The Supreme Court Is Backing Trump's Power Grab

I'm John Caramonica, a critic at The New York Times. And I'm Joe Cascarelli, a culture reporter at The Times. Together we host Popcast, a weekly pop culture chat show where we speak to the biggest musicians, actors, internet celebrities, and more. We've had Bad Bunny, Olivia Rodrigo, and Anne Hathaway. We've also hosted live performances with Andre 3000 and Erica Badu.

Plus we end every conversation with a snack. Catch new episodes of Popcast every week on YouTube and anywhere you get your podcasts. Early in the second Trump term, as Donald Trump was asserting a level of nearly autocratic power that his predecessors certainly did not think they possessed, I released a an essay, audio essay, video essay called Don't Believe Him. And in that essay, I argued that he was asserting all this power because he was actually weak. He was moving so fast because everywhere else in the government, he was likely to be stopped.

Stopped in Congress and stopped in the courts. And so it was very, very, very important not to treat what Trump was doing as fixed, not to treat it as something that could not be undone, because it was only in assuming he had that power that he would really have it. Otherwise, he was going to get mired down. in the same inertia and checks and balances that admired all of his predecessors. For a while, that bet looked sort of right.

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