The Supreme Court Is Backing Trump's Power Grab

The Ezra Klein Show

New York Times Opinion

Society & Culture, Government, News

4.6 • 11K Ratings

🗓️ 2 September 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Trump was losing in the courts. He’s not anymore. In the early months of the administration, the courts were proving a powerful check on President Trump, blocking many of his boldest actions. But those were the lower courts. In the past few months, the Supreme Court has weighed in, and it has handed Trump win after win after win. So what do these decisions enable the president to do? And why is the Supreme Court giving Trump what he wants? To pull all this apart, I’m joined by Kate Shaw. She is a former Supreme Court law clerk, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School and a host of the “Strict Scrutiny” podcast. Note: This episode was recorded on Aug. 21, before Trump announced his intention to fire Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve Board of Governors and before Immigration and Customs Enforcement re-arrested Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia and began processing him for deportation to Uganda. Mentioned: “Don't Believe Him” by Ezra Klein “This Is the Presidency John Roberts Has Built” by Peter M. Shane Book Recommendations: Lawless by Leah Litman Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart We the People by Jill Lepore Thoughts? Guest suggestions? Email us at [email protected]. You can find the transcript and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.html This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Elias Isquith. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Our senior engineer is Jeff Geld. Mixing by Isaac Jones and Aman Sahota. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Rollin Hu, Elias Isquith, Kristin Lin, Jack McCordick, Marina King and Jan Kobal. Original music by Aman Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. Special thanks to Josh Chafetz.

Transcript

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0:00.0	The
0:07.0	The Early in the second Trump term, as Donald Trump was asserting a level of nearly autocratic power that his predecessors certainly did not think they possessed.
0:42.1	I released an essay, audio essay, video essay called Don't Believe Him.
0:47.0	And in that essay, I argued that he was asserting all this power because he was actually weak.
0:52.0	He was moving so fast because everywhere else in the government,
0:56.6	he was likely to be stopped, stopped in Congress, and stopped in the courts. And so it was very,
1:03.3	very, very important not to treat what Trump was doing as fixed, not to treat it as something
1:08.8	that could not be undone, because there's only in assuming
1:11.8	he had that power that he would really have it. Otherwise, he was going to get mired down
1:15.6	in the same inertia and checks and balances that had mired all of his predecessors. For a while,
1:24.4	that bet looked sort of right.
1:29.5	Trump was getting stopped in the courts.
1:34.7	They were ruling against him overwhelmingly, over and over and over again.
1:38.1	But that was the early months of the administration.
1:42.0	We were still then waiting from the Supreme Court to weigh in.
1:44.4	And in the last few months, it has weighed in.
1:50.3	And it has weighed in overwhelmingly for Donald Trump and the powers he seeks.
1:56.7	Even as a skeptic of the Supreme Court, even as a skeptic of this Supreme Court in particular,
2:01.9	I thought Trump might get 20, 30% of the power that he wanted.
2:05.5	So far, he's getting a whole lot more than that.
2:12.0	I guess the good news here is that maybe we're not going to have the constitutional showdown many feared,
2:16.0	but the bad news is because Trump is getting what he wanted.
	...

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