Show 324 - What's Good for the Goose

March 23, 2025·1 hr 31 min·5 clips

Carlin lays out the two-fork road ahead: expanded presidential powers outlast Trump, or Trump never leaves office at all.

The cold open names partisanism as the disease. From there, the host says, with dry frustration, that he has tried 12 to 14 times recently and scrapped the takes because they were not right. Laryngitis kept getting in the way too. That setup matters because the episode feels like something he has been trying to say plainly for a while and could not quite land. Then the frame widens. His constitutional argument is not that the system is good at moving laws quickly. It was built against kings. He asks you to sit for a minute with people in 1787 who saw monarchy as a real political danger, not some dusty abstraction. People lose that distance. They had just dealt with a king, revolution, Parliament, and the fear of concentrated executive power close enough to treat a strong chief executive as something that needed brakes. The Articles came first. In his telling, that first setup pushed even harder against concentrated executive authority, before the 1787 Constitution reluctantly gave the office more room. That is the point. The design is clunky because the danger is not slow government. It is one person finding the holes and using them. Franklin becomes the hinge. The familiar republic-if-you-can-keep-it line shows up, along with the host's caveat that he barely trusts old quotes anymore. Even so, the meaning lands. The republic is treated as something that can be lost, not as a civics-class ornament. The warning gets sharper. Once a leader can say saving the country puts them above the law, the next person gets that precedent too. Judges matter there. Without that power, whether the republic can be kept starts to sound less like an argument and more like an outcome. Then comes the historian's chill. Five hundred years from now, he imagines some future audience finding this moment thrilling. Living through it feels less thrilling than alarming.

As heard by us

Carlin turns partisanism into a constitutional warning about executive power, restraint, and whether the republic can still hold.

Dan Carlin returns to Common Sense with a warning about partisanism and the older constitutional fear he thinks it has exposed: a president willing to exploit weak points in a system designed to keep America from drifting toward monarchy.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

Carlin recorded this one more than a dozen times. The republic being on the line is why.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Dan Carlin's Common Sense