Will the Supreme Court Yield to Donald Trump?
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This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The persistent question that runs through everything Donald Trump is doing, deporting legal residents, shipping people off to a Salvadoran prison in the middle of the night, demolishing government agencies, and on and on. The question is, can he really do that?
Federal courts across the country are weighing that question in a huge number of lawsuits. Will judges ratify Trump's view of his own power as effectively limitless? And if they do not, will Donald Trump bother to listen? Now his defenders in the Republican Party will argue that Trump is just pushing at the limits of his power as many presidents do, but ultimately he'll obey court orders. So far the Trump administration doesn't show a lot of evidence of respecting the authority of courts.
Ruth Marcus is the author of Supreme Ambition, a book about Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Marcus was a columnist for the Washington Post until last month. She resigned after an executive killed a piece that she wrote that was critical of the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos. In fact, Ruth Marcus ended up publishing that column in our pages in The New Yorker, and she's continued covering Trump in the courts for us. I spoke with Ruth Marcus last week.
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