Hi, I'm Dahlia Lithwick.

Welcome to Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court.

People do have power, but to utilize that power, they have to go to new places.

And that place right now is the federal courts in this country.

Maybe finally, the majority is not granting Trump the presumption of regularity that he does not deserve.

This week, we are marking, exhaustedly, the 100-day anniversary of Donald Trump's second inauguration as president of the United States of America.

Two clashing legal narratives are currently duking it out as experts try to explain how radical the attack on the law has been.

One holds that the Trump administration has been freakishly gifted at taking over all the levers of power,

aided and abetted by the Heritage Foundation and Project 2025 and brilliant planning and execution in implementing the

Victor Orban playbook. The other holds that this is all a clown car full of mediocre clowns

who are terrible at governance and keep tripping over their own feet in policy matters and in court.

As we rear up on this 100th day in office, a few things can be true.

Trump has issued almost 140 executive orders sparking over 100 lawsuits. The Trump administration

may be destroying the rule of law by virtue of power, numbers, and fear, but they also

losing court all the time. And that matters tremendously.

Speaking of losing in court, later on in the show, Mark Joseph Stern is going to help us

consolidate the many moving parts of the Alien Enemy's Act cases, including that very

significant order from the Supreme Court last weekend and the valiant efforts of Judge Paul Lazini's and others to elicit basic facts from the Trump administration as to the whereabouts of disappeared individuals and to ensure some kind of due process for people at risk of imminent rendition.

But first, the first 100 days.

And let's just stipulate, there are too many legal challenges and too many courts to keep track of, but they are also too important to let slide. And as you're about to hear, too effective

to ignore. So we wanted to mark the 100-day milestone with Sky Paraman, president of Democracy Forward, who has been at the tip of the spear in litigation challenging the unlawful actions of the Trump administration since week one. Democracy Forward has been involved in major lawsuits challenging the spending freeze for federal

programs, the deportations without due process, challenging the authority of Doge to conduct mass

...