The first two weeks alone of the Trump administration have brought dramatic proposals and some unprecedented changes in our systems of government.

Tonight, we begin a new series of interviews called On Democracy, taking a step back to look at big questions around our laws, institutions, and norms, and how they're changing.

We begin with Barton Gellman, a longtime journalist and senior advisor

at the Brennan Center for Justice. It's a nonpartisan think tank at New York University's School of

Law. Bart, welcome back to the News Hour. Thanks for being with us. Thank you.

Bart, I want to begin with these tabletop exercises you and your colleagues ran last May and June,

role-playing both a Democratic

and Republican potential presidency. On the Republican side, you looked at what would happen

if Donald Trump came into office and made good on a lot of the public promises and pledges

he made, how the system of checks and balances would work. So how does what you've seen over the last

two weeks plus line up with what you saw back

in those exercises?

So we did five different tabletop exercises.

Two of them were called Everything Everywhere all at once.

And those are the ones that Trump is going through with in which he is launching attacks

on multiple fronts all over the federal government against

the government itself.

And he is doing so baldly in defiance of the law and in some cases the Constitution.

He is firing people.

He doesn't have the power to fire.

Or he's firing people without giving them hearings

or reasons that are required by law. He tried to stop three trillion dollars of payments that Congress

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