Ruth Marcus resigned from the Washington Post after its C.E.O. killed an editorial she wrote that was critical of the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. She ended up publishing the column in The New Yorker, and soon after she published another piece for the magazine asking “Has Trump’s Legal Strategy Backfired?” “Trump’s legal strategy has been backfiring, I think, demonstrably in the lower courts,” she tells David Remnick, on issues such as undoing birthright citizenship and deporting people without due process. Federal judges have rebuked the Administration’s lawyers, and ordered deportees returned to the United States. But “we have this thing called the Supreme Court, which is, in fact, supreme,” Marcus says. “I thought the Supreme Court was going to send a message to the Trump Administration: ‘Back off, guys.’ . . . That’s not what’s happened.” In recent days, that Court has issued a number of rulings that, while narrow, suggest a more deferential approach toward Presidential power. Marcus and Remnick spoke last week about where the Supreme Court—with its six-Justice conservative majority—may yield to Trump’s extraordinary exertions of power, and where it may attempt to check his authority. “When you have a six-Justice conservative majority,” she notes, there is“a justice to spare.”
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From the online spectacle around Leo XIV's election to our favorite on-screen cardinals. This week on Critics at Large, we're talking all things Pope.
The Catholic Church was made for this moment. I think 2,000 years ago, the Catholic Church basically anticipated TikTok, Instagram, X. You don't have those little Swiss guard outfits and think they're not being photographed. Oil painting is not enough.
I'm Vincent Cunningham. Join me and my co-hosts for an episode on what can only be described as Pope Week. New episodes of Critics at Large drop every Thursday. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Federal courts across the country are weighing that question in a huge number of lawsuits. Will judges ratify Trump's view of his own power as effectively limitless? And if they do not, will Donald Trump bother to listen?
Now, his defenders in the Republican Party will argue that Trump is just pushing at the limits of his power, as many presidents do. But ultimately, he'll obey court orders. So far, the Trump administration doesn't show a lot of evidence of respecting the authority of courts. Ruth Marcus is the author of Supreme Ambition, a book about Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Marcus was a columnist for The Washington Post until last month. She resigned after an executive killed a piece that she wrote that was critical of the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos. In fact... Ruth Marcus ended up publishing that column in our pages, in The New Yorker, and she's continued covering Trump in the courts for us. I spoke with Ruth Marcus last week.
Now, Ruth, we just recently published a piece by you, and it said that Trump's legal strategy had been backfiring. That was just a while ago. Are you still right?
Well, TBD. Trump's legal strategy has been backfiring, I think, demonstrably in the lower courts. On what kind of cases? Everything from challenging DEI orders to challenging the orders against law firms to challenging the administration's attempt to undo birthright citizenship to challenging putting USAID and every other federal agency that distributes grants into the wood chipper.
But I'm talking about orders from Reagan-appointed judges, from Bush-appointed judges, both Bushes, from, yes, Democratic-appointed judges. But we do have to say, acknowledge that we have this thing called the Supreme Court, which is in fact supreme.
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