and this is going to sound like some contemporary originalist, but I'll distinguish in a moment why he's not doing what so-called originalists think they're doing. He says, there's one way of reading the Constitution. And the Dred Scott court, which, as I said before, denies national citizenship, legal personhood to Black Americans. The way that court is reading the Constitution is it's thinking about intents of the founders. 

And that is a very common way of thinking about a Constitution. And if you look at the intents, I think Douglass' view is it's not clear. There wasn't one intent. There were multiple intents. Pennsylvania delegation was abolitionists. The South Carolina delegation was very pro-slavery. The Virginia delegation was sort of something in between, thinking that slavery would end eventually, but it would take time. 

So intent gets us nowhere. And then Douglass' point is, but we have a text. That's the thing, that's the law, the text of the written Constitution. And we all can read it. That's what enables this citizen participation in constitutional law and constitutional interpretation. We don't have to defer to courts. But he's also careful to say, when you look at the most important words, We the People, the idea that you would read it word by word or look to the dictionary to see what that is, that's ridiculous to him. 

I think it's that it really stands for an idea. I'm calling it a set of principles or you could say values. I call them core pillars of democracy in the book. And you see each of the pillars of democracy, the idea, first of all, of equal protection. A phrase he was fond of that finds its way eventually into the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, among the most important pieces of text. But he's reading it into the principles of We the People and the Declaration and the ban on corruption of blood. 

And you see that too in what the editors were doing. It helps us to explain why they were able to read words that are about not abridging freedom of speech, but to see in it a right to dissent. And of course, the overall idea that no president is above the law is found throughout the document. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Yeah. What I find fascinating is that there's a level of truth telling about your book. And not truth telling in terms of pointing fingers and saying, well A is right and B is wrong, but really trying to un-layer these really important relationships. And what the book seems to suggest is that part of saving democracy and in the world of individuals is to form these sort of coalitions. And to work in groups, but also to galvanize. 

And I'm curious, can you say more about Lincoln and Abraham's relationship? Because it seems like you're pushing against traditional readings of that relationship. And say more about it and why you think it's important. 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Yeah. I mean, I think that we know that Abraham Lincoln isn't the great savior that sometimes American history makes him out to be. But he is kind of an ally in the fight for democracy. And although I put Douglass first, I try to show how over time Lincoln really does come to reflect and to embrace even Douglass' words. I was going to say his rhetoric, but that's really not what I'm talking about. It's his philosophy of the Constitution. 

Douglass, these recoveries, I should say too, the sort of theme of the book is that we have these crisis presidents. We have citizens who fight back. And then they prevail on recovery presidents. And I mentioned Jefferson, for instance. 

But the recoveries take time. So Jefferson is in many ways, of course, a more than imperfect president. And even aside from the issue of slavery, which I discuss. On speech itself, he secretly seeks the prosecution of his enemies, even though publicly he doesn't. It's far from a full recovery. Madison during the War of 1812 is willing to protect the right to dissent, even during wartime. That's the realization of the editor's dreams, as I put it. 

So these recoveries take time. And in the case of Douglass, President Buchanan seeks his prosecution. He has to flee the country to the UK, where he's giving many of the speeches about constitutional interpretation that I was talking about. And when Lincoln is elected, it's not like Jefferson. It's not a recovery. 

In fact, Douglass is really skeptical of him. He thinks he's maybe not a Buchanan, but he's not too far off. Why? He thinks the Fugitive Slave Act has to be enforced. That Dred Scott is wrong, but should be respected because it's the law. And he's very much emphasizing, as opposed to morality, the rule of law. 

He thinks slavery is protected within the states. This is not Douglass' idea that slavery is contrary to the American democracy principles embedded in the Constitution. But he criticizes Lincoln in these speeches and newspaper articles abroad, and they're also published at home. And over time, Lincoln we know is reading about them or hearing about them from advisors. And he's feeling the pressure too. 

The UK, for instance, hasn't decided if it's going to back the South or what it's going to do in the case of the war. If Douglass is able to convince people this isn't a war against slavery, there's a danger that they might actually even intervene on the side of the South. So he's using political pressure to try to prevail on him. 

But ultimately, what's incredible is they meet face to face twice. And Douglass uses those moments to defend his more moralized idea of the Constitution to this idea of these principles mattering. So he says to him, and he makes it personal, he tells them the story of his sons who are fighting for the Union Army and yet not receiving equal pay. And over time, my argument in the book, and you have to read, it is we see Lincoln changing from emphasizing the legalistic understanding of the Constitution to a much more moralized. 

So by the time you get to Gettysburg-- and Douglass' other argument is, look, you're suspending habeas corpus. You're suspending the rule of law all over. Why not just say the war is about slavery, it's about the clear inequality at issue, the violation of the Declaration? So when you get to the Gettysburg Address, which begins by noting the writing of the Declaration of Independence, which includes a commitment to a government by, for, and of the people. 

That's Douglass. That's his ideas. It's not the legalistic idea that Lincoln begins his presidency with. And over time, we see him move towards Douglass. Now, Douglass says at a commemoration memorial for Lincoln that he was a white man's president. He's not the recovery that Douglass is demanding. That comes really in the form of Ulysses Grant, who Douglass all along really sums up all his ideas with one principle, that's the idea of equal citizenship and a right to vote. It's the only way Black Americans are going to be able to protect themselves from the terrorism of the Ku Klux Klan and other groups. 

And so when Grant not just supports the passage of the 15th Amendment, but its second section, creates a new power of Congress to enforce that right to vote. And Grant not only supports the passage of, but uses the enforcement acts to prosecute over 1,000 white terrorists throughout America. That is the culmination of Douglass' vision. It is a real recovery in a way that Lincoln moves towards but Grant really realizes. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: So then how would you respond to undergraduates who are like, look, there's a lot of pessimism around this idea around principles versus power. And when we think about Dred Scott and its ongoing legacy around the inhumanity of African-Americans, how do you come to terms with this idea that there's this ongoing legacy that African-Americans are fighting that's not simply about the right to vote, but they're also trying to prove their humanity, which comes up even in Brown v Board of Education with Thurgood Marshall? So how do you navigate this idea of we have these great principles that Douglass is pushing for, and yet there's this huge power that he's fighting against? 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think the question is, how do you fight against white supremacy? Which is a theme from, of course, the beginning of American history. And two clear options. One is you say, as Garrison did, Douglass' former mentor, original mentor, as an orator-- 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Yes. 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: That this whole document is a pact with the devil. It's something that's just evil from its inception and let's just get rid of it. And it's not that Douglass doesn't understand that, he holds that view in the beginning. And we all understand why that is. 

But over time he develops this, in my view, much more sophisticated idea that the fight for true democracy for humanity can take place through the Constitution and its principles, not as it was intended by the delegates from South Carolina, but as it was written. And that tradition, even if we didn't have an American history would we choose this way of doing it? Would we come up with it? I don't think so. I think you need a Douglass. 

But it works. That's part of my point in the book. That you see that this strategy works. It's not that we abandon the Constitution and start again. It's that we realize the promise of the preamble. We see it as one story. One story of realizing these principles that were never lived up to. Until, I think, the Grant presidency actually does a pretty serious job of it. And Douglass feels that way too and Lincoln on its way. 

And then you really see it in the 20th century, I mean, with William Monroe Trotter using the principles of the Constitution to confront the supposedly preeminent constitutional theorist of his time, Woodrow Wilson, who had been president of Princeton, who had lectured on constitutional law at Princeton. And he's really saying to him what we're saying, that this is not a regime that has nationalized second-class citizenship. And that's what Trotter is accusing him of is spreading. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: And please say more about William Trotter to the audience and his relationship to Ida B. Wells and how you use them in your book, I think, rather cleverly. 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Thanks, William Monroe Trotter is a Boston newspaper editor and activist, I would really call him. He's leading protests against birth of a nation. And he really, with Ida B. Wells, has one of the most important in American history confrontations with the president. Douglass had done it too, when he realized Andrew Johnson is a white supremacist. He confronts him in the White House and leaks to the newspapers the transcript. And Trotter uses the same strategy when Wilson tries to nationalize white supremacy, specifically by re-segregating the federal government after it had been desegregated. 

This is something that we now know about. It's been in the news. But Trotter calls him out in the moment and goes to the White House to confront him. And their conversation is really a study in what we're talking about, this topic of do you use the Constitution or do you abandon it? And he says to him, this is an idea, what you're doing, a Constitution devoted to equal citizenship. You're turning it into a system of first in class, second-class citizenship nationally. And Wilson says back to him, he uses the language of Plessy. He says, if you see that, that's something that you, Trotter, are imposing. 

And Trotter's response is to say, no, separate is inherently unequal. Finally, the court says that in Brown decades later. But he does it in the moment. So, again, my point was that the strategy of Douglass is it doesn't work in the moment, but it does work in the long run. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Sure. So there are two other points I want to make before we end. Say more about-- we know about Thurgood Marshall, right? But there's a Sadie Alexander. Say more about her significant role and really kind of invisible role in reshaping the Constitution. 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Yeah. I mean, Trotter is not as well known as he should be, but he's certainly famous. And those who the history know him. And same with Ida B. Wells, the famous anti-lynching activist who joins Trotter in confronting Wilson. But as important as Thurgood Marshall and Brown is, it's the recovery story I tell. 

I should say, too, that tragically Trotter kills himself and dies despondent, thinking that he's lost to Wilson. But the mantle has really picked up during the Truman administration. And that's where the recovery, the agenda for recovery of the ideals of Douglass begins. 

Walter White and a delegation from the NAACP go to Truman and they tell him the stories. Even though Truman, they knew, was a kind of casual white supremacist who used the N word as many of his relatives told people to reassure them of his racism. They go and they tell the story of Black soldiers returning home and being beaten. And they use that to get him to create a committee that will at least study the issue of recovery from Wilson, recovery of the idea of equal protection. 

And in this committee that's formed by Truman is a completely unknown, and should be in the pantheon of civil rights heroes, a woman, the first Black woman to receive a PhD in economics, a lawyer too with a degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Sadie Alexander. And the story I tell in the book is really how she maneuvered this committee to go from something that could have easily been a do-nothing committee to one that really stands for recovery of the ideas of equal protection across three branches. 

They certainly call for the reversal of Plessy, which does happen in Brown. She calls for and she gets the immediate reversal of Wilson's segregation of the federal government and executive order from Truman and a reversal of the segregation of the armed forces, both of which Truman does. And then the most important thing that she does is she gets into this report a call for what becomes Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the use of financial incentives and disincentives to desegregate schools. 

The thing that political science and social science really did more, even more than Brown to actually desegregate America's schools. And she does that all through this committee, through convincing the committee to endorse it. Her idea is seen as too radical about financial incentives and disincentives. But I tell the story of how she's able to prevail on Eleanor Roosevelt to convince her son, FDR Jr, to switch his vote to endorse Alexander's proposal. 

I should say about Marshall, who, of course, argues Brown, that he's part of the story too. She works with him. She brings him in. She engages in a dialogue with him to try to explain why really the issue is not any individual policy, but is the idea of, as Trotter said in that White House confrontation, second-class citizenship. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Yeah. And say more in terms of then how are you linking King, Martin Luther King Junior? Because we often are-- The Letter of Birmingham Jail as a way of thinking about-- rethinking the legal norms. But you actually make interesting move in terms of how he is actually really rethinking his use of natural laws. So say more about that. 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Thanks so much. And of course, we're in a school of theology. And so this is a great, great place to dive into King's theology and its evolution. He really is a natural law thinker. I would call him for much of the beginning of his career, he's thinking about the idea of the divine law and how it translates to the natural law, which can be accessed through reason and then to the positive law. 

And you do see elements of that in The Letter from a Birmingham Jail, where he talks about Aquinas, for instance, on natural law. But I tell the story of how he over time is convinced by his student he meets, actually, at a lecture to start to not only think in terms of theology, but to think in terms of the Constitution. And specifically, like Douglass, he goes back to the founding. And he talks about eventually an anti-tyranny principle. That that's the founding ideals, a resistance to a kind of monarchy. 

And he uses that to say, what is segregation but a kind of-- and what is the restriction on the right to vote, an equally important, if not more part of his struggle, but a tyranny? And using the ideas of the American Constitution to push back. It's not that it replaces the natural law and it becomes what you and I and others in our field know as the idea of public reasoning. Really he's the inventor of it in many ways. 

The idea that we have this shared principle of anti-tyranny. And then it can be backed through thinking about the theological conception of natural law. What that means in his rhetoric is just, to me, a powerful evolution in the way the speeches operate where he's constantly calling back to the Constitution. And my most powerful moment to me is he's doing it certainly in the March on Washington, but in the moments before he's tragically assassinated, he's talking about the idea of the right to dissent. And it's strike of sanitation workers, of course. And he's saying-- somewhere I read he's using that refrain. I read about the right to dissent, the right to freedom of speech. 

And he's calling out this idea of the First Amendment. And so he really starts with this idea of anti-tyranny. And then over time getting deeper into using the Constitution and combining it with a theological way of thinking. And thanks to help from the King archives, I was able to get the actual letters where he's corresponding with this student named Hereford. And you see his notes on the page talking about the anti-tyranny principle. It's a sign of-- one of many signs, I should say, of his brilliance. The ability to think about what's going to draw on his educational background, his theology, his deeply held personal beliefs, and to combine it with a vocabulary that's going to speak to all Americans. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: I'm curious in terms of what does it mean that so many of your heroes are African-American in this book? Is it just by coincidence? 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Well, I think that's a good point. I'd say certainly half the book at least. And more, actually, because even the story of the resistance to Nixon I spoke to two people who were on that grand jury. I tell the story of the attempt too. So it's more than half, actually, of the book. I think that's true of. 

And I'll just say something quickly about them, because I want to acknowledge these two heroes. There was an attempt to indict Richard Nixon. And I talk about the failure to do so as really paving the way to our current crisis. But they tried. And there was a vote, unanimous of the grand jury, grand jury one, looking into Nixon's crimes to indict him. 

And in a sense, a deal was made that they'd postpone the vote to indict. They'd pass on the information to Congress. And after Nixon stepped down, then there would be an indictment. Now, what happened was the grand jury was essentially tricked. Nixon does step down and the grand jury goes back to Jaworski, the prosecutor working with them. And says, OK, we made the decision to indict. It's time to do it. 

The pardon follows almost immediately after that. And so they never got the chance. But they really did resist and they put up a heroic resistance. Part of what I'm doing in the book is calling for an acknowledgment of this idea that no person, not even a president is above the law. That presidents should be and can be indicted if they commit crimes while in office or after. 

And so Ethel Peoples is one of those grand jurors who is still alive and who I spoke to on the phone during COVID. And so is Patricia Woodworth. And both of them are Black Americans, totally unknown, even more unknown than Sadie Alexander. And in my view, they're heroes. So you're right. I mean, more than half the figures that I'm looking at are Black Americans. 

It's a combination. I think one thing that you see from the editors is that the people who know most about what our Constitution is and the Democratic idea of the Constitution are those whose rights have been violated, who aren't being included as they should be in We the People. So let's take the editors to begin with. I mean, their rights to dissent are being trampled on by prosecuting them. And they see firsthand that First Amendment has to mean a right of dissent. 

In the case of Douglass, he sees very clearly over time that the Constitution vindicates his personhood, which, of course, he is well aware of well from the beginning. That's his story is a claiming of his own personhood denied him by the law. But he comes to connect that to the Constitution. 

And yet, it's the most supposed learned. We talked about Adams and McCullough. He was so learned. I read those books. They're fine for political theory. They're great. I wouldn't say they're great. But it's abstract, I think, in some ways these ideas to those who are highfalutin in the language of constitutional law. And that's why they get it so wrong. And it's the people whose rights are being most violated. 

Now, if you look in American history, whose rights have been totally trampled on from the beginning? It's Black Americans. And so that's part of the story. But it doesn't explain it completely. Like, how can you explain Douglass' genius, without which we wouldn't have America in any way that we think of or kings? 

But Douglass is the one I really fixate on. It's not the case that because one's rights have been trampled on they're going to create the founding theory of the way that Douglass does. So it is-- some of it's just not determinative. It's just I think all we can say is that they're heroes. The admiration and luck, maybe. So it's partly rights being violated, but it's also something more. In the case of Douglass, it's that America was fortunate to have somebody who was able to think on so many different levels with such-- I'm not afraid of using the word genius. It is a kind of genius, I think, in that's what we get from the founder of American democracy. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Very interesting. How would you characterize the Supreme Court and people who are saying why even bother debating the court? 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: The current court has done so much to undo the principle of Ethel Peoples and Woodruff, who I mentioned. To them, when I asked them, it's an amazing thing. Their families don't know what they did. I mean, they have some sense. They were involved in a court case and that it involved the president. But they really put the best effort forward to try to indict this criminal president. 

And I try to show, too, that Nixon's crimes were so much worse than Watergate. They included the order to blow up the safe in the Brookings Institution, the attempt to kill Daniel Ellsberg on the Capitol steps. All things that we don't know about because of the pardon wiped them away. And yet, these people were just trying to do a simple thing. And when I asked them, they both had a very similar answer. It's like, look, when a crime is committed, it doesn't matter who does it, we're all equal. You punish that person. And that kind of common sense approach, I think, is what you see from them. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Fascinating. So what did you learn after you wrote the book? And as you reflect on your research, what do you walk away with as a husband, father, professor? What lessons did you learn from this? 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Thanks for that. I mean, I think it's two feelings at the same time. One is hope. And that's why I wrote the book. This book would not have been-- if it was all that everything is lost, everything is dire. The American presidency is so dangerous. Nothing can be done to overcome it. And the risk of Trump taking it or somebody like him, it doesn't have to be him, is so great that all is lost. 

And, unfortunately, one of the worst things I've seen about the book is from Jonathan Turley, who I know didn't read it, but yet wrote that somehow it's an anti-constitutional book. And it is about the threat to democracy posed by the American presidency. It is about the idea that impeachment doesn't work. That the courts have, throughout American history, and I know you asked about the court earlier, that really is the theme that the courts undermined. Sorry, I'm coming back to the original question, the courts undermined what Ethel Peoples and Patricia Woodworth, what they were trying to do, to say that no person is above the law. They undermine it in the immunity case. 

So if that was the only story, though, the danger of the presidency and the danger of the court, it wouldn't be worth writing. So it is about that threat. But the main takeaway is hope. That in these citizen heroes, the newspaper editors, Frederick Douglass, who we've talked about at length, Sadie Alexander, we see a vindication and a possibility of a future vindication. I don't name who the future people that are going to save America, because I want listeners and people listening to this podcast to be those people and to be inspired by these stories. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Well, thank you so much, Professor Corey Brettschneider of Brown University. Author of The Presidents and the People Five Leaders Who Threaten Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It. 

COREY BRETTSCHNEIDER: Thank you so much, Terrence. And thanks for having me today. And to reconnect like this has been a total pleasure. Thank you so much. 

TERRENCE JOHNSON: Thank you so much, my friend.