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Welcome to this MSNBC special, 100 Days of Trump, Law and Disorder. And good evening to you. I'm Ari Melber. And I'll be joining you for this special hour as we aim for some perspective on what has been, of course, a very litigious first 100 days in office. President Trump testing the limits of the law itself and the Constitution.
We have a very special panel assembled of individuals you recognize, Melissa Murray, Mary McCord and Andrew Weissman. We'll be hearing from them not only in a moment, but also across the hour. So we're hoping to aim for some more depth and perspective. Indeed, if you're watching and thinking, I know about some of this stuff, I bet you do. But we promise with the time we've allotted to go even deeper if you're interested in that kind of thing.
Now, many have been pushing for even stronger efforts to find ways to combat President Trump's obvious and extreme power grabs across these 100 days. And those words, obvious and extreme, are based on the facts and the evidence in the cases where he's continued to run into trouble. Not an opinion, but rather the extremes that have drawn rebukes, not only from lower court judges and both parties' appointees, but all the way up through the Supreme Court.
The president has claimed war powers to openly plot a bid for an illegal third term. Neither of those things are acceptable under the law. Both are testing the courts.
I'll tell you that coming up in the special, we also have a booking of one of the nation's top civil rights lawyers who's doing this work in court, including bringing some of the very lawsuits which stopped Trump's power grab at the Supreme Court. An ACLU litigator will be joining us this hour and discussing the blueprint for facing down Donald Trump's DOJ and winning. That's not something that every guest or lawyer can say, but our guest can get into that later tonight.
So what am I going to be asking our legal vets? Well, they're also going to break down what we've learned across these 100 days about combating the flood the zone strategy. Trump has done more than an executive order per day on average across these 100 days. In fact, 140 total. And his lawyers know that some of them are clearly dead on arrival in the courts. They're trying to overwhelm as much as govern, according to many critics. So that is obviously plenty to cover.
As we begin, though, I want to share a point that cuts actually against President Trump and that no one could fully predict when he began his tenure 100 plus days ago. Trump is facing the worst stock market opening since Richard Nixon. The economy flashing red with recession signs as those 100 days hit this week.
And historians and legal experts have often noted in various ways and arcane histories that what's happening out in the country can shape the public and judicial mood around a president's actions. In other words, what they get away with. Now, in theory, you'll be told, well, courts simply state the law and they're supposed to do that regardless of what's happening out there.
In practice, though, we have seen times when a war is on or the nation's economy is booming and courts may in various moments defer a bit more to a president than when the mood sours. As one legal scholar recently put it, Donald Trump has been testing the democratic system. And while courts can respond, it is also up to the nation, the people, if I can be so bold, to show that we all have the democratic systems back.
Now, we're seeing that already in mounting protests far more often than the first hundred days of most modern presidents, people in the streets. Trump is responding with a free speech crackdown. If you recall during the campaign, he and some of his allies like Elon Musk using the words free speech.
Well, it turns out for them, according to a lot of experts, it was just words because they have now been trying to abuse government power to target everyone from students who speak out on policy to universities based on the learning and science or facts they deal with that offends Donald Trump's MAGA movement all the way out to law firms, an issue you've probably heard about.
Judges drawing the line, though, against Trump claiming war powers that he does not have. There is no declared war. And that is on behalf of a mass deportation agenda that is an area where presidents have power, but not the same powers as conducting war.
So I mention all that because with those headwinds in mind, we have some top line results as the 100 days land. The administration has been contending with 225 legal challenges. Trump 2.0 bans purges and retribution, as The New York Times dubbed it, with losses for various efforts. The Musk group purge has all of those problems. You can see just in summary over the 100 days, judges rejecting attempts to freeze grants.
to break down federal agencies without Congress involved, but also upholding certain executive firings, for example, of groups of workers and even some inspectors general who were not deemed protected under the precedents that we have. Trump has made attacks on the trans community and tried to purge diversity programs. In some ways, he might have moved the conversation or the culture, as it is called. But legally, he's also faltered with some of those efforts facing partial or temporary blocks in federal court.
The immigration agenda is where you see, and this is what we're tracking for you to get a sense of it, as so much of these headlines have come so fast over the 100 days. If you look at all the X's on your screen, what you see is all the places where we've documented them losing or having setbacks, especially on immigration.
President Trump's promised mass deportation operation is now underway. The Trump administration says it sent hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court ban on the deportation of hundreds of immigrants. Trump administration officials admitted to a, quote, administrative error.
that they made when they deported a Maryland father. That's up to El Salvador if they want to return him. That's not up to us. How can I return him to the United States? Like, I smuggle him into the United States or whatever it is. Of course, I'm not going to do it.
That's how this played out on the actual international stage in the seat of power of the White House. Trump's immigration agenda also garnering pushback from the majority conservative Supreme Court, which ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of the man that you just heard referenced in that meeting. That has not happened. So when you take it together,
They're flooding the zone precisely to overwhelm the courts and there would be judicial and legal opponents, the plaintiff lawyers who deal with these cases, but also in a very real sense to leave a kind of chaotic feeling out in the country that it's working or they're getting away with it. And we will yet see if you watch the news, you've seen nights where it seems like they are getting away with a lot. And yet I want to be very clear as we take stock of this in general that
The immigration agenda is where Trump has tried to push the farthest. And it is where he has actually created the beginnings of a new alliance on behalf of Democratic presidents and against Donald Trump. And it includes three Trump appointees on the Supreme Court.
One of the most significant rulings of these first hundred days was a rare overnight weekend ruling that blocked what I mentioned before, the effective attempt to seize those war powers. Now, you're not looking at a final merits decision. In other words, a lot more could happen in the future. But this was not the result that even Donald Trump's lawyers were expecting. Seven to two, at least on that first step of whether the war powers could be used for these deportations.
There are also concerns that all of this could hit U.S. citizens, as reports of American children deported alongside their undocumented mothers. A state judge arresting, getting arrested, I should say, by the FBI over a very controversial case revolving arresting
A federal arrest of a detainee there for immigration offenses. SCOTUS also handed Trump a win, we should note, for attempts to fire certain classes of workers and rejected Trump's request to avoid paying USAID contractors amid efforts to dismantle an agency. So you see a different ruling breakdown there. Federal courts also intervening when Trump wanted to strip international students of their legal status. One video that's gone more than viral shows the Tufts student
detained by what were plainclothes federal officers that has sparked questions about the practice and the deportation agenda. There's a larger pattern here, as the Trump administration says, that students are
We'll just be declared linked to terrorist organizations, but without what has been the traditional due process, let alone terror charges for that. Most students targeted have also been outspoken. I should say many, depending on the case you look at, have been outspoken in the Mideast conflict. A broader crackdown on the elite universities, Trump threatening their funding, the retribution tour against the prominent law firms. Some have cut deals, others fighting back.
What we see here is that courts so far have been one of the last lines of defense against an administration that clearly wants not only expand executive power, but sort of show and test how much they can get away with.
With all that in mind, under 10 minutes, we try to do a summary. We bring in our guests for the hour. NYU law professor Melissa Murray, Mary McCord, a former acting assistant attorney general for national security at DOJ and Andrew Weissman, former FBI general counsel and a Mueller prosecutor. Mary and Andrew also co-host the MSNBC main justice podcast. And if we wanted to pull out Wikipedia, we could add many more details and accolades about all of your careers. Welcome, Andrew. Your thoughts tonight.
So I was thinking when you were talking that one way that I try and think about this is divide things into the illegal. Another group is the incompetent and another group is the unwise. And it's worth mentioning.
Right.
pardoning people who assaulted our democracy, but actually also assaulted law enforcement. Then there's this bucket of just the incompetent. Ebrego Garcia could be an example of that. The claim that the Harvard letter was a mistake, which I think is palpably not true, given subsequent
actions. But remember, the defense of what happened there is the government saying, oh, no, that was a mistake. So that would be gross incompetence as the defense of doing something that Harvard says is illegal. And then the thing that we spend a lot of time on is things where the courts have actually said over and over again, this is illegal. But I think it's useful to put it in the context of
of number of different things, things that could be legal, but just in my view, outrageous that in terms of what the administration is doing. So I think it's useful to think about that in terms of all three of those things going on. - And you left out one that we've talked about on the podcast, cruel, just cruel, right? Some of these things might be lawful, might be unlawful, but they're with a malevolent intent.
And I think an intent to really create multiple tiers of people in this country and particularly targeted at immigrants, whether lawful or unlawfully here, but also at the LGBTQ community and really sort of anything other than white men, honestly. But on the illegal part, I think one of the key things here that we've just never seen in
in anything like this magnitude is the steamrolling the other two co-equal branches of government, right? Plowing right over congressional statutes, dismantling departments and agencies that not only Congress statutorily created, but a president signed those statutes that created those departments and agencies, right?
ignoring appropriations that Congress, under the spending clause, had the constitutional authority to appropriate for certain purposes and just cutting off that funding. So lots of times just ignoring Congress. But also now we are up against the very edge, if not having crossed over into violating court orders, too, which then you're starting then then we're talking about trying to steamroll the judiciary. And Melissa, when you talk about that steamrolling,
the political messaging over the legal clashes is almost joyous or cartoon villain style. Take a look at Carolyn Livet from earlier this week.
Would you ever arrest somebody higher up on the judicial food chain, like a federal judge or even a Supreme Court justice? That's a hypothetical question. Again, I defer you to the Department of Justice for individuals that they are looking at. So anyone who is breaking the law or obstructing federal law enforcement officials from doing their jobs is putting themselves at risk of being prosecuted, absolutely.
You heard it there. They know exactly what they're doing. We haven't really covered this that much. I don't know that many news outlets have covered it. But last week, America's first legal, which is Stephen Miller's legal outfit, not an arm of the administration per se, but certainly in league, I think, filed a lawsuit against John G. Roberts, the chief justice of the United States, in his capacity as the chief administrator of the Federal Judicial Conference. And the whole
idea behind this lawsuit is that the Federal Judicial Conference, which has always been the administrative branch of the federal courts, is actually a part of the executive branch. And again,
It seems wildly implausible that that is the case, but I think the point of this lawsuit is, like, we can do whatever we want to you. We can issue these threats against judges. We can say we're not going to abide by judges' orders. And we can also sue the chief justice and make him an actual defendant in his official capacity in a lawsuit. And, you know, Mary made a good point about this administration essentially giving the double middle finger to both Congress and the courts. They've been doing that from day one. We don't talk about the TikTok case that much, but...
The court issued a unanimous opinion upholding Congress's bipartisan ban on TikTok, requiring TikTok to divest itself of Chinese ownership on the Friday before the inauguration. And the president-elect over the weekend said he had a better idea. He was going to do a deal. And to my mind, that was the first constitutional crisis. And we don't even really talk about that. Why don't we talk about it? Great question. I mean, we should be talking about it because it has been an harbinger of
everything that has followed. It was the template for what we are seeing now, just the abject defiance of the courts and Congress on the sidelines. So one of the things that you're such a Supreme Court guru is that
Essentially, you have the administration in the Abrego-Garcia case, just as one example, doing something that, to my mind, is, as our colleague Ryan Goodman said, it sort of thrice denied what it is that the courts have said. Whether it is the initial court saying, do not send him to El Salvador, whether it's saying you have to give him due process, whether it's saying you have to facilitate his return, that's sort of the thrice statement.
Is the Supreme Court going to stand up? I mean, the number one question we get, and I'm sure you get on your podcast as well, is what are the courts going to do? Because they don't have an army.
They don't have an army. I think one of the reasons why you saw the court's decision, the earlier decisions around Judge Boasberg's order, they initially said it should not have been filed in Judge Boasberg's court. It should have been filed in Texas, where the detainees were before they were expelled to El Salvador. And then they said that habeas was the appropriate vehicle to go forward. Real questions about whether you can aggregate evidence.
habeas proceedings, like they're usually done singly, that means each individual detainee likely has to have their own lawyer in order to proceed. Whack-a-mole. Terrible, terrible. But I think part of it is like the court a little worried that this administration is not going to listen and they're trying to find ways to kind of play out the clock a little bit. One thing, though, I do think is encouraging about
about the court's order that you mentioned, Ari, is, you know, it was a seven to two order. I think we ought to wonder why it wasn't nine to zero, why Justices Alito and Thomas weighed in on, in favor of the administration. But, you know,
The fact that they issued that ruling at one in the morning and did not wait for Justice Alito to file his dissent, that came later, suggests that this court knows that the administration cannot be trusted. The presumption of regularity in the executive no longer exists. So just unpack that a bit more, because when those when those stories break, Melissa, I
People say, oh, my gosh, seven to and the Trump appointees and that's sort of the headline. And my view is both a legal reporter and lawyer is that is the first headline because you say, whoa, seven to two and the Trump folks. But then underneath that is you're hard pressed to find other modern examples in the last decades where to distill what you observe, the court looks over and says, no.
Not only the president's leadership, but enough people now in the executive branch who might not have been there in 2017. When you think about the range of purging can't be trusted, in other words, are either bad faith actors. So they're going to find a way around complying or are full blown liars, which in court we call perjury. What did that mean when you saw that? And how does that affect what you expect the Supreme Court to do in the next few in the next few months? And then, Mary?
I'm done predicting what the Supreme Court is going to do, full stop. But I do think that did raise eyebrows. The fact that they issued that at 1 in the morning, they have a pretty, I wouldn't say leisurely, but they keep business hours, right? To do something at 1 in the morning was highly unusual. No one was going to do it.
Not waiting for a noted dissent from one of their colleagues, also highly unusual. It was because they knew time was of the essence. If they did not issue that order immediately, who knows what the administration would do? In fact, just to be clear, just how dramatic that was on the Friday night, one of the government lawyers had said to Judge Boasberg, a district judge,
We will not do anything today, but I need to tell you we're reserving the right to do something tomorrow, which means 1201. So in terms of thinking about the sort of tick tock of what was happening, the Supreme Court knew that if they did not act immediately, those planes could have been taking off and that all these people could end up in El Salvador where the government saying we wash our hands of it.
Two more points on this. We've emphasized 7-2, but there was one part of this where everyone was unanimous, even in Justice Alito's dissent, joined by Justice Thomas. At the very end, after he objects to doing an emergency middle-of-the-night ruling without hearing from the government, without the lower courts having...
gotten a chance to have it percolate and rule on it, he makes clear the executive must obey our order of April 7th, which was the order that says you have to provide due process notice and an opportunity to seek relief in the court. So remember, all nine agreed to that multiple times. And I just want to keep flagging that over and over. Now, at some point, the decision will be how much process is due. And that's where some of the justices might fracture. The other point is,
This is still on hold because the Supreme Court said the seven there said no further deportations of the putative class from the northern districts of Texas until further order of this court. And that's been now time is I don't want to track of time anymore. But it's been more than a week. We're going to deal with that later in the hour. What is time? Right.
I'm going to put it in our first break. We set aside a really long opening here. And I know you wanted to make another point on immigration, which I want to come back to. So our esteemed panel stays. That's the good news. Why we've gone deep. We're going to look at the resistance by the end of the hour. The protests gathering as Donald Trump is caught abusing.
Abusing power to try to punish law firms, how that has also recently run into more judicial resistance. Also, as promised, the lead attorney fighting for due process, winning some of the very cases we just discussed. Our special guest next.
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Welcome back to our special law and disorder. I am Ari Melber and we are looking at how Donald Trump's legal agenda, including his effort to use deportation powers to expand executive power overall, has often been slowed and sometimes fully thwarted in court. It suffered what some call the worst legal defeat yet, as The New York Times put it, ruling that they had a sweeping, most sweeping ruling issued so far in this Texas borderland case. The judge found Trump was wrong,
to even assert that the activities of a Venezuelan gang were a, quote, invasion, which is a legal term in this matter, that would justify wartime powers, which is pretty straightforward. Even if you don't know all the law, we have not declared war on those countries and they have not invaded through any military means. This is on the heels of the Supreme Court also preventing more of those deportations, something we discussed earlier in the program. The larger pattern is the president seeing how much he can get away with
whether it's immigration or tariffs or anything that is what they sometimes call a unitary power, meaning it wouldn't automatically involve Congress, but it doesn't mean it's unlimited powers. We are now joined by the special guest I mentioned. Lee Gallert is the ACLU's deputy director of the Immigration Rights Project. He's argued dozens of these key cases, most recently for deported immigrants who were fighting whether the president could even use those war powers. Let's take a listen to him.
There's common ground now that there has to be process. We're talking about people being sent to El Salvador, the worst, one of the worst prisons in the world, in Communicado. They're essentially being disappeared. Lee joins us. Melissa is still with us. And the rest of our panel of legal eagles will be returning later in the hour. Let's start with a positive from your view in the ACLU's view. You've been winning.
Right. So big picture. Right. Why have you been winning some of these early? I mentioned they're not the final merits resolution. Right. But let's just start with why are you winning some of these cases so far? You know, I think the Trump administration is pushing it to such an extent that the courts are saying, well, wait, wait. Basic principles here have to come into play. You know,
The Trump administration is doing a lot about trying to paint immigrants as horrendous people and demonizing immigrants. But they're pushing up against things like, as you've talked about so often, Melissa,
basic due process principles. And the courts are pushing back from either, you know, I sort of a believer that the federal judiciary are very serious people and you can get into the whole sort of partisan thing. But if you push too far against these basic principles that they believe in, they will push back. And I think they've
said look we do say what the law is that's our role in this system and we're going to say what the law is and if you're going to claim no due process whatsoever
Then you're gonna get pushback from us and I think that's what's going on, you know sort of forget each little move But those big principles are coming into play and I think you see people on both sides of the aisle saying wait Wait, that could be anybody who sent you if you don't give any ability to contest and I think that's sort of at the big picture level What's going on?
Which is interesting because you're dealing with the first impact emergencies, the actual human beings affected by this. Some of them you've saved. Some of them are stuck in a foreign prison. Exactly. But you're dealing with that. And then there's a wider audience, as we've covered how Joe Rogan and other podcasters who literally endorsed Donald Trump in November are now saying...
Yeah, but we didn't endorse this. Go ahead. No, no, no. You're absolutely right. Because I think when people say we want harsher deportation or we want more deportation, it's sort of an abstraction. It's kind of vague. And so as you both have talked about,
When people see what happens in practice, then they say, well, wait, exactly how you put it. Wait, we didn't endorse this. And so that happened the first term with family separations. Another case I did where people said, yeah, we wanted more deportations. We wanted, you know, more enforcement of immigration. But wait, we didn't want little babies being taken away. And now this where all of a sudden there's no due process. And it's
And then they say, wait, that's not exactly what we thought you were talking about. And these federal judges are not rookies. They've long left a lot of room for political rhetoric. They understand that politicians will say stuff on the campaign trail. They have doctrines that allow that. And yet you've been able to show in court that this goes well beyond that. We're dealing with what we discussed earlier in the hour, which is that some of these people have been caught lying.
being bad faith, trying to get around orders, whether it's a technical violation, you can have that litigated, but they're clearly doing that. So let's play a little more of you in court where you were saying to the judges, basically, and I want you to explain this on the other side, that these folks aren't on the level. They're trying to move in secret. Let's take a listen.
The whole thing has played out in secret. The president is supposed to make a public proclamation. He signed it on March 14th. It wasn't published till the afternoon of March 15th. People were already being lined up to be brought to Plains. This is an unprecedented move to use the Alien Enemies Act for only the fourth time in our country's history without a declared war. Yeah, I mean, I think that's the difference between, and you know, you guys have both hit on it,
between Trump 1 and Trump 2, there's really an attempt to sideline the courts. And there's always been this attempt to sideline Congress, but now to sideline the courts as well. I mean, they're doing a few things. One is they're moving people around all the time to try to keep us from getting into the right court. So we go to one court and get injunction, then they move people to another. I mean, even with this Alien Enemies Act, that piece you just played, he signs it on March 14th
Doesn't tell anybody, but we find out they're starting to get people ready. Then they finally publish it on the 15th, but the statute says very clearly you're supposed to publish the Alien Enemies Act proclamation. If you want to use it, make it public. But they're already trying to move it before it becomes public. We find out that people are being moved. We go into court, and then they say, well, you're too early. It hasn't even been published yet.
But the people would have been gone. And as you said, they were already some people gone. So I think these sort of procedural shenanigans are really important to highlight. And I'm thinking about the hearing before Judge Boasberg, where Judge Boasberg had initially told the government's lawyers, you must turn these planes around and return them. And later, when they weren't returned, Judge Boasberg was like, you didn't listen to me. And they're like, well, it was a minute or...
order, an oral order, not a written. I didn't know I was supposed to do that. And I mean, it just, these are federal judges. Like they aren't used to people playing in their faces. Like, like they're used to obedience and this is not what happens. And even for someone like judge Boasberg, who I don't think anyone would call a liberal squish. Right. Right. Right. This guy is on the level and he's like, what are you talking about? Like, you know what I meant.
Yeah, for sure. I mean, I think he has said to them, I've never seen anything like this in all my time on the bench. And I haven't either. And I think that's one of the interesting Trump one and Trump two. They are really being strident in court. They are not giving an inch, even when you know that any other lawyer would say, well, that's reasonable. They're relieved of their duties. I mean, we have that lawyer who admitted in court.
that the expulsion of Abrego Garcia was an administrative error, that person was removed from the Department of Justice. Right, and I've litigated him, against him, through many, many administrations, Democratic and Republican, and I know he's a zealous advocate.
but he's straightforward with the court. And that's what you're supposed to be as a Justice Department lawyer. And a Justice Department lawyer is not supposed to win any way they can, even if it's manipulation of the courts. They're supposed to do justice. They're supposed to be zealous advocates. Right. They're an officer of the court and of the United States. Exactly. Of the United States. Right. Finally, as we...
as we conclude this interview with you, do you see an avenue where anyone's going to be held in contempt, where officers of the United States are actually going to be sanctioned or jailed if we see this bad faith resistance from the government? That's a very good question. You know, I'm not really sure. I mean, we're litigating this. Judge Boasberg has said,
There's probable cause for contempt. They've gone to the circuit. I suspect they will litigate that very hard. I'm not really sure where all this plays out, whether it could be civil criminal contempt. But I mean, we are trying to keep our eye on. He has said, look, you can get out from under this contempt potentially if you bring these men back who were unlawfully sent to El Salvador. They're refusing to do that. That's what we're keeping our eye on.
Right. And then we have the president recently admitting in an interview, yeah, I could follow the order, but I'm not going to, which, again, we're going to see if the Supreme Court takes that seriously. Lee, you've been on this mission and on a roll, so we appreciate you joining us here on the special. Our entire legal panel is with me next. We're going to finish a break, but we look at the university's target in Trump's free speech crackdown and the first hundred days. We have something very special to show you that might help it all make a little more sense.
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Hi, I'm Ari Melber. Welcome back to our Law and Disorder special. President Trump has now marked 100 days. You've probably heard about that. And I want to show you something we've put together to try to make sense of the legal parts with the day count and kind of take some perspective. And then our legal eagles are here with us again on the other side.
A federal judge has just temporarily blocked President Trump's order attempting to end birthright citizenship. The president himself cannot amend the Constitution. A federal judge said that Elon Musk's folks who are inside of the Treasury Department's payment systems have to stop. A wave of mass firings. I have no idea how I'm going to recover from this. Outrage at the dismantling of the federal government. President Trump is losing in a major way
at the Supreme Court. The president invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798. Those planned deportations that had supposed to have been halted went forward. The Trump administration has already admitted that they deported him recklessly. We have breaking news right now from the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court unanimously ordered Garcia to come back. It's all about the erosion of the rule of law.
Now, 90 days may not seem like a long time, but remember, Trump has only been president for 82 days, and it already feels like a goddamn decade. The constitutional crisis is here. President Bukele does not want to give him back to the United States, nor do we want him back. We will not allow the United States of America to become an oligarchy.
This head-to-head really between President Trump and Fed Chair Jay Powell. The Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from deporting a second group of migrants. The markets now continue to drop. Duterte crushed our institutions within six months of taking office. You can't have a trial.
for all of these people. The United States, this administration is moving faster. In the long run, will it hurt the country? Fifty one percent. The public is deeply, deeply, deeply against what Trump is doing. And we are back with our experts, Melissa, Mary and Andrew, all who have expansive federal legal experience. Mary, you look at
That altogether, and you realize on many days of the first hundred, the lead thing in a substantive way. And I don't mean the media. I mean, the most important thing sometimes happening in the federal government was a clash between branches over fights. The administration picked that any working lawyer, federalist society or otherwise would have told them in advance, you probably don't have this power.
That's one of the remarkable things here, because so many things he's done, he would have needed in an ordinary world to go to the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice and get a legal opinion on that. Well, he did these things so fast and furious. Number one, I don't think there was even time for that if he wanted to. And secondly, it appears that he's just sort of
not paying attention to that office. I mean, there are political appointees in that office. And so it always does change policy wise, administration to administration. But there is no one giving him the advice he needs to stop completely walking into losses in court or he's ignoring the vice. You know, it could be a combination of both. And it could be he doesn't care.
because he seems to be prepared to lose in court. And that's where we're pushing to what's going to happen. I think that's exactly right. He is prepared to lose in court. And I think the attacks on the judges are to lay the groundwork in the court of public opinion that
The judiciary doesn't actually matter. He keeps harping on this mandate, essentially telling the public, you voted for this, you voted for me. That's the only thing that matters. That's the rule of law, not what these judges have to say. And I want to bring Andrew in, but put some of the numbers on the board. I mentioned that the courts will say we only do law, but other things can matter. We've seen wartime impacts. If you look at the 100-day approval,
Donald Trump doesn't have a strong hand. If you separate the bluster and we look at the actual approval numbers, it is 39% the lowest in 80 years, including his first term. If you look at this Fox poll where you ask people about the issues, he loses on overall immigration, overall performance, guns, everything. Border security as a subset is the only place he can find a majority. And so, Andrew, does it matter that...
in a fight where the president says, hey, everyone supports this. That's not true. And judges can see if they're informed that he is fading after the first hundred days, not rebounding. Look, the salvation here is has to be the populace. And the salvation is clearly not Congress, which is not been doing anything. The courts can only do so much
Remember, a lot of what we're talking about is something that may be illegal, but there's a whole lot that's going on that is legal and just impractical.
in Providence. And so that's where you really need those polls. I mean, that is why that is ultimately the key issue. But what we're seeing in terms of the attack on the judiciary, I mean, nobody should be surprised. This is, you know, a man who is a convicted felon in that sitting now in the Oval Office. We saw him attack prosecutors and the courts in
for the entire time that he was under indictment. So now you're seeing the exact same thing. It's the reason he has attacked the media, anybody who stands up. And part of it, even when he loses, is fear. So the idea of attacking...
The law firms is that they have the fear they will obey in advance. The attacking of universities is to have fear and obeying in advance, even if he loses. The international students, international scholars thinking about thinking twice about coming here. Scientists thinking, you know what?
better to be doing this in Canada, in England, in France. I mean, the repercussions because of the nature of what he is doing, even if the courts ultimately say you can't do this, are enormous. And I want to ask each of you, what's the most important lesson going forward? Because now we've heard tonight about some things that worked and some of what you each describe as kind of the slide, the way that things that used to be guardrails now are being tested. So we're going to hear again from each of our panelists when we come back.
Donald Trump is the most unpopular president since Kevin Spacey. Yep, Trump's approval rating is down to 39%. Even... Even measles is polling at 40%. You know what I'm saying? It's bad. 100 days of Donald Trump. I'm so tired.
Late night capturing the moon. And it is relevant to the legal environment we're in where judges, including the Supreme court are figuring out how to deal with a president who is both demanding more power than anyone in the modern era, but also watching his approval and the economic conditions he's presiding over crumble before us. Melissa, Mary and Andrew are here. Uh, Andrew, as we try to deliver on what we aimed for tonight, uh,
the lessons going forward for the things that worked dealing with this Trump legal onslaught.
Let's learn from history is the way I look at this, which is all of us at this table were too young for the McCarthy era. But I think there are real lessons there for us, which is we are seeing blacklisting. We're seeing the same kind of abuse, the same kind of fear, the same kind of obeying in advance. And I think the lesson, if you think it can't happen again, it is happening now.
The idea that, oh, that's something that's just in our history and we're well beyond that. No, that is what is happening now. Not just blacklisting, but people going along with it, not being the people who stand up. And I think that is the lesson, which is if you want to be on the right side of history, you need to not be afraid. You need to speak. You need to be saying to people who want to use fear as a way to silence you that you still have a First Amendment right.
Well, it's the time for the people, right? I mean, you're showing the polling. We're showing more and more protests because the three branches of government, the executive is trying to steamroll the others. The judiciary is trying to put up roadblocks wherever it can. Congress is asleep. And it's time for the people to demand something more. And I think as we do get closer to 2026, we're going to see more and more and more of that. But in the meantime, it really is incumbent on the three branches to all.
do their part. And I just want to quote from Judge Royce Lamberth, a district court judge in D.C., appointed in 1987 by President Reagan in ruling against the Trump administration just a few days ago, said, if our nation is to thrive for another 250 years, each co-equal branch of government must be willing to courageously exert the authority entrusted to it by our
founders. And he said that after quoting from Federalist No. 51. So he's saying, we're doing our part.
Congress needs to do its part. And I'd say another branch, not really a branch, the people. Yeah. And there are fundamentals there. And I know Andrew got a little concerned when you said you were going to quote because he's he's very strict with music quotes. We've been doing that. I trust Mary. Mary was fine. We've been doing this together for years and he will patrol a quote. But once we got that, it was Federalist Papers and judges. We were back back on track. Melissa, close us out here.
So I agree entirely with Mary. Congress needs to get off the couch and get in the game. But I think the other thing we need to do is stop looking at all of these different episodes as sort of individual isolated episodes. They're all part of a concerted strategy to close down every legal avenue that could be an engine of dissent against this administration. We have DOJ no longer enforcing justice like the whole
dismantling of DEI. Everything the DOJ has done thus far has been in support of this administration. They have attacked the courts to undermine the court's trust with the public for when the courts actually do speak. They are attacking the whole prospect of the nationwide injunction, so it's going to make it a
harder for people to challenge the administration's actions. They'll have to do it in every different jurisdiction. That'll be entirely unwieldy. They are subjugating law firms and they are trying to attack public interest firms, too. All of that is about reducing the amount of legal resources available for this fight. It is not a coincidence. This is a strategy to make the law no longer work for the people.
And it's up to the people, as each of you have said, to be informed and to be citizens in that sense, because we're up against so much. I want to thank our legal scholars here. I think we learned a lot and we have a lot coming up. I'll tell folks watching at home, again, our thanks to Melissa, Mary and Andrew. You can find.
excerpts of these segments on msnbc.com slash Ari. That's msnbc.com slash A-R-I. If you heard from our experts and want to share that, we'll be posting that on our YouTube page. That does it for us. Keep it locked right here on MSNBC.
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