I'm Dahlia Lithwick, and this is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court.

All of this is about power. All of it is about the protection of power but for a single person.

And that is the person that is Donald Trump.

It is really hard to look at the ways in which President Donald Trump, his administration, and his Republican Party are willing to break rules, norms, institutions, and break the law without concluding they actually have zero fear that someday Democrats will wield all those powers against them.

Put more bluntly, they are not behaving like people who believe they will ever face

accountability at the ballot box.

A perceived immunity from accountability of any sort ever is finding expression in so many

of the destructive acts of this second Trump administration.

Last week, we focused on the immigration piece of that rampage.

This week, we wanted to turn our attention to civil rights.

Now, we have talked separately about the evisceration of the Civil Rights Division at the Justice Department,

the weaponization of civil rights protections against diversity in higher education and

Skodas's delivery of death by a thousand cuts to the Voting Rights Act.

But we wanted to take a step back and try to knit all of this together in a way that

educates and empowers us to think

about it as a unified whole. Maya is the president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil

and Human Rights, a coalition of more than 240 national organizations fighting to protect,

defend, and expand the rights of every person in the

United States. A nationally respected civil rights attorney, Wiley has been a litigator at the ACLU,

the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. She has also worked in the civil division of the U.S.

Attorney for the Southern District of New York. I know her as a fellow MSNBC news analyst, and her memoir, Remember You Are a Wiley, was published just last fall.

Maya, welcome to Amicus.

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