Who Made the President a King? David Sirota Explains

Millions of Americans have shown up to “No Kings” protests in recent weeks, pushing back against what they see as an executive branch running without guardrails. The demonstrations have a specific political target: President Donald Trump, and what critics call his transformation of the presidency into something closer to a monarchy.

But journalist David Sirota wants people to understand that this didn’t start with Trump.

Sirota’s new podcast, “The Kingmakers,” traces the roots of unchecked executive power back through decades of American political history. It’s the second season of his series “Master Plan,” which looks at how corruption became legal inside American politics. The argument Sirota makes is uncomfortable precisely because it implicates both parties and spans generations: the unitary executive theory, a legal framework that grants near-absolute power to the president, didn’t emerge from a Mar-a-Lago conference room. It was born in the Nixon administration.

“The Watergate scandal, where the president is using the various pieces of the political machine and apparatus of the presidency to target his political opponents, is seen as the zenith of the imperial presidency,” Sirota said in a conversation with VTDigger host David Goodman.

Congress pushed back after Nixon resigned, passing legislation meant to cage executive authority. Then came Reagan.

Short pushback. Shorter memory.

Reagan didn’t just resist those constraints. He attacked them at the root, arguing that any statute from Congress limiting presidential control over the federal government was not merely bad policy but unconstitutional. That aggressive posture led, eventually, to the Iran-Contra scandal, when White House officials openly defied and misled Congress. “The ideology is that we are above the law, the law does not apply to us,” Sirota said. “The president is essentially not a co-equal branch of government, but an elected king.”

That phrase, elected king, is doing a lot of work right now. It’s showing up on protest signs from Portland to Philadelphia. Sirota’s podcast is an attempt to explain how the intellectual scaffolding for that position got built, brick by brick, over 50 years.

Sirota is the founder and editor-in-chief of The Lever, an independent investigative news outlet. He also wrote the screenplay for “Don’t Look Up,” the Oscar-nominated satire about institutional failure. He’s worked for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, most recently as a speechwriter and senior adviser during Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. Sanders, he said, shaped his understanding of political power in a fundamental way, teaching that “it’s not really the two parties. It’s really money versus everybody else.”

That framing runs through everything Sirota reports. His analysis of the current moment isn’t simply about Trump or Republican overreach. It’s about a decades-long project to shift American democracy away from one-person, one-vote and toward something that favors concentrated wealth. “If you’re an oligarch you try to turn the one-person, one-vote democracy into a $1, one-vote oligarchy,” he said. “Turning elections into auctions. That’s one way you deal with the democracy problem.”

The “master plan” Sirota describes took shape in the 1970s, designed, as he put it, “to consolidate as much power as you can in the hands of one person so that when you get into power and you use the legalized corruption system to buy that office, then you can do whatever you want.” The unitary executive theory gave that consolidation its legal cover.

For Upper Valley listeners and Dartmouth students thinking about constitutional law, federalism, or just the basic question of what checks and balances are supposed to do, “The Kingmakers” offers something rare: a historical argument with receipts. It’s available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever podcasts are distributed. The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman, the VTDigger interview series where this episode aired, runs new episodes regularly and covers Vermont’s particular vantage point on national politics, one shaped, in no small part, by Sanders’ long career in federal office.