Trump’s Back, This Time Without Guardrails.
Slate News
Slate Podcasts
4.5 • 6K Ratings
🗓️ 9 November 2024
⏱️ 44 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
We are, most of us, still very much in the post-election fog. It’s early days and while the fog persists, some of the shape of the future is very clear: despite his felonies, his lies, his promised mass deportations and threats of vengeance, President Donald J Trump will re-enter the White House in 2025 better organized, with a clearer mandate, and with the seal of approval of the popular vote. On this week’s Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is joined by Protect Democracy’s Ian Bassin to discuss navigating the challenges that lie ahead for American democracy, as we collectively struggle to make sense of this pivotal moment and to emerge from the fog with a flicker of hope.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hi and welcome back to Amicus. |
| 0:08.1 | This is Slate's podcast about the courts and the law and the Supreme Court. |
| 0:12.7 | And I am Dahlia Lithwick. |
| 0:13.9 | I cover these things for Slate. |
| 0:15.9 | This week, Trumpism came to America, not as a surprise, but as an invited guest. It returns well-staffed |
| 0:24.0 | with really explicit plans for deportation and deregulation and deep cuts to government services. |
| 0:30.4 | It feels like it's returning on a red carpet with a compliant Supreme Court and a Senate majority |
| 0:36.3 | and a mandate to fulfill many, many promises that Trump and J.D. Vance and the Heritage Foundation and Stephen Miller have kind of gleefully made to us. |
| 0:46.1 | Many of those promises are really chilling. During this campaign, America was asked to imagine Donald Trump with no legal or institutional guardrails, and now I guess we will bear witness to that. |
| 0:58.0 | We have devoted months and months of shows to warning against it, but this is not the moment, at least for me, to do the Monday morning quarterbacking of the campaign or to join in this delirious trashing of groups of voters |
| 1:13.5 | who didn't do what I wanted. And it is certainly not time, I think, to wish pain on anyone |
| 1:18.9 | because pain is surely coming. In my view, it is the time to think about how best to mitigate |
| 1:24.4 | what is about to come. I want to sort through the best ways for moderating what is coming, protecting the |
| 1:30.9 | architecture of democracy, even as the sort of soft furnishings of democracy are being |
| 1:36.5 | stripped away in front of our eyes. |
| 1:38.3 | And I'm joined by a friend and a friend of this show, Ian Basson, who, for me, at least, |
| 1:44.0 | has lit the way through so many dark times in so many tapings, in so many tweets, in so many notes that he has sent over the years. |
| 1:52.6 | Ian is co-founder and executive director of Protect Democracy. He previously served as Associate White House Counsel in the Obama administration, where he counseled the president and senior White House staff on administrative and constitutional law. |
| 2:08.3 | He is also a class of 2023 MacArthur Fellow. |
| 2:13.0 | Ian Bassin, uh, welcome back to the show. |
| 2:16.1 | Thank you, Dahlia. It's a tough week to be here. |
| 2:18.5 | And I'm just going to ask you this because I think a lot of people are forgetting to ask this. |
... |
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