Transcript: Trump Suddenly Facing Worsening Losses on Many Key Fronts
Sargent: And to say that everything is justified by the urgency, but we will come back to it. We had something similar on these two other cases. On the prices, this time, the Court of Appeal of the Federal Circuit ruled most of them illegal. Trump had argued that he could invoke an economic emergency to unlock the authority to impose unilateral prices – and he said that the economic urgency in question was our business deficits. But then, the court ruled that the status in question, which is the international law on economic powers, does not give Trump this unlimited tariff authority. And then on Harvard, a federal district judge ruled that the Trump government has broken the law when it frozen billions of dollars in research money on the grounds that Harvard had not done enough to fight and anti -Semitism. Leah, in these two cases, the justification of Trump’s illegal acts was frankly a joke, and everyone knew it. Are you satisfied with how the courts managed both?
Litman: I must say that I am very satisfied with the opinion in the Harvard affair. I am less satisfied with the opinion in the tariff case, because the way in which the court resolved the tariff affair was not to dive into this pretext for an emergency. Instead, it was simply a question of declaring that there is an emergency or not, the president simply does not have the authority of instituting these rates or these types of prices. And I think that goes around what, as you say, is the key problem in this case and the others, which is the underlying complaint and premise is bullshit. He creates an emergency to justify emergency powers. And so I want the federal circuit to have been ready to examine this part of the challenge. Harvard’s opinion, I think, is a tour de force. It completely demolishes the suggestion of pretextual bullshit, once again, that it was never anti -Semitism. It is, as judge the judge, just a pretext barely hidden for an ideological war against higher education and the education of the elites.
Sargent: Let’s step back and note that, OK, Trump won a little in court, but these three losses – Alien Enemies Act, Prices, Harvard – are really three main pillars of the Trump agenda. You have mass deportations, the effort to scam the order of international exchanges and the strong armament of the largest cultural institutions in this country. So, if you take a step back, you can see how the large expanses of the Trump agenda are currently resting above enormous abuses of power and illegal flagrant acts. And has it not been revealed in a fresh way?
