Welcome to another episode of the Open the Office.

I'm John Fuglesang.

Welcome to the show.

We have quite an episode today.

The Trump regime is losing in Hungary, in courtrooms, and in the Vatican.

For the first time in our lifetimes,

we see a Pope and a president openly clashing, not over abortion, not over gay marriage,

but over the radical, controversial, leftist idea that killing people in large numbers is bad.

For more, let's go to the star of our show, the author of The Oath in the Office and the

Presidents and the People, Constitutional Law Professor Corey Brechtniter. Cori, it is so good to see you. Welcome back. What a pleasure, John. And, you know, some of the best news we'll talk about in the second half of the show, which is that in a regime that looked like it was destroyed, a democracy had disappeared, it's come back.

And, you know, that election has got to give us hope. is that in a regime that looked like it was destroyed, a democracy had disappeared, it's come back.

And, you know, that election has got to give us hope in our own situation where we're facing a threat to democracy.

And, of course, this battle that's brewing between the Pope and the president, something that really seems like a kind of bad novel or something. This is our reality.

And we'll see. We'll try to use it to think about what it can teach us about the role of religion,

the idea of neutrality and religion and politics. And it's a teaching moment, as they say,

teachable moment. Yeah, there's a lot I want to get to on that. And let's get some announcements out of the way.

First off, please subscribe, everyone. Please like us and subscribe. And also over on the John Fuglesang podcast really quick, we had a very special guest, Mr. Martin Sheen, who has joined us on stage for sexy liberal shows in the past. But he read my book, Separation of Church and Hate. And I was trying to get him on my show for a long time. I'm in L.A. last week, Corey, and I was talking to you the day this happened. And I said to Mr. Sheen, okay, well, listen, we can do it on Zoom. I'm happy to book you in a gorgeous space in the Hollywood studios. They're very lovely. Or I can come to you, and he wanted to come to my place.

And so he and his daughter drive over, and we sat around the kitchen table and talked for over an hour,

and he discusses everything, activism and acting and craft.

He talks about everything from working with Arthur Miller to Dorothy Day to activism.

And it's a really, really special conversation, And it's the first time I've ever done an interview with anybody around my kitchen

table who's also a former American president. So I was pretty excited. I had to say, yeah, that the

...