The Briefing with Jen Psaki
Trump's power grab scheme exposed; Supreme Court birthright citizenship case focuses on court powers
Fri, 16 May 2025
The focus on nationwide injunctions in the birthright citizenship case before the Supreme Court shows that what is at stake is less about whether people born in the U.S. are citizens and more about whether a circuit court can put a hold on a new rule for the entire country, or whether Donald Trump can assert his will in different regions of the U.S. if he finds friendly judges willing to indulge him, even if he is blocked in other parts of the country. Jen Psaki reports.
Chapter 1: What examples illustrate the divide between Trump's privileges and the public's challenges?
It's pretty clear there are two very different worlds right now. I mean, one world for Donald Trump and his family and his billionaire buddies and his cabinet secretaries, too. And the other for just about everybody else. I mean, just take a look at some of these headlines. Here's one. It reads, Trump wants a new plane. Now, so does Homeland Security Secretary Noem. I mean, who doesn't?
That's right. It's not just Trump and his $400 million jet from Qatar. Not just that one. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem already has access to a Gulfstream jet paid for by the government, by the way. She wants a new one. Why wouldn't she? A plane that a top Democratic lawmaker says would actually cost the U.S. taxpayers roughly $50 million.
So that's how Trump and Kristi Noem think they deserve to travel and navigate the skies. Now, here's the headline from today that applies to, I guess, the rest of us. Denver air traffic control went dark for 90 seconds. And here's another one. Newark airport passengers warned of possible measles exposure by New Jersey health officials. So Trump and Kristi Noem are basically demanding new planes.
And I guess, I mean, the rest of us are just hoping we land safely and also avoid infectious diseases in the process. That's, I guess, what's happening right now. And then there were Trump's tariffs. ProPublica just broke the news that on the day Trump announced his sweeping tariffs, Attorney General Pam Bondi sold between $1 and $5 million of Trump media stocks. $1 and $5 million.
That's a lot of money, wherever it falls in there. You probably don't need me to remind you of how the stock market plummeted right after Trump announced those tariffs.
So the stock Bondi sold fell 13% in the days after she sold it, which considering she sold somewhere again in the ballpark of $1 to $5 million, which is quite a range, but it's a lot of money regardless of what it is, it means Attorney General Bondi avoided quite the haircut by doing that. So that was the headline for Pam Bondi, the Attorney General.
Here was the headline today for basically everybody else about tariffs. Walmart warns it will raise prices within weeks because of tariffs. That's right. The largest retailer in the United States, the biggest grocery store in the country, is warning customers that prices are going up because of Trump's tariffs.
I mean, when was the last time you remember a company warning customers about a price hike? That tells you how bad this could be. But unfortunately, that's the world basically everybody else has to live in. And hey, maybe Pam Bonney shops at Walmart too. I can't really say. But the point is, this is all a pattern. They get luxury jets. We get delays, fear, maybe the measles.
They avoid the pain of tariffs while everyone else pays more for groceries. And there's a similar dynamic playing out right now in our legal system. The Trump administration wants one set of rules for themselves, which is pretty much an evergreen statement about them, and an entirely different set of rules for basically everybody else.
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Chapter 2: What is the controversy surrounding Trump's tariffs and their impact on Americans?
Fast forward to last month, and Eastman filed a brief in support of the government's case, arguing this court should not only stay the universal injunctions issued by the lower courts, it should resolve the merits question and decide that there is no guarantee to birthright citizenship. Somehow in Trump world, the same cast of characters keeps popping up over and over again.
And if you've got a fringe legal theory, you'll always have an audience in this White House, it seems. Joining me now is someone who knows a whole lot about that cast of characters, Congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland. He's the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee. It's great to see you, Congressman. I'm just going to start.
The John Eastman of this all, I mean, he is almost the perfect symbol of this notion in Trump's mind that he can basically do whatever he wants. You've kind of followed the guy for a long time. What do you make of his involvement here?
Yeah, I mean, he's the Roger Stone kind of aide-de-camp. He's willing to say and do anything for Donald Trump. His theory of the 14th Amendment is utterly fraudulent. It's been debunked not just by the Supreme Court throughout history, but by four district courts, two judges appointed by Democrats, Biden and Obama, two judges appointed by Republicans, Bush and Reagan.
And the Reagan judge said, in his four decades on the bench, he never had an easier case than this, because Donald Trump was attempting to, by executive order, repudiate the first sentence of the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, which says, all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof are citizens of the United States.
It's just an open and shut case, which isn't to say that lawyers cannot, you know, convoke and conjure up, you know, all kinds of figments of their imagination. And undoubtedly, you know, Thomas and Alito will fall for that. But I hope The vast majority of the court will stand by precedent going back to 1868 when the amendment was passed.
And the first challenge to that was 30 years later in 1898 in the Wong Kim Sum case. And the Supreme Court again emphatically said everybody born here is a citizen of the United States. They were rejecting the Dred Scott definition of racial citizenship. in the country, which was that it's hereditary by virtue of race, as opposed to hereditary by virtue of being born in the country.
But that was the new vision adopted by the radical Republicans. Everybody fought on the union side in the Civil War and by the Supreme Court ever since.
I was talking with the attorney general of New Jersey—and New Jersey is, of course, part of this case—about the fact that the Supreme Court wasn't even asked to rule on the merits of that. What do you make of that?
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