The Political Scene Podcast

“If they don’t stand up to Trump right now on this kind of power grab, then the pretenses of what the courts are for will be really exposed,” Michael Waldman, the C.E.O. of the Brennan Center for Justice, says.

A rarely invoked 1798 law, the Alien Enemies Act, may have set off a constitutional crisis.

What do the believers in “tech supremacy” plan to do with the federal government?

“I always compare tariffs to a boxing match,” the staff writer John Cassidy says. “The other guy punches you back, you punch, and who’s gonna stop it?”

Julius Caesar pressured the Senate, won popular support by fomenting class warfare, and sported a combover. The constitutional scholar Jeffrey Rosen discusses the parallels.

“Donald Trump ran for President promising vengeance,” the staff writer Eric Lach says. “The Adams situation is in some ways fascinating because it’s part of the demonstration of the flip side of that—which is leniency for friends.”

“It's something that is at the top of the authoritarian playbook list,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser says. “You know, go after the independent press.”

“Obviously, it’s a biological phenomenon, but it also is largely a cultural phenomenon,” the staff writer Gideon Lewis-Kraus says.

“The earlier the intervention, the earlier the mobilization, the earlier the forthright exercise of countervailing power, the better the prospect of saving democracy,” the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond says.

“For a long time, Silicon Valley has wanted to try to replace the government, and has thought that they would be better at governing the country than, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans alike,” the staff writer Kyle Chayka says.

“I think the Democrats have worked themselves into a bit of a corner,” the writer Brady Brickner-Wood says. “They’re going to need to soul search in a way that’s not just performative and is consistent with their values.”

“You cannot pause a plane in midflight and expect that everything is going to be O.K.,” Gawande says. “That’s what they were trying to do with lifesaving health and humanitarian assistance around the world.”

The veteran transportation-safety reporter Matthew L. Wald breaks down the dangers of airline safety becoming a political flashpoint.

“We are up against perhaps the biggest, most malignant political operation in American history,” Whitehouse says.

 “We are in an era of a real reckoning with the relationship of the President to the other branches of government,” the Harvard Law professor and New Yorker contributor Jeannie Suk Gersen says.

“There is no distinction between his personal grievances and his policy aims,” Evan Osnos says.

“The hunger that there was to know every detail, every tweet, every remark, has receded immeasurably, to Trump’s benefit,” the editor of The New Yorker says.