--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Hi, Molly. Hey, Ryan. Are you ready to talk about all the hot court action this week?
--:-- Molly Ball: Yes. Have you picked your team?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: My team? You know I don't take sides.
--:-- Molly Ball: No, I'm talking about March Madness.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: March Madness. Oh, Ryan, I'm way too much of a nerd for that. I was talking about the judicial branch.
--:-- Molly Ball: Nerds love basketball too, Molly. Not this nerd. Sorry.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Right, okay, the court, yeah, the Supreme Court, the judicial branch, there is a lot going on there, too, right now.
--:-- Molly Ball: There is indeed. It's really heating up.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Did you see this statement from the chief justice?
--:-- Molly Ball: I did see it, a pretty remarkable statement this week from the Supreme Court chief justice, John Roberts, who, you know, was nominated by a conservative president, generally votes with the conservatives on the court.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But this statement essentially was calling out President Trump.
--:-- Molly Ball: Is there a showdown coming between the executive branch and the judiciary?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I think it's already here. It's happening. And it feels it's consequential and it's intentional.
--:-- Molly Ball: This is something that the administration has put into motion on purpose in order to both advance their agenda and potentially change legal precedent.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: From the Journal, this is Trump 2.0.
--:-- Molly Ball: I'm Ryan Knudsen. And I'm Molly Ball. It's Friday, March 21st.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Coming up, a breakdown of our March Madness brackets. Just kidding. We're going to talk about the Trump administration's friction with the courts.
--:-- Molly Ball: Go Ducks, though.
--:-- [Sound effects and music transition]
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: CRM was supposed to improve customer relationships. Instead, it's shorthand for can't resolve much.
--:-- Molly Ball: Which means you may have sunk a fortune into software that just bounces customer issues around but never actually solves them.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: On the ServiceNow AI platform, CRM stands for something better.
--:-- Molly Ball: With AI built into one platform, customers aren't mired in endless loops of automated indifference. They get what they need. when they need it.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Bad CRM was then. This is ServiceNow.
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--:-- Molly Ball: Plus, with sponsored jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions or long-term contracts. You're only paying for results.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed.
--:-- Molly Ball: Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at Indeed.com slash journal.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: That's Indeed.com slash journal right now and support the show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast.
--:-- Molly Ball: Indeed.com slash journal. Terms and conditions apply.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Hiring Indeed is all you need.
--:-- [Sound effects and music transition]
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: All right, so we're going to talk about the highest court in the land, the Supreme Court, and the rest of the judicial system.
--:-- Molly Ball: And to help us understand what's going on, we're joined by our colleague Jess Bravin, who covers the Supreme Court.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Hey, thanks for having me.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Great to be here.
--:-- Molly Ball: Hi, Jess. By the way, speaking of March Madness, I do have to point out that there actually is a basketball court in the Supreme Court building.
--:-- Jess Bravin: You're kidding.
--:-- Molly Ball: Yes, there is over the Supreme Court room, and they call that the highest court in the land.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Wait, over the Supreme Court chamber, like there's a basketball court up there?
--:-- Molly Ball: Yes, there is.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Yes, there is.
--:-- Molly Ball: RBG famously frequented it, right?
--:-- Jess Bravin: She was not really known for her shots, but she did do some workouts there.
--:-- Molly Ball: And Justice Sandra Day O'Connor used to have a yoga class up there.
--:-- Jess Bravin: But my guess is that they built it just because they wanted to be able to say highest court in the land.
--:-- Molly Ball: I think that that may be part of the reason.
--:-- Jess Bravin: To really make it the highest court in the land, Supreme Court decisions have to be appealable to the basketball court, right?
--:-- Molly Ball: So if you don't like your decision from the Supreme Court, you can settle it in like, what do you call a basketball score?
--:-- Jess Bravin: Get a free throw and sort of, You can overrule.
--:-- Molly Ball: I want to see Donald Trump play basketball one-on-one against John Roberts, the chief justice, and then we'll see who gets to decide.
--:-- Jess Bravin: I mean, these separation of powers questions have no easy answers, and that might be the way to settle them.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: All right, well, I could talk about basketball all day, but it's time to get serious.
--:-- Molly Ball: We started out by talking about this statement from Chief Justice John Roberts, where he effectively rebuked President Trump after Trump, on Truth Social, called a judge a left-wing lunatic and said that he should be impeached for ruling against the administration's latest deportation efforts.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Jess, can you just bring us up to speed here? What is the series of events that led us to the chief justice putting out this statement?
--:-- Jess Bravin: Sure. Obviously, we know this administration has a very, very harsh view of illegal immigration and immigration rights in general.
--:-- Molly Ball: The ACLU got wind of the plan to invoke the Alien Enemies Act as a way to essentially short-circuit immigration procedures to use an emergency kind of wartime power to remove enemy aliens without going through immigration courts and the usual process.
--:-- Jess Bravin: So they then filed an emergency motion in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., asking for an order to stop the government from doing this.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And the judge said, all right, well, slow down. I'm going to issue an order to, you know, pause this for 14 days so I can consider these legal arguments.
--:-- Jess Bravin: And this is District Court Judge James Bosberg, who is an Obama appointee, correct?
--:-- Molly Ball: He's the one who's been the main target of Trump and other conservatives' anger here?
--:-- Jess Bravin: Yes, he is.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: That's right. He's an Obama appointee.
--:-- Jess Bravin: He actually was a George W. Bush appointee to the local municipal court in Washington prior to that.
--:-- Molly Ball: But yes, Obama put him on the federal district court in 2011.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So after the judge issued this order, what happened next?
--:-- Jess Bravin: There is some opacity about exactly what happened next.
--:-- Molly Ball: The administration went forward with its removal of these Venezuelan migrants to a prison in El Salvador.
--:-- Jess Bravin: And they say that they did not disobey the judge, although the judge verbally said, don't take off the plane, turn the plane around if it's in the air.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The administration says they disobeyed the judge that his order was not final until it was reduced to writing and the written version didn't say anything about turning around a plane and so they complied with his order
--:-- Molly Ball: So there two things about this case that are significant. One is the fact that it ultimately led to the statement from the chief justice, but then also that the Trump administration seems like they may have ignored potentially a court order here.
--:-- Jess Bravin: How significant is that second aspect of it?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Well, it's very significant if they did, in fact, ignore a court order.
--:-- Molly Ball: Now, they're going to say, I mean, they are saying that there was not a valid court order in effect when they did what they did.
--:-- Jess Bravin: But they also say that he, that this is, that this judge doesn't have the authority to do it.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So they're sort of saying both things.
--:-- Molly Ball: One, he issued an illegal order, so therefore we wouldn't have to follow it anyway.
--:-- Jess Bravin: But also, we didn't disobey his illegal order.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I mean, that's essentially what they're saying.
--:-- Molly Ball: The judge has asked the government to clarify exactly what it did when, and the government is resisting saying that's national security information that they don't have to disclose to the judge.
--:-- Jess Bravin: The judge says he was, you know, he was on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
--:-- Molly Ball: He was, you know, he has a security clearance.
--:-- Jess Bravin: He's frustrated.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And so we don't know where that's going to end up.
--:-- Molly Ball: So after that little spat, Trump went on Truth Social and heavily criticized the judge, as we've been talking about.
--:-- Jess Bravin: He said nobody voted for him.
--:-- Molly Ball: He said he was crooked.
--:-- Jess Bravin: He said he was a troublemaker.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And he said the judge should be impeached.
--:-- Molly Ball: And that's when Roberts issued this statement that said, and I will just read it out loud, for more than two centuries it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.
--:-- Jess Bravin: The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.
--:-- Molly Ball: Jess, like reading between the lines here, what is Robert's thinking here? What is he trying to say with his statement?
--:-- Jess Bravin: Well, he's trying to say that this is going to DEFCON 1 over the kind of legal dispute that is really quite routine.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: You know, judges issue preliminary orders in cases all the time.
--:-- Molly Ball: Those often do not reflect the final disposition of a case.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Often the very same judge, when he gets into further deliberation and reviews all the arguments, will reach a different decision.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So temporary orders at the outset of lawsuits are quite common.
--:-- Molly Ball: And the entire legal system is premised on the idea that there will be appeals.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Everyone is entitled to an automatic appeal of a district court to a circuit court, and then the Supreme Court exists above that.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So the idea that the judge issues an order that you disagree with, even if you think it is, you know, incredibly mistaken, impeachment is not the remedy.
--:-- Molly Ball: And we know that because there have only been 15 judges impeached since 1789.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Eight of which were ultimately convicted by the Senate and removed from office.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And they were people who, you know, had also been convicted of crimes or other kinds of true misconduct, not simply making a decision that the president thinks is egregiously wrong.
--:-- Molly Ball: So that is what the chief justice is saying, that, you know, there is a process for resolving these things.
--:-- Jess Bravin: And immediately calling for the impeachment of a judge because you lost an early round in court strikes him as inappropriate.
--:-- Molly Ball: Molly, do you have any sense of whether or not there's an appetite in Congress for impeaching Judge Boesberg or any other judges?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So several House Republicans have now introduced impeachments against different judges, actually.
--:-- Molly Ball: Generally, it doesn't seem like something that the Republicans in Congress have much of an appetite for.
--:-- Jess Bravin: It is a quite high bar for impeachment.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The House has to pass it and then two-thirds of the Senate has to approve it, similar to a presidential impeachment.
--:-- Molly Ball: And I would say the Republican leadership in the House believes that the votes aren't there for this to get through the House in their narrow majority, and also that it's a distraction from the other things they're trying to do.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They have their hands full with their legislative agenda, and they don't view this as something they should be spending time on.
--:-- Molly Ball: Do you think there's a—the Trump administration has a goal? Do you think there's something specific that the Trump administration wants to see? Like, only the Supreme Court can rule, or, like, what's the thing that they want out of this question?
--:-- Jess Bravin: Well, they want courts to stay out of their way.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I mean, you know, their messaging, it's, you know, we don't know what kind of subliminal or psychological effect, but this is a very, very combative administration.
--:-- Molly Ball: Their rhetoric is not we respectfully disagree with the court and intend to appeal.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Their rhetoric is this judge is a lunatic and should be impeached.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So they are sending a message to the courts that, you know, stay out of our way, just as they've done to other opponents.
--:-- Molly Ball: They don't seem to have a concept of a loyal opposition.
--:-- Jess Bravin: You know, any opposition is by definition disloyal, I think, in their view.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So, yeah, there's that.
--:-- Molly Ball: Now, that's the general, I think, atmosphere that they want to promote.
--:-- Jess Bravin: In terms of their legal objectives, they have a very, very strong view of executive power.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They know that several members of the Supreme Court share that view, at least in theory, about how the separation of powers should be interpreted.
--:-- Molly Ball: And they are hoping that the cases that inevitably are arising from many of their very aggressive assertions will lead to new precedents that bless their approach to running the government.
--:-- Jess Bravin: So yes, I think that's their legal objective and I think they're likely to win on some of their arguments.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: As a legal matter, there is a legitimate argument out there about national injunctions, right?
--:-- Molly Ball: That maybe a federal judge in Texas or San Francisco or wherever shouldn't be able to tell the federal government to stop doing something.
--:-- Jess Bravin: There certainly is.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And the Supreme Court itself has raised questions about the propriety of nationwide injunctions.
--:-- Molly Ball: It is a good question, and it is one that could be resolved in a couple of ways.
--:-- Jess Bravin: One, the Supreme Court itself can set out new guidelines for when those kinds of injunctions are appropriate.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And also Congress can.
--:-- Molly Ball: Congress can set the rules for federal courts, and I think there is some talk of doing that.
--:-- Jess Bravin: There is a serious legal question about should a single judge, often picked because the parties who are filing the lawsuit think that judge will be sympathetic, be able to stymie an entire initiative of the government.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Well, and this is the sort of ultimate confrontation that everyone seems to be sort of girding for, right?
--:-- Molly Ball: I mean, it's been really interesting to me that you've had people high up in the administration, including Vice President J.D. Vance, you know, quoting that apocryphal Andrew Jackson statement, the chief justice has made his ruling, let him enforce it.
--:-- Jess Bravin: But when Trump is asked this question, he's repeatedly backed down.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: He'd say, oh, no, that's something you can't do.
--:-- Molly Ball: You can't just disregard something the court has said.
--:-- Jess Bravin: How serious a possibility is that?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And would that constitute a constitutional crisis?
--:-- Jess Bravin: Well, I think the answer is of course it depends.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I mean, is it a kind of soft noncompliance which actually is not that unusual.
--:-- Molly Ball: I mean, you know, there are a lot of court orders that don't get fully carried out by the government you know all the time.
--:-- Jess Bravin: And courts don't have a perfect way of assessing whether that goes on.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Or is it just, you know, a flat out defiance of a Supreme Court directive?
--:-- Molly Ball: As you said, the president has not gone that far at this point.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Some of his nominees, though, left open the possibility that there were circumstances when they wouldn't have to comply with a court order.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: This came up at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing when the nominee for Solicitor General and a nominee for Assistant Attorney General were asked flat out, you know, are there circumstances when you don't have to obey a court order?
--:-- Molly Ball: And they hedged.
--:-- Jess Bravin: You know, they said, well, we don't want to talk about hypotheticals or, you know, there's a big debate about that or, you know, they kind of left it open.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Bottom line, should an elected official be allowed to defy a federal court order?
--:-- Molly Ball: It would be too case-specific for me to make a blanket statement about that.
--:-- Jess Bravin: And interestingly, there was even a Republican Senator, John Kennedy of Louisiana, who scolded them.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Don't ever, ever take the position that you're not going to follow the order of a federal court. Ever.
--:-- Molly Ball: Now, that's the other thing that the Trump administration has been doing in the realm of the legal system is going after individual law firms.
--:-- Jess Bravin: There was this order against Perkins Coie, another one against Paul Weiss that effectively made it impossible for those firms to interact with the federal government.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: What is the justification, Jess, for these actions?
--:-- Jess Bravin: And what impact is it having on the legal system?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: That is definitely a novel policy of the Trump administration to target individual law firms in this way.
--:-- Jess Bravin: The justification is that the president doesn't trust these law firms and he has cited their activities against him personally.
--:-- Molly Ball: Like in an order that he issued against the law firm Paul Weiss, he named one of their lawyers and said this person, you know, tried to like gin up a prosecution of me and he is a untrustworthy, crooked lawyer.
--:-- Jess Bravin: And so it is the president's determination that these law firms are security threats and can't be trusted.
--:-- Molly Ball: Perkins has gone into court to get that order lifted and won a temporary order lifting portions of the president's order.
--:-- Jess Bravin: But it is, again, a very strong message that the administration views people who file lawsuits against it or people who have taken legal action against the president as enemies.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And they are not pulling punches in using their powers.
--:-- Molly Ball: These orders got blocked by a judge, at least for now.
--:-- Jess Bravin: But is it having a chilling effect on the legal profession? or other law firms?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Well, I mean, we don't know yet, but we're not seeing a very robust response from the bar.
--:-- Molly Ball: We're not seeing a kind of unified, defiant retort to the president saying how outrageous.
--:-- Jess Bravin: It's not gone unnoticed, but there's not the kind of outrage and tremendous resistance that one might have expected if this happened in Trump's first term.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I mean, some of these law firms are not even fighting these orders in court.
--:-- Molly Ball: All right, now our favorite segment, we have a question from one of our listeners.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Hi, guys. My name is Matthew, and I want to get your thoughts on how the Supreme Court's ruling last summer about presidential immunity is going to or is currently playing into the administration's decisions, if at all.
--:-- Molly Ball: Thanks, Matthew.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Jess, thoughts?
--:-- Jess Bravin: Well, that decision is playing into it all the time.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And for one, the government is raising it in a lot of its legal briefs as evidence of the president's power to command subordinates to not have any kind of judicial review of what he does in his direction of the executive branch, how it's outside the realm of courts to examine.
--:-- Molly Ball: So they're definitely bringing it up in many cases as precedent that supports their view of executive authority.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Also, of course, the president himself knows now that nothing he does while he is acting as president can ever lead to any kind of legal liability for him.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So to the extent he wasn't fully emboldened before, he is now.
--:-- Molly Ball: So it's quite consequential.
--:-- Jess Bravin: And of course, that decision may be the reason that Donald Trump is president again in the first place.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I mean, you know, had the court ruled the other way, he might have been put on trial or perhaps history would have gone in a different direction.
--:-- Molly Ball: But that decision cleared the way for him to campaign through the end of 2024 and get elected and then now use, employ this very, very broad view of executive power.
--:-- Jess Bravin: So I'd say it's really central to everything that the president is doing.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I was just going to observe, you know, it's as if they took Richard Nixon's statement, if the president does it, it's not illegal, and made it into a legal theory.
--:-- Molly Ball: Or another way is that President Trump has also done sort of the other way around, that if the president doesn't like it, it's illegal.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Because if you listened to his speech at the Department of Justice last week a very long speech and he described many activities that normally are protected by the First Amendment as illegal.
--:-- Molly Ball: He described news reports as illegal because they were not flattering to him.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Now I don't know that any action is going to follow from that.
--:-- Molly Ball: That something that always an unknown with President Trump, right?
--:-- Jess Bravin: I mean, how much of the rhetoric then becomes policy?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: This term, the rhetoric is becoming policy a lot more than it was in the first term.
--:-- Molly Ball: I mean, think back in his first term when universities did things he didn't like, he said, you know, all their federal funding should be cut off.
--:-- Jess Bravin: But that didn't happen.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: This term, that is happening.
--:-- Molly Ball: And universities are towing the line.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Last question. This is really important. Do you have a March Madness favorite?
--:-- Jess Bravin: Well, I cover the Supreme Court, so I've got to, you know, I've got to put them in my bracket.
--:-- Molly Ball: Yes, John Roberts. You're going to win it all.
--:-- Jess Bravin: He's going to win.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: All right, great. Thanks so much for your time, Jess.
--:-- Jess Bravin: Really appreciate it.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: You bet.
--:-- Molly Ball: All right, last question for you, Molly, before I let you go.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: We talked last week about the dilemma Democrats are in over a potential government shutdown.
--:-- Molly Ball: Ultimately, Chuck Schumer and a handful of other Senate Democrats decided to join Republicans and vote to keep the government open.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: There has been a ton of blowback from other Democrats who very, very strongly disagreed with that decision and felt like it was time to take off the gloves, fight hard, leave it all out on the court, to use another basketball metaphor.
--:-- Molly Ball: What's your take on what's happening here?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So there's a couple of things happening here.
--:-- Molly Ball: First of all, because all but one House Democrat voted against this bill, they felt hung out to dry by the Senate.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: There was clearly a miscommunication between the House and Senate Democrats, where House Democrats felt like they took a political risk here and then the Senate sold them out.
--:-- Molly Ball: So that's part of the anger.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But the other part of the anger is really coming from the Democratic base.
--:-- Molly Ball: Rank-and-file Democrats are livid and terrified and feel a sense of existential rage at what they believe is an apocalyptically terrible administration and what it is doing to the things that they hold dear.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And they want Democrats to do something, do anything to try to stop it.
--:-- Molly Ball: And this was a very rare moment, because remember, Democrats have very limited structural power in this moment.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: They're in the minority in the House and the Senate.
--:-- Molly Ball: This was a very, very rare moment where Republicans actually needed the Democrats' votes.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And so Democrats felt like they should get something from that.
--:-- Molly Ball: There should have been some kind of negotiation.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And there was, again, not good communication from Chuck Schumer and the Senate Democrats.
--:-- Molly Ball: They seemed to threaten to withhold their votes one day, and then the next day they supplied the votes.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So just a debacle.
--:-- Molly Ball: There are calls now for Chuck Schumer to lose his job over this.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Do you think that might happen?
--:-- Molly Ball: I don't think that's going to happen.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Chuck Schumer retains the nearly unanimous support of his members in the Senate Democratic Caucus.
--:-- Molly Ball: He himself is not up for election again for four more years, which is a lifetime in politics.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Some House Democrats have called for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to primary Chuck Schumer.
--:-- Molly Ball: But again, that would be way, way down the road if indeed it were to happen at all.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And she notably had a chance to do that two years ago and decided not to.
--:-- Molly Ball: So the political risks for Chuck Schumer are quite remote at this time, but he's still under a lot of pressure just because there's so much anger at him.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Also from the grassroots, a lot of grassroots liberal groups vowing to put more pressure on Senate Democrats, bring primaries against other Senate Democrats.
--:-- Molly Ball: So Chuck Schumer has really been in the hot seat.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So what's the next point of leverage that the Democrats have on the horizon, if any?
--:-- Molly Ball: It's hard to see where.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: You know, there are a few special elections coming up.
--:-- Molly Ball: The Trump administration having tapped several House Republicans for cabinet posts means that there's two vacancies in Florida.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: There will be a special election in just a couple of weeks for those.
--:-- Molly Ball: Once Elise Stefanik is confirmed as U.N. ambassador, there will be another vacancy in upstate New York.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: But all of these are deep red districts.
--:-- Molly Ball: You know, they voted for their Republican member by a big double digit margin in 2024.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: So it would be a really steep climb for Democrats to win any of these seats.
--:-- Molly Ball: And that would be a purely symbolic victory.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: It would not give, even if they were to win these seats, Democrats would not have a majority in the House.
--:-- Molly Ball: So they would still be in this situation of being really sort of at a loss for what to do.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: You know, their base is up in arms and wants to see them do something.
--:-- Molly Ball: But structurally, there's just very, very, very little that they can do.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And I've been doing some reporting on this and spending some time with grassroots Democrats, and there is a real feeling of powerlessness and of fear and of anger that they are so helpless in this moment.
--:-- Molly Ball: All right, Molly, the buzzer has sounded. The game is over.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The game is over. We have won, and we're moving on to the next round.
--:-- Molly Ball: Wait, does that mean we won? We get to move up in the bracket?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I hope everybody had us in their brackets because, dang it, we were the underdogs, but we did it.
--:-- Molly Ball: We have to win more games.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Yeah, there's still several more games.
--:-- Molly Ball: Bring it on, Ryan.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I'm ready for the final four.
--:-- Molly Ball: Let's go.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Yeah, there we go.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: That's where we're headed.
--:-- Molly Ball: Thanks so much, Molly.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Shooting threes all day.
--:-- Molly Ball: Thanks, Ryan.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Thanks.
--:-- [Theme music fades in]
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Before we go, do you have any questions about what the Trump administration is doing?
--:-- Molly Ball: Email us and let us know.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Please send a voice note to thejournal at wsj.com.
--:-- Molly Ball: That's thejournal at wsj.com.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Trump 2.0 is part of the Journal which is a co-production of Spotify and the Wall Street Journal.
--:-- Molly Ball: This episode was produced by Enrique Perez de la Rosa and edited by Catherine Whalen with help from Tatiana Zamis.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Molly Ball is the Wall Street Journal's senior political correspondent.
--:-- Molly Ball: I'm Ryan Knudsen.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: This episode was engineered by Peter Leonard.
--:-- Molly Ball: Our theme music is by So Wiley and remixed by Peter Leonard.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Fact-checking by Kate Gallagher.
--:-- Molly Ball: Artwork by James Walton.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Trump 2.0 will be back with a new episode next Friday morning.
--:-- Molly Ball: Until then, good luck with your brackets.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And go Ducks.
--:-- [Theme music continues to play until the end of the episode]
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Yo, this is important, man.
--:-- Molly Ball: My favorite Lululemon shorts.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The ones you got me back in the day.
--:-- Molly Ball: I think they're called pace breakers.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: The ones with all the pockets.
--:-- Molly Ball: I just got back from vacation.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: And I left them in my hotel room.
--:-- Molly Ball: And dude, I need to replace these shorts.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: I wear them like three times a week.
--:-- Molly Ball: Could you send me the link to where you got them?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Oh, also, my birthday's coming up soon.
--:-- Molly Ball: So anyways, thanks, bro.
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Talk soon.
--:-- Molly Ball: Looking for your newest go-to's?
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Lululemon What's New Gear drops on Tuesdays, every Tuesday.
--:-- Molly Ball: Head to lululemon.com to shop what's new gear.
--:-- [Theme music fades out]
--:-- Ryan Knudsen: Lululemon.
