The Three Faces Of Trumpism

Amicus With Dahlia Lithwick | Law, justice, and the courts

Slate Podcasts

News Commentary, Politics, Government, News

4.6 • 3.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 November 2025

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

By design – and also by dint of unbridled, undisciplined extremist exuberance – Donald Trump’s second stint in the White House is thus far a tricky thing to characterize. While many of the administration’s moves seem copy/pasted from a manual for authoritarian takeover, they’re also deeply rooted in longstanding structural democratic deficits in America. For their part, The administration’s boosters argue this whiplash-inducing dismantling of institutions, norms and precedents are simply the right’s answer to similarly seismic constitutional shifts in the New Deal and Civil Rights eras. In a recent piece in the Boston Review, What Are We Living Through?, law professors Jedediah Britton-Purdy and David Pozen try to puzzle through these conflicting narratives of change. They join Dahlia Lithwick on this week’s Amicus to map this moment and to plot paths through it. Want more Amicus? Join Slate Plus to unlock weekly bonus episodes with exclusive legal analysis. Plus, you’ll access ad-free listening across all your favorite Slate podcasts. You can subscribe directly from the Amicus show page on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Or, visit slate.com/amicusplus to get access wherever you listen. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Have you ever wondered what a sandwich sounds like?
0:04.2	Not much to it, is there?
0:06.2	Unless, of course, it's a Walker's sandwich.
0:10.9	Mmm, that is good.
0:12.9	Now that's what Asani should sound like.
0:15.8	Go all crisp in with walkers.
0:19.0	Delicious.
0:22.9	I'm Dahlia Lithwick.
0:24.3	This is Amicus, Slate's podcast about the courts, the law, and the Supreme Court.
0:32.3	We need to think somehow bifocally about the Supreme Court both as rule of law bulwark and potential still
0:41.1	at the moment and also as a long-running structural problem in American democracy.
0:45.5	Although some of the destruction of state capacity will be very hard to reverse some of the
0:50.9	attacks on basic norms that Trump has engaged in, actually, those norms might be more
0:55.7	resilient.
1:02.2	In the trip to Finn Hayes of the long weekend after Thanksgiving, I thought we might do one of
1:08.4	what we sometimes call our thinky shows.
1:14.5	That is a show about big themes and big questions,
1:18.8	an attempt to locate ourselves within the swirling to anchor ourselves with a little bit of analysis with a horizon broader than a news alert or a TikTok take.
1:24.6	If you've been listening to this show for the last 10 months or maybe longer,
1:28.7	you are well aware that our view is that we are sitting square in the middle of an authoritarian
1:33.4	takeover, mostly copy-pasted from the Victor Orban playbook,
1:38.2	and that it's proceeding swiftly and alarmingly despite the fact that it comes in the shape of a clown car.
	...

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