From WNYC Studios.

I'm Brian Lehrer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Wednesday, March 19th.

We're very happy to have it with us now, Boston College historian, and these days a very popular newsletter writer, Heather Cox Richardson.

Her newsletter is called Letters from an American.

She is also the author of many books, including her latest Democracy Awakening Notes on the State of America,

which came out in paperback just last October.

That book traces what Richardson calls Donald Trump's authoritarian experiment

back through American history. In her latest newsletter, Richardson focuses largely on the

battle for democracy taking place right now in the courts. One judge, as you probably heard in the news,

ordered Trump to stop deporting people based on the 1798 Alien Enemies

Act. That's supposed to apply only to times of actual war or actual invasion by another country.

Another declared Elon Musk's shutdown of USAID, likely unconstitutional, including for

Musk's unappointed role in it. And besides the rulings

themselves, she notes Trump's argument that the judge in the deportations case should be removed

from the case or even impeached. Now, Chief Justice John Roberts weighed in on that yesterday,

very rare, writing, quote, for more than two

centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to

disagreement concerning a judicial decision. So how far is Trump taking us in this authoritarian

experiment, as Professor Richardson calls it, if you accept that framing.

An experiment where we're waiting to see if he ignores judicial rulings altogether, right?

...