Derek Thompson

that they unearthed in order to defend what seemed like a clearly unconstitutional use of National Guard force.

AIPA, which is the law that was initially cited to justify the Liberation Day tariffs recently struck down by the Supreme Court, the Supreme Court said, look, the word tariff,

doesn't appear in this law.

This law is clearly not intended for these purposes.

And so this is not legal.

And now we're going to, I think, a 1974 law passed after a Richard Nixon initiative that's being used to justify the next round of tariffs.

Never before used.

Who knew it was there?

Well, the Trump folks did.

It seems like over and over again, the administration is almost like teaching us a lesson

in the degree to which American law justifies authoritarianism if you dig deep enough.

And so it's like this search function I said, Control-F monarchy, like go through the entire US statute and do a Control-F for anything that gives the executive branch emergency power to do whatever it wants in domestic and foreign policy.

And they're using this over and over again.

And it just disturbs me as a moral matter, but also interests me to the degree to which we can predict what the Trump administration is going to do next.

Like it almost makes maybe like a smarter, like maybe legal reporter want to use like an advanced version of ChatGPT or Claude to essentially like have a swarm of agents look through the law and predict what,

Where are the examples of latent authoritarianism hiding in the U.S.

legal code that the Trump might use in the next two and a half years to justify some completely cockamamie scheme that we couldn't currently imagine, that that might be a way to almost run ahead of the administration and predict what they're going to do next?

Right.

I mean, and you set this question up with an example that I didn't even give in my answer, which is that Pete Hegseth, after contract negotiations broke down with the AI company Anthropic, labeled Anthropic a supply chain risk under Section 3252, which is a section that has typically only been applied –

to foreign companies that are essentially saboteurs, like Huawei, the Chinese company that we worried had a backdoor to the Chinese government.