Notably, the potential overhauls he favorably singled out did not include several other issues raised by Mr. Trump’s behavior that might also affect Mr. Bloomberg, as a fellow wealthy businessman. They include the ability of a president to keep secret his or her tax returns, to engage in business transactions with foreign governments while in office and to choose not to divest from significant business holdings or place them into a blind trust.
On the main executive power questions, the answers provided by Mr. Bloomberg generally followed a pattern. He made strong gestures toward obeying norms of presidential self-restraint, not abusing power, and being reluctant to act based on extraordinary claims of executive power. But he also often left himself flexibility rather than unequivocally declaring steps to be legally off limits.
“The answers seem crafted to avoid raising any red flags for Democrats who have been repelled by the Trump administration’s claims of presidential authority — even if the answers don’t categorically refer to certain problematic past uses of executive power as unlawful,” said Peter M. Shane, an Ohio State University law professor and co-author of a separation-of-powers casebook.
For example, Mr. Bloomberg said he would be “extremely concerned” about detaining an American citizen, arrested on domestic soil, in military custody as an enemy combatant rather than in the civilian criminal justice system — as the Bush administration did after the Sept. 11 attacks. But he stopped short of saying the Constitution would never let him do so.
Similarly, Mr. Bloomberg spoke critically of the practice of presidents issuing “signing statements” deeming parts of bills to be unconstitutional intrusions into their executive powers, even as they sign them into law. He said the right response to a flawed bill “is almost always to veto it, not to sign it and to say that it is unconstitutional.” But he reserved the right to use such statements in “very rare circumstances — which I hope would never arise.”
And Mr. Bloomberg largely sidestepped a question about the legitimacy of presidents claiming that their constitutional authority as commander in chief permitted them to lawfully override federal statutes — as Mr. Bush did in authorizing the National Security Agency and the C.I.A. to bypass legal constraints on surveillance and torture, and Mr. Obama did in transferring five Guantánamo detainees to Qatar in the Bowe Bergdahl prisoner exchange.
While noting that each of those acts was “expressly contrary to acts of Congress,” Mr. Bloomberg did not rule out making a similar claim to bypass a law. Rather, he echoed a famous formulation for analyzing whether and when the president can override a law, by Justice Robert Jackson in a 1952 case striking down President Harry S. Truman’s seizure of steel mills.