Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
Corey Brettschneider: Pleasure, Greg. Always.
Brettschneider: I think it remains to be seen what the Supreme Court is going to do, or what higher courts will do in these cases. But certainly for now, it does look like he’s being stopped—and he’s not being stopped by accident. These aren’t just one-off cases. He has, as you said in your introduction, really threatened democracy itself and been doing nothing less than assaulting the other branches, usurping—for instance—Congress’s spending power, its power to make laws by ignoring so much of what it’s done, ignoring prior court rulings and precedents in his executive orders. I know we’ll get to that soon.
Sargent: I think another connecting thread here is that the lower courts are really stepping up. This is a really important thing that they’re doing. They’re doing a ton of really important fact-finding, which is illuminating a lot of difficult issues for people, which I find super helpful and very heartening to see. But they’re also slowing him down in a really visible way, aren’t they?
Now there is something slowing it down—although it hasn’t for the most part been the Supreme Court; it’s been lower courts and it’s been citizens. And I think those two things feed each other. What the lower courts do is they provide information to people like you and me—we’re able to get that information out there. And then when we see “No Kings,” it’s not in response to nothing; it’s in response to things that Trump has done that we learn about in part because the lower courts have taken a stand against him. So I think in the same way that citizens have been the heroes of the moment, it’s also been these lower court district court judges.
Brettschneider: I was really heartened. I’ve been very disappointed in the Supreme Court, as I said, in the shadow docket—using its emergency orders to not even write opinions and to just allow so much of the assault on democracy to continue. And today my mood is lifted, because I saw conservative justices like Gorsuch really rip into the government’s position. And I can’t say enough: this is not a two-sides issue. The Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment couldn’t be clearer. If you are born in the United States, you are a citizen.
Sargent: Well absolutely. And I think there’s good reason to think he’s probably going to lose here, don’t you?
Sargent: Well, all this got Trump very angry. He’s very angry about a bunch of different things. Earlier this week, he started out by raging at the Supreme Court over the birthright citizenship case, calling the courts stupid. That, plus him showing up at the court, seemed like an effort to bully it into siding with him. His very act of showing up was an act of rage and hostility toward the court.
Brettschneider: Absolutely. In 2016, when he was running, I wrote a piece called “Trump versus the Constitution: A Guide.” And my point there was not just that he’s proposing thing after thing—including torturing the families of suspected terrorists, for instance—that are obviously unconstitutional, but that he really has no understanding of the way the system works. He doesn’t know what a constitution is. He hasn’t read it. He talks about having an Article Two that gives him the power to do anything he wants. He thinks that our system makes him a dictator and that because he was elected, he really is unlimited in his power.
Sargent: Now I don’t want to make the mistake of being too kind to this court, but they actually seem to do the right thing today, and I hope you’re right. I think they are going to take this as an opportunity to show some sort of independence. Now they haven’t been nearly as independent as they should be. They rolled over for Trump a whole lot, but this is a big one and I’ll take it, man.
And so that gave me some hope, and I have hope here too. Like you, I don’t want to excuse the Supreme Court. They in many ways have brought us to this moment by enabling this president in horrific ways—worst of all, in its immunity decision, the Supreme Court essentially placed Trump above the law, above prosecution, the opposite of what a constitution is supposed to say. And hopefully it’s not too late for them to redeem themselves. I think they’re starting that redemption arc with these two cases.
Brettschneider: Absolutely not. One thing I’m devoted to on my podcast is restoring the idea that the Framers were brilliant in realizing that the war powers that a monarch had had to be divided up. And let me say a little more about that. The monarch in England had the power to both initiate war and carry it out. And what the Framers said is that’s too dangerous. We’re going to give the power to initiate war to Congress, and it’s going to require deliberation. We’re going to need reasons for a war. The American people are going to have to hear that. And then, of course, they made the president commander in chief. And Trump has tried to usurp that—launching a unilateral war with no reasoning that we’ve been given. We don’t know what the goals are here. And it really is an action that flies in the face of exactly what the Framers were trying to prevent.
There is none that I can see. He’s going to say he decapitated the regime and degraded the military. That last part is probably true, but we don’t even know who’s going to be in power long term. The nuclear situation is going to be basically where it was before the war.
Brettschneider: Yes. On the one hand, he doesn’t have a sophisticated idea of power. He thinks—me, me, me. It’s a narcissist’s idea of power rather than cooperating and bringing the global community on board. And you also saw him domestically refuse to even give us any reasons, much less bring Congress on board. And so I think that does weaken him. On the other hand, I would say that as much as I hope that’s going to be the outcome, we’re in a dangerous moment. He is the commander in chief. He does control the military, and that’s both dangerous domestically as he tries to shut down civil liberties—and as he engages—as much as he talks and rails against endless wars, he might have begun an endless war with no end in sight. And as much as his narcissism brought him into this, it also might keep him in it. And there might not be a way out. The Iranians see his weakness. They might continue it, and to save face—that’s my worry.
Sargent: Well, I will tell you one area where he’s not winning: it’s in the court of public opinion, so to speak. We have an absolutely crushing new CNN poll. It finds his approval on the economy at an abysmal 31 percent. Twenty-seven percent said they approve of his handling of inflation, which is the most important issue to most people right now. His overall approval is also in the toilet—it’s at 35 percent—and 65 percent say Trump’s policies have made the economy worse. That’s the highest of his presidency.
Brettschneider: That’s right. And in his recklessness, he doesn’t care about anyone’s welfare except his own—he cares about his own popularity. What is scary at the moment is that I think he looks at Nixon, and we look at Nixon, and we see Nixon’s popularity as it began to dip. As we got the impeachment proceedings in the Judiciary Committee—you didn’t even need to go through impeachment in the full House and the trial in the Senate—he was embarrassed enough of his own wrongdoing, his own high crimes and misdemeanors, that he resigned.
Sargent: Well, let’s recall, though, that he’s actually had to scale back the use of paramilitary forces in cities and things like that. I actually take somewhat seriously these moves to reorient ICE. I think we’re now reading that the plan for prison camps is being reconsidered. I don’t know what’s going to happen there, but very plainly, the enormous outpouring of energy from incredibly heroic, ordinary people across the country has really put a brake on one of the most authoritarian things that he has done. And I find that heartening. What do you think?
My worry is that we can’t let up. As he gets pushed back in each of these instances, he does back down—he has backed down with ICE—but the moment he sees the opportunity to rise up again, to slap us back, he will, because he doesn’t view his own power as limited. He believes that the Constitution gives him absolute authority. Let’s not forget, this is a person who admires dictators and has said so repeatedly. That’s his dream, really. And his own narcissistic fantasy is the thing he cares about the most.
And I think importantly, Corey, the people get encouraged when they see the courts putting the brakes on Trump. They actually look at what’s happening and they say, Our institutions aren’t folding. I’m not going to fold. I’m not in this myself—the people say to themselves when they see this kind of thing. Can you talk a little bit about that to close out—just how the good performance by our institutions in putting the brakes on Trump feeds positive tendencies and energies among the people at large? Is that an important dynamic, and what do you think of it?
When I talk about a self-coup in the abstract, even the rule of law, or ideas like free speech and equal protection, can sound abstract. But when you start to see his shutdown of political opponents—Comey and James and the courts blocking that, when you see them restoring funding to groups like PBS and NPR, when you see his usurpation of power resisted—even if in the end the Supreme Court is going to take his side—we get energy by seeing that we’re not making it up. We’re not dreaming this attempted dictatorship.
Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you what the big story I take from this is: we’re not out of it yet, Corey.
Sargent: Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, check out Corey Brettschneider’s podcast, The Oath and the Office. Corey, pleasure to talk to you, man. Hang in there.
Brettschneider: Love to, Greg. Happy to do it anytime.
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