May 29, 2025: Trump vs. the courts — again

The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO

News, Daily News, Politics, Government

3.9 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2025

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

President Donald Trump’s tariff agenda has largely relied on one central claim: that America faces a national emergency that justifies the president taking extraordinary measures. Yesterday, a federal court blew a hole in that rationale in a ruling striking down his tariffs on dozens of U.S. trading partners while teeing up yet another looming Supreme Court showdown. On issue after issue, the legal system has proven to be the one reliable restraint on Trump’s policy ambitions. And on issue after issue, the administration is eager to go to war against the judiciary. Where do those battles go from here? Chief Playbook correspondent Dasha Burns joins managing editor and author Jack Blanchard to map it out. That, plus Elon Musk’s DOGE days are over.

Transcript

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0:00.0	presented by BP.
0:08.4	Hello, I'm Jack Blanchard.
0:10.3	And I'm Dasha Burns.
0:11.4	It is Thursday, May 29th.
0:13.5	And this is the Playbook podcast.
0:15.5	Good morning.
0:16.8	My goodness, there's a lot of news suddenly happening again, Dash.
0:19.2	We were talking about being quiet at the start of the week.
0:21.3	I knew you were jinxing it. It's not anymore. There are three big stories dominating the day, and none of them bigger than the sensational court ruling last night, the unanimous judgment that basically all of Donald Trump's tariffs so far have been illegal.
0:36.5	That is a big, big wrench in one of his most
0:39.1	prominent policy agendas. More big court's news coming today. A second item we'll get into afterwards.
0:44.9	We're expecting some judgments from the Supreme Court this morning. We don't know what on,
0:48.3	but that could be a colossal story for all we know. And also, Trump's fight against Harvard University is back in court today. That's a real big one.
0:57.0	Trump's effort to block Harvard from having international students will be heard before we're caught in Massachusetts today.
1:02.4	We need to get a lot of degree, Jack. It's all legal today.
1:05.9	Luckily, I've been chatting to our legal reporters. I've downloaded a law degree into my brain for the purpose of this podcast.
1:12.4	Let's start with tariffs, though, because this really is a properly big story, an absolute
1:16.3	jaw dropper, frankly, from the US Court of International Trade.
1:20.4	The background to this is that Donald Trump used a pretty unusual mechanism to introduce
1:25.2	these tariffs, and that rather got lost in the world of it all.
1:29.7	He basically said we're in the middle of a national crisis and therefore I should be allowed to
1:33.6	unilaterally impose tariffs, which normally would be something that Congress does.
	...

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