We have a constitutional crisis. Now what?
Marketplace All-in-One
Marketplace
4.5 • 1.4K Ratings
🗓️ 18 March 2025
⏱️ 18 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On today’s episode, Kai Ryssdal and Kimberly Adams discuss the Donald Trump administration’s disregard for the courts. The White House has ignored a judge’s order to turn around a pair of deportation flights and failed to rehire federal workers. A constitutional crisis has arrived. Plus, get ready for a three-bleep Kai rant. And how anime helps explain the GOP’s attempt to get around the real cost of its $4 trillion tax cut.
Here’s everything we talked about today:
- “Black War Hero’s Medal of Honor Page Deleted by Pentagon” from Newsweek
- “Donald Trump Is Itching for a Legal Showdown Over Deportations” by Vanity Fair
- “What court orders? Trump’s moving full steam ahead to slash more federal workers” from Politico
- “Exclusive: How the White House ignored a judge’s order to turn back deportation flights” from Axios
- “Trump admin live updates: Border czar says ‘I don’t care what the judges think’” by ABC News
- “Crematory horrors spur Maryland lawmakers to push for reform” by The Washington Post
- “A Congresswoman with Dementia Stopped Coming to Work. The DC Press Corps Never Noticed.” by Politico
- “The Budget Trick the G.O.P. Might Use to Make a $4 Trillion Tax Cut Look Free” by The New York Times
- @bbkogan.bsky.social on Bluesky
- “Republicans press for change in how CBO tallies cost of legislation” from Marketplace
Got a question or comment for the hosts? Email makemesmart@marketplace.org or leave us a voicemail at 508-U-B-SMART.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Jake, I'm right when you are, I think. |
| 0:08.0 | Hey, everybody, I'm Kai Rizda. Welcome back to Make Me Smart. Where we make today make sense. |
| 0:14.0 | And I'm Kimberly Adams. Thank you for joining us on this Monday, March 17th. Happy St. Patrick's Day. |
| 0:20.0 | Oh, my. Today we're going to do our usual Monday thing, some news, and then some smiles. |
| 0:24.2 | Kai, what you got? |
| 0:25.2 | Well, so I'm going to let the music fade out here before I say what I'm going to say so that |
| 0:29.5 | Courtney and Marissa and Bridget can fight amongst themselves to be first to the bleep button. |
| 0:35.7 | But the headline of my piece goes like this. |
| 0:39.6 | What the fuck is the matter with these people? |
| 0:42.1 | What the absolute fuck is the matter with these people? |
| 0:45.3 | So the news, of course, came late Friday over the weekend |
| 0:48.1 | that the Pentagon has gone further in its anti-D-EI mandate, I guess, from the White House. |
| 0:59.0 | And they have removed a web page honoring a guy by the name of Charles Rogers. |
| 1:07.0 | He's a Black Army General and a Medal of Honor winner in Vietnam. That page now, |
| 1:14.0 | should you try to go to it, gives you one of those 404 errors. And not only that, the URL, |
| 1:19.9 | the little address that you put up in the web browser, instead of saying Medal of Honor |
| 1:26.4 | now says DEI metal. |
| 1:31.1 | Wow. |
| 1:32.3 | And so I'm going to say this again. |
| 1:34.6 | The fuck is the matter with these people. |
| 1:41.3 | That's all I got. |
| 1:47.0 | I will be very fascinated to see how recruitment does. |
... |
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