Transcript: Trump Suddenly Facing Worsening Losses on Many Key Fronts

Sargent: And saying it’s all justified by emergency, but we’ll come back to that. We had something similar on these two other cases. On tariffs, this time the appeals court for the Federal Circuit ruled most of them illegal. Trump had argued that he can invoke an economic emergency to unlock the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs—and he said the economic emergency in question was our trade deficits. But then the court ruled that the statute in question, which is the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, doesn’t grant Trump this unlimited tariff authority. And then on Harvard, a federal district judge ruled that Trump’s government broke the law when it froze billions of dollars in research money on the grounds that Harvard had failed to do enough to fight and antisemitism. Leah, in both these cases, the rationale for Trump’s illegal acts was frankly a joke, and everybody knew it. Are you happy with the way the courts handled both those?

Litman: I have to say I am very happy with the opinion in the Harvard case. I am less happy with the opinion in the tariff case because the way the court resolved the tariff case was not to dive in to this pretext of an emergency. Instead, it was just to declare that whether or not there is an emergency, the president just lacks the authority to institute these tariffs or these kinds of tariffs. And I think that that skirts what, as you say, is the key issue in this case and others, which is the underlying claim and premise is bullshit. He is creating an emergency in order to justify emergency powers. And so I wish that the Federal Circuit had been willing to examine that part of the challenge. The Harvard opinion, I think, is a tour de force. It utterly demolishes the, again, pretextual bullshit suggestion that this was ever about antisemitism. It is, as the judge found, just a thinly concealed pretext for an ideological war on higher education and elite education.

Sargent: Let’s step back and note that, OK, Trump has won some in court recently, but these three losses—Alien Enemies Act, tariffs, Harvard—really constitute three major pillars of Trump’s agenda. You’ve got the mass deportations, the effort to rip up the international trading order, and the strong-arming of the biggest cultural institutions in this country. So if you step back, you can see how large swaths of the Trump agenda are currently resting on top of enormous abuses of power and flagrantly illegal acts. And hasn’t this been revealed in a fresh way?