My guest today is Asha Rangappa. Rangappa is a former F.B.I. special agent and a senior lecturer at Yale University’s Jackson School of Global Affairs. She’s also the author of the Substack Freedom Academy. Asha Rangappa, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, Ezra. So I want to begin in the somewhat dark place that we’re in. It looks to me that the administration is pretty directly disobeying Supreme Court orders in at least the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case. What recourse is available to the courts or to the system? Well, I think this is why a lot of analysts are now saying we’re officially in a constitutional crisis. So the normal recourse here would be to hold the administration in contempt. They can fine specific as if it were you and me and we were held in contempt. I mean, the ultimate penalty might be that we could be jailed, but I doubt that that’s something that would ultimately happen to anyone in the administration. But that would be within the power of the court as well. But Trump could just pardon you. Ultimately, the executive branch has the enforcement power. The problem with getting to any point where there would have to be physical enforcement is, of course, that Trump maintains control over all of the enforcement agencies. Including the Marshals Service. And so even if this goes all the way back up to the Supreme Court, and you then have this face off between the judiciary and the executive branch, it’s not clear to me exactly what can be done to enforce an order, ultimately, which kind of leaves the Trump administration with a Trump card, no pun intended. Well, the Trump administration’s I don’t know if the right word for it is interpretation of the order. Certainly, their spin of the order if you’re listening to Stephen Miller, is that this was a huge victory for us because what the Supreme Court said is nobody can make us that. We maybe have to facilitate but don’t have to effectuate. There’s a lot of hair splitting in that language going on, but their view is that the Supreme Court has created or has validated a fairly large zone of authority, which is foreign policy for the executive, for Donald Trump, and that if you read that order correctly, what the Supreme Court really said is that what they will do about it is nothing. Well, first, Stephen Miller’s interpretation of what the Supreme Court said is not entirely accurate. The Supreme Court did mention the deference that’s given to the executive branch and Foreign Affairs, but it did uphold the lower court’s order that the administration facilitate the return. They can’t tell him what to do in terms of the negotiations and the dealings with the foreign power, but they need to do everything in their power to make it easier for this person to return. But I think to Zoom out, this is by design in all of these contexts, whether it’s in these deportations, whether it’s in the visa revocations, whether it’s even in the tariff context, you hear these buzzwords: foreign affairs, terrorism, national security, national emergency, all of these are arenas that are core executive branch authorities that are given great deference by the courts. And so when they frame all of these issues in those terms, they’re already carving out a huge swath of authority that they can essentially exercise without much oversight. And when you layer the court’s absolute immunity ruling from last year on top of that, which again protects these core functions from any kind of liability, there is a large arena in which they can act with impunity if they can move fast enough as they are in this case. So when the president says it is about national security, that means it’s not illegal to twist the old Nixon line. I wouldn’t say that it’s not illegal. It means that he’s going to be given a lot of deference. He’ll be given a lot of deference in terms of factual determinations, for example, factual determinations that were in a national emergency, perhaps his factual determinations that were being invaded or that somebody’s actions are intruding on his foreign policy prerogatives. All of these things are giving great latitude. Attitude and this is discretion that’s been afforded to the executive branch in all of these contexts. So far with delegated authority from Congress. So these are actually Congress’s authorities that it has given to the executive branch, with the understanding that there might be actual quick decision making needed by the executive branch in certain circumstances to exercise this kind of authority. It presumes that somebody is going to be acting in the nation’s interests and in good faith. So before we move to Congress, I want to just make sure I understand what you are saying and that the level of alarm rising in me, as you say it is merited, which is what I hear you saying, is that there is no check from the courts on this. They have told the administration to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia and to allow him the due process, as if the original administrative error, quote unquote, had not been made. The Trump administration has been perfectly clear that they will not do that. You do not seem to me to expect that there is going to be some secondary round here from the Supreme Court that in some way forces them to do a thing that I don’t think they want to do. I don’t know that in this specific case, they can force him to do anything. If he says, look, I talked to President Buckley and he said he can’t return them or he won’t return them and shrugs his shoulders, which he basically did in this press conference. Then there’s not much that the court can do in that situation. What’s interesting to me, Ezra, is that this doesn’t really help him in the big picture in terms of the policy. It’s in his legal interest to bring Abrego Garcia back and say, look, this is not a big deal. We can correct errors. So we can move fast. We can round up all these people and do these summary deportations, because if we make mistakes, we can bring them back. I actually think that would be a stronger legal argument. What’s happening here is that this is about a power play and it’s about defiance. So in some ways, the legal interests are working against what I guess, the ego that the administration has. So they might be able to, for example, prohibit further deportations if it becomes clear that this is an irrevocable, irrevocable move and and errors can’t be corrected. But even if it would be in their legal interest to do that in some other world, in the world we actually live in, where it’s very likely this guy has been brutalized or tortured, or him coming back to the United States where his story could be heard would be politically devastating for the administration that in practice, it’s not in their interest for him to come back and for any of the people sent out on this authority to come back, because every one of those people, if they come back and it becomes clear the administration made not just a terrible mistake, but deported somebody into a hell for no reason at all, that it’s actually a political imperative for them that story cannot be told, that Buckley keeps them in Scott functionally forever. I think that’s true. My only point is, Yes, I think there would be a downside to bringing someone back, but I think if they were operating in a paradigm where they want to be in compliance with the court, they would do that. So during that George W Bush administration, there was famously the removal, the shipping of people who were deemed threats to Black sites, to prisons in other places that were not bound by our laws. How similar is the theory and the powers of what we’re seeing to what was being invoked and used there. It’s similar, I think, that it’s more similar to the Bush administration sending people to Guantanamo. So the black sites were instrumental. It was for extracting information that they believed that these detainees had using methods that would be illegal under our law. I’m not excusing it, but I’m saying that there was, I think they thought there was going to be some output that they were going to get that would be useful intelligence. But in terms of evading actual court authority with the Bush administration did, is that they looked at some World War II precedents that said that enemy combatants who were imprisoned in a location over which the U.S. had no control that those people did not have the right to petition for habeas corpus. And the Bush administration thought, hey, that’s great. We can put people in Guantanamo Bay because that’s under the sovereign control of Cuba, and we can basically have this convenient location where we can house all these people, but it will be out of reach of the courts. And this read led to a pretty robust jurisprudence after 9/11, where the courts didn’t really getting cut out of the equation. And so they began to have these decisions where they said, no, we actually do have the right to look at what you’re doing there. And all of this results, by the way, Ezra, in this irony that Guantanamo detainees who had never who were captured abroad, who never stepped foot on American soil, had the ability to petition for a writ of habeas corpus, due process rights, the ability to contest their enemy combatant status, and were protected by the Geneva Conventions. So what you’re seeing now is that people who have literally been here for a decade aren’t being afforded those same privileges and rights. I mean, that’s horrifying. It’s horrifying. And I think the administration. What I think is horrifying here is that they’ve been very legally savvy. They understand whatever lawyers have studied this, understand the trajectory of what happened with the Bush administration. And they O.K, for this to be a constitutional black hole, it has to be completely in another country and not just to extract information, but they just need to be sent there and we throw away the key. They’ve been very legally savvy. What? I think something that is very important and telling about the individual cases here, which has been true across a lot of what the Trump administration has done in different domains, is that if they wanted to protect this power and expand it maximally, they would choose the people, the cases, the laws, the authorities very, very, very carefully. And what you see with the Abrego Garcia case, although not only him, is they’re not doing that. They are choosing people whether they intend to be doing this or not. It’s very hard to know what is incompetence and what is intentional malice. Yeah but they’re choosing people whom it looks terrible for them to be doing this to. I mean, this is I mean, there’s a reason people know his name. There’s a reason this particular case is broken through and won. And certainly the decision they have made on the other side of that, whether or not they intended to be here or not, is that if they can win on that, then that truly does expand the power. If they don’t have to choose who they are sending to Buckley’s hellhole carefully, if it does not have to be the absolute worst, most bulletproof confirmation of this person is a horror who you do not want in the United States, if it can just be Donald Trump said. So, then what you have is a disappearance power, not just a national security power, the capability to remove almost any kind of person at any kind of time. And when he begins to then on top of the criticism he is getting, have Buckley there in the Oval Office, yucking it up with him, tell him he’s going to need to build more prisons, saying maybe the homegrowns are next. What do you think. American citizens are a special kind of people. Wasn’t that what he said Then it feels to me like we’ve tipped into another world. Whether they’re being legally savvy. This is not the narrowly tailored test cases they’re sticking to. These are I mean, the kinds of cases that the Supreme Court has already telling them, you can’t do this. And functionally, the response is, Yes, we can. I was going to say, I think the only change I would make to what you said is it’s not if we can win on this, then we can do everything else. If we can defy this, then we’re home free. Yeah I mean, when not legally, but just in power. Exactly in power. And this is the difference, I think, between what the Trump administration is doing and what the Bush administration was doing. The Bush administration didn’t want the Supreme Court to end up ruling on something that wasn’t going to go its way. So when they thought that maybe they did not have the best legal case, they would move the detainee out, or they would put them into criminal proceedings to avoid having the question actually answered, because it then they’re still acting in some gray zone. The Trump administration is willing to take, as you mentioned, these bad cases, bad cases make bad law for, especially for the executive branch. But they seem to not care. And I think that is the scary part because it does events a predisposition to disregarding as we’re seeing it happen right now, if you were to give me your big picture, we’re somehow not even 100 days into this, but your big picture for the way the Trump administration wants to use the security and judicial apparatus of the state to accomplish its objectives, whatever those are. What is the framework that you’re using now to make sense of it. I think this is just a consolidation of power. This is arrogating authorities from Congress, which, as I mentioned before, it’s already kind of ceding on its own. And now arrogating powers from the judiciary. I mean, effectively, what the Trump administration is doing is actually acting as a quasi judiciary. They’re rounding up people and effectively being judge, jury, and executioner. And they’re just saying, look, trust us, we’ve decided that this person is guilty, that this person is a terrorist, that this person violated the law. So it’s a consolidation of power. It’s an authoritarian move. And I think the challenge is who’s going to stop us. And if they do it fast enough and they can get people into this constitutional black hole, then they win. So in theory, the power to stop them would be in Congress. If Congress wanted to I think the power to stop this in any systemic way is with Congress. So the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, I mean, this is a delegation of Congress’s War Powers. Hell, what is that act. Why don’t we talk about that act for a minute Yeah the Alien Enemies Act was passed in 1798 during the quasi-war with France. And it allows the president, during a declared war or an invasion by a foreign government to remove Alien Enemies of the nation. That is the enemy that are 14 years or older. And basically remove them. And the idea being in that kind of situation, people hold their allegiance to their country. And so there could be people who are spies and saboteurs. And in order to protect national security, the executive branch needs to have the ability to very quickly remove people. It has only been invoked three times before this year in the War of 1812, in World War I and World War two. In those contexts in World War two, for example, people got individualized, individualized hearings, at least to determine whether they were, in fact nationals of the country that was the enemy. But it’s now being applied in this immigration context. Trump is claiming that illegal immigration constitutes an invasion, and specifically an invasion by jaragua and therefore people, men 14 years or older who are members of that group fall all under the purview of the Alien Enemies Act and can be removed. And when you say it’s an aggregation of power by the administration, which I agree It is. Is this an aggregation of power. Because Donald Trump is truly so convinced that South American gangs are a threat to the US, or is this an aggregation of power in a more broad based and fundamentally dictatorial fashion, where there’s a range of enemies to the state, to the leader, and they are pulling in any set of powers they can to exert control. Well, I think the latter, though I think right now they’re testing it on this one group because it’s something that most people wouldn’t object to. There’s gangs coming in. There are dangerous gangs. I mean, trend Aragua is an actual gang. It’s a dangerous gang. So is MS 13. Let’s apply this war framing here. And I think the idea is, let’s see how much we can get away with, and then we can push the envelope and keep expanding this group into broader and broader categories. And we’ve already heard Trump discussing with President Bukele yesterday that, hey, why not include homegrown criminals in this whole thing. So I think that this is kind of testing the waters to see how they can do it. But this is about summary removal. This is how can we get people out of here in as great a numbers as possible as quickly as possible. I think that’s the goal. And then maybe and then they’ll start including other people into whatever category they deem as the enemy. So we should say that when Trump was amusing that he would like to send homegrown criminals to Salvador. He does say, well, we’ll have to look into the laws on that. What are the laws on that. So I think sending US citizens abroad to rot in a gulag would be blatantly unconstitutional. There is something called the non-detention act, which says that no citizen can be imprisoned or otherwise detained except pursuant to an act of Congress. But if you could just send people away on what even you admit is an administrative error. So this is the thing. I think the thing is, if it’s we just whisk people off, then at that point it’s over. It’s game over. And Yes, listen, if they can cut the judicial branch out of this, which is what the Bush administration tried to do, if you can’t even get your foot in the door to have the executive branch justify the reason that they’ve designated you as a terrorist, as an enemy before they ship you out, then. Absolutely we’re in 1973 Chile. This is from there to Black vans showing up in the middle of the night and rounding you up and you get disappeared. Is that where you think we are. I don’t think we’re there yet. Not the black vans, but 1973 Chile. I mean, isn’t what is between us and there. In your presentation here, I have found nothing to hold on to. And I’m not asking you for something to hold on to because I think it’s really important that look, the thing I say in the intro to this conversation is it seems to me the emergency is here. Yes, the test is here. Yes the question of whether or not they can defy the courts and do this is here. I think it is very inconvenient to face up to that. So if you think it isn’t true, that’s great. I would prefer to think it isn’t true as well. But if you think it is true, then. Then what does that imply. What are you supposed to do if you’re standing on the abyss of 1973 era Chile. Listen, our Constitution has one remedy for this, which is impeachment. I mean, this requires political will. It requires a certain consensus that this is unacceptable, that we are beyond the pale, that this is extraconstitutional, that this person, that this person is abusing their power, that they are violating their oath, they’re violating all kinds of laws. But once I mean, I think to me the constitutional crisis is not it is the defiance of the judicial branch, but it is as much Congress’s failure to act in this situation, whether it’s to step up and claw back some of these delegated authorities to declare to stop the National emergency that he’s using for other things, or to take that final step and say, this is a step too far. I mean, I actually I think we are in impeachment territory right now. These are impeachable offenses. This is a deprivation of rights. In my opinion. What you saw between Trump and Buckley yesterday was a criminal conspiracy to deprive people of their rights. It’s an agreement to commit a crime. It is a crime to deprive people of their rights under the Constitution or the laws of the United States under color of law that’s exactly what he was saying that he was going to do. We know that he can’t be held criminally liable for that because he’s doing these as official acts in the Supreme Court has said that those are beyond the purview of Congress to criminalize what’s left. The problem is impeachment in an era of personalized, polarized political parties is a broken power. It’s a broken power. If we no longer have shared values that transcend our partisan affiliation, which is to say it’s a broken power. Yeah I mean, but that’s the remedy, Ezra. I don’t if Trump defies the court, the court has no independent enforcement mechanism. I don’t want to drive people completely to despair. So let me I know I’m like, let’s wear sweatpants and stare at the ceiling territory now. I mean, you can imagine a world. Yeah where we muddle along in these horrors for a year and change. Democrats have a significant midterm victory. And I keep saying, and it’s half a joke, but it’s not a joke, that what might save American democracy is Donald Trump has the dumbest possible views on the global economy. And in absolutely wrecking 401(k)s and prices and the ability of small businesses to import. He is handing his opponents an incredible midterm opportunity. And then Democrats take the house Senate is unlikely for them, but it’s not completely impossible in a wave. And they’re not going to have the power to impeach him. They would not have the numbers in the Senate to attain conviction, but they would all of a sudden have a lot of power. They could take money from all kinds of areas of the government. They could hold all kinds of members of the government in contempt. There is all of a sudden then not power to end this, but a huge amount of leverage. And that’s, I think, the actual pathway that is open. And I think I’m glad that you mentioned the appropriations authority, because one thing that remains very unclear in this is where the money is coming from to transport these prisoners. What was that money originally appropriated for. What are the terms of this agreement, by the way, under the law, there’s something called the case Zablocki act, which requires the executive branch to the Secretary of State to actually notify Congress of executive agreements that it reaches with foreign nations. So this is something that technically they need to disclose. They’re supposed to actually publish it the Department of State website. But to your point about withholding funds, to go back again to 9/11, Congress actually prohibited the use of funds to transfer detainees from Guantanamo to the United States to be tried in criminal courts. So they were just stuck there. So it seems very clear to me that if Congress wanted to, they could prohibit the use of funds to send people to Salvador. They could also take a lot of things that Trump administration wants to keep away from them. So again, imagining the admittedly unlikely scenario of unified Democratic control of the House and the Senate, Democrats could simply decide, we’re going to carve out more exemptions on the filibuster, and they could take the tariff power away from Donald Trump. They could take the tariff power back for Congress, which is originally where it sits. And all of a sudden, Donald Trump doesn’t have his favorite tool of International Economics. So everything then becomes a negotiation. There are a huge number of powers Trump is using right now that are working off of old pieces of legislation that were not built for today. Now, Congress does not like going back and revisiting old pieces of legislation ill built for today, because they have trouble legislating on anything. You don’t get a lot of political victories for going back and closing old loopholes and authorities. But they could. And in a world that becomes a showdown between the branches. It’s not impeachment or nothing. It is leverage over functionally, everything. I mean, the President of the United States does not have a magic wand that puts tariffs on other countries. It has to be enforced and done through US law. That is power given to him by Congress. The things that Doge has been doing, the efforts they’re making over spending, that is all power that Congress is functionally granting them. They could take it all back. Yes, absolutely. And I think and in a bigger sense, it’s reimagining the kind of person we imagine to be in the Oval Office. So you think about after Watergate, there were all these reforms that were done because all of a sudden, we had to reimagine. What do you do if you have a president who’s going to push all these boundaries. And so we get the ethics in Government Act of 1978. We get the independent counsel statute. We get restrictions on how tax information can be used by the president, because all of a sudden we had all these examples. I think, frankly, we’ve known this for a while. These things should have been done. That pendulum should have swung already. But that’s, I think, the kind of reckoning that is going to have to happen in terms of can’t grant this much authority to the executive branch. And it’s tough because you also don’t want to tie the president’s hands. The reason that all of these authorities are delegated, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act that Trump is using to impose the tariffs, is really there as a surgical leverage tool if the president needs it. We want the president to have something like that. If we need to if he needs to negotiate something with a specific foreign power with that. We’re facing a specific emergency, but I think we’re no longer in that world, as you said. We’re in a different world now, and I think Congress has to reckon with that. I remember a political scientist I really respect said to me during Trump’s first term, there is no design of a political system that works well for electing terrible people. That to design a political system under the theory that you elect terrible people is to make the system unmanageable because you are by nature tying their hands because they’re terrible. But then if you elect a political system, if you elect leaders who have tyrannical impulses into a system that assumes a fundamental level of good faith on the part of the executive, then you’ve given an ill motivated person a terrible amount of power. And I would add to that, Ezra, that the landscape has changed. If you’re also looking at two big assumptions that maybe existed back in Nixon and before, which the president is not above the law, and B that Congress would be willing to use its ultimate weapon if it has to which is impeachment. If both of those are off the table, then we’re in a whole new landscape and we have to accommodate that reality. We’ve been talking here about things that we know the administration is doing. One of the reasons I wanted to talk to you is something that has worried me from the beginning. Here is things that we don’t know the administration is doing. When we go back to the early days of nominations, the nominations of Kash Patel and then Dan Bongino to the FBI, a place you used to work were astonishing to me that even Senate Republicans agreed to. This was frightening. And when I see the way this administration is working out in daylight, the FBI is a powerful organization that by its nature, works in shadow. It is being run by people who would never run it, aside from their loyalty to Donald Trump. What is your sense of both. What might be happening here and what is possible here. I’m glad that you mentioned that the FBI operates in the shadows. I mean, it does have this national security piece, which is literally in the shadows. But also the nature of investigation is that a lot of it happens before it ever gets to a court. And I think what most people don’t realize is the FBI does not operate under a legislative charter. It doesn’t have laws. I mean, apart from the Constitution that govern how that investigative power can be used, it is governed by something called attorney general guidelines which are issued by the attorney general, and these create the standards that you need to meet before you can initiate an investigation. What kinds of investigative techniques you can use for different kinds of investigations. What kind of approvals you need. Et cetera. Et cetera. Those can be changed, rescinded, not adhered to all internally. And we would not know. One thing that we can do is look at what is actually happening or not happening. So for example, after signal gate, that is the kind of thing that the FBI would normally have started, have done an investigation or the Department of Justice would have, the attorney general would have appointed a special counsel, at least to look into it. We saw Merrick Garland do this with Joe Biden’s possession of classified information or mishandling of it. That didn’t happen. We have recently seen an executive order targeting Chris Krebs, who was the head of CISA, and demanding that he say what she says. CSA is the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. It’s under DHS. It was created in 2018, and it oversees election security. And Chris Krebs, who was the first director, was one of the people who was very vocal in the 2020 election that the election was secure, reassuring people that our elections were proceeding properly, which obviously undercut the claims that they were rigged. But Trump has ordered DOJ to do an investigation. Again, this kind of tells me, unless there’s evidence, that I just don’t that the attorney general guidelines are in the dustbin mean, this is they can’t possibly be following those to create an unsubstantiated investigation. An analyst who was working on the Russia investigation has been placed on leave. That was somebody who was mentioned in Kash Patel’s book on his enemies list. So it is telling me that this is not an agency that is working the way that it did when I was there, just based on some of these outward things. And that can be very dangerous because there is a lot the FBI can do. Let’s go into what it can do here. Here’s my picture of the FBI. And you can tell me how much of this feels right to you. There is a highly professionalized bureaucracy there. That bureaucracy is a bureaucracy the Trump administration understands to be hostile has treated as hostile. But of course, not everybody in it is hostile. There are going to be people who are there who. Kash Patel believes are loyal, believes are on board, believes. Want to advance through Kash Patel’s FBI. They’re going to be people they hire into the FBI. And so while the entirety of the FBI would not be safe to turn into your private go after my enemies agency, they’re certainly going to be dozens, hundreds of people who you could have on special teams. Who you were using in ways like this in the past under Hoover. The FBI has done a lot of digging up information on people and then using it to compromise them, to blackmail them, very famously with people like Martin Luther King jr. And so if you imagine something that does not seem to me to be far fetched historically or in the present, which is you’ve named Patel and Bongino, who are intense loyalists to Donald Trump, to this position. They understand their work is serving Donald Trump’s will, and they understand their tool as being the FBI and loyal agents within the FBI or loyal people they can bring to the FBI. What could a group like that do. They can do a lot. There is a long runway from when an investigation is started to when it might get a judicial check of some kind. So just as an example. They can surveil you physically. I mean, just as an intimidation tactic. We’ll talk about Black vans. They can park in front of your house and just watch you all the time. They can go interview people that you’re working with and not make it clear what they’re investigating. And that creates a lot of suspicion around you. They can go through your trash. They can find out all the numbers that you’re calling. They can get your financial transactional data and find out how and where you’re spending your money. All of those things they can do without getting without having to show probable cause to a court. And that in and of itself, I think the danger is not so much you’ll be charged with a crime. And that is specious, is that you actually will never be charged. It will be a Hoover type of operation where it’s either done surreptitiously, as you said, to gather information and then to weaponize that, or as simply a way to harass you, to intimidate you, to make it expensive for you, that you have to hire a lawyer and you have to figure out what is going on. All of those things can happen. And it’s why the attorney general guidelines are there. If you listen to Kash Patel and Pam Bondi very carefully in their confirmation hearings, they said, we’re going to follow the law. Let’s imagine that once again, President-elect Trump issues a directive or order to or to the FBI director that is outside the boundaries of ethics or law. What will you do Senator, I will never speak on a hypothetical, especially one saying that the president would do something illegal. What I can tell you is my duty, if confirmed as the attorney general, will be to the Constitution and the United States of America. Director Wray, quoting former attorney general bell said you should be willing to resign if necessary over conduct. If you’re pressed to engage in it, that’s unethical, illegal or unconstitutional. If pressed by the president, would you resign. Senator, my answer is simply I would never do anything unconstitutional or unlawful, and I never have in my 16 years of government service. Would you be willing to resign the post of FBI director if pressed and given no choice but to obey the order or resign. Senator, I will always obey the law. Well, the law to them is Article 2. It’s the unitary executive theory. It’s this idea that if the president does it, it’s legal in terms of law enforcement, in terms of taking care that the law be faithfully executed. So there aren’t guardrails. I mean, in their interpretation of the law, the president’s will is essentially their command in their interpretation of the law. It was lawful to go to the s.d.n.y. And tell the career prosecutors there to lay off of Eric Adams, because he had come to some kind of deal. I mean, accounts differ, but it’s pretty clear, I would say, my opinion, what happened, that he had come to a deal with the Trump administration to basically do what it said in return for their protection that happened under Pam Bondi. This attorney general that was, to me, the big signal in all this. Again, that happened relatively in the daylight. They sustained the effort even after all these prosecutors resigned publicly, creating quite a lot of bad press and publicity for them. And they did it because, I mean, I think through line of Donald Trump’s view of the world and how to operate in it is leverage what he wants on countries, what he wants on people, what he wants on business partners is leverage. He’ll get it. And kind of all different domains. Tariffs are leverage. Power in primaries is leverage funding for universities. Funding for universities is leverage. The fact that they can deport you on a green card is leverage the fact that you are being investigated by the s.d.n.y for political corruption is leverage. But then you think of the FBI and its capacity to find leverage on people. And if you hold the view of them that I just described, then the FBI specifically becomes a very frightening organization. It becomes a weapon. It’s important to understand that this idea of using power for leverage actually dovetails very nicely with the unitary executive theory, which doesn’t see any independence between law enforcement and the president. Can you say what the unitary executive theory is. So it’s this idea that the president, in his singular person, embodies all of the executive power. Everyone under him, all the inferior officers under him, are essentially expressions of that power. This is really about being able to hire and fire everyone in the executive branch, but it’s been extended to this idea that the president can control investigations because he is the chief law enforcement officer. And I there’s nothing in Article two of the Constitution that actually says that there has to be any independence. I mean, the attorney general and FBI is not mentioned there either. These are all evolved from norms. So then when you say there’s a connection between unitary executive theory and using the FBI in this way, draw that out. Basically, the unitary executive theory would support President Nixon’s maxim that if the president does it, it’s legal. It’s when we talk through this, what you’re left with is, at least for the next period until the midterms and the swearing in of another Congress. The boundaries on what they can do are what they decide to do. Well, first, is there anything wrong with that statement. No and you’re more of a political analyst than I am. But my sense is there may be one other potential restraint is that even if this administration doesn’t care about the Court of law, they do seem to care about the Court of public opinion. See, I don’t think they do. You don’t think they do. Because I think mass protest, unpopularity, bad polls, I could potentially. And also the framing of things, for example, the idea that Trump can’t bring back a person from an Salvadoran gulag from this country suggests a lot of weakness. And so I think there are ways to frame things in ways that put the administration on the defensive in terms of the popular narrative. Let me think about how my own thinking on this has changed, because I would have said the same thing you’re saying, and I’m not going to tell you that I think there is no level of mass protest, no level of public opinion loss that would move or unnerve them. And the thing about public opinion is he doesn’t have to win reelection, and he’s definitely not running the country in a way where he seems to care if House Republicans win reelection. Donald Trump has systematically traded away that popularity to do things that anybody, anywhere in the world could have told him would be unpopular crash the global stock market, raise prices for everyday Americans. And it has been their relative immunity is too strong but willingness to absorb that unpopularity and that backlash, it has made me rethink how sensitive they are to it. The only thing I have actually seen stop them is the beginnings of unraveling in the Treasury bond market. I don’t think they want to cause a genuine financial crisis. Beyond that, either because they think this stuff will be popular over time. I mean, Buckley is a very popular president in Salvador. Or because they think their tariffs will work over time. They are not vulnerable or sensitive to short term whims of popular opinion. Mass protests. I actually find a quite unnerving prospect right now, because I think a lot about the moment in the first term, when you had the George Floyd protests and Trump said that he wanted to see the National Guard or someone deployed to shoot the protesters, at least in the knees. And that order, if you want to call it an order. That suggestion was ignored. And Trump was surrounded by people in that term who saw part of their job as restraining his worst impulses. There are no breaks around him. There is no one left to say no. Watching his cabinet arrange itself to give him this dear leader. Like encomiums watching Doug Burgum prostrate himself before Donald Trump. Watching Donald Trump’s FCC nominee walk around with a golden Trump pin, a golden pin of Trump’s head. Watching members of Congress put forward bills to make it possible for Trump to have a third term or be on Mount Rushmore. Watching Marco Rubio defend what is happening with Buckley is, aside from being horrific. Very telling. Rubio is completely, at this point clearly compromised or has chosen to be the address to the joint session of Congress where Trump singled out Rubio for this public mocking, this public humiliation, where it was clear that Rubio was on thin ice in a way that other members of the administration weren’t, was a very adroit play, a very adroit signal to everybody that Rubio was either going to get on board fast or he was going to get off boarded fast. So I think they have chosen to ride this as hard as they can, under the assumption it will work out for them. I don’t think they have a lot of points of vulnerability until someone else holds actual power. I trust your assessment. I do think that it is an assumption I would like to be wrong. Yeah and I think what you’re pointing out is it’s always a loyalty test. The ritual humiliation, the wanting people to bend the knee. But I do think for that reason, it’s that much more important to have the acts of resistance. Like what Harvard is doing now is absolutely even changing their website. The law firms that are stepping up. I do think the protests and if it gets to the point of we need to have our Tiananmen Square moment, then maybe that’s what it needs to happen. I mean, we’re kind of sometimes the egregious things are what Wake people up. This I agree with the thing I was saying that I don’t think they are that vulnerable to now is public opinion. When I think they are vulnerable to is power. And there are lots of parts of society that hold power. Donald Trump does not have absolute power. It was essential that Harvard did what it did. And now the other universities behind them are going to start doing that too, because you don’t want to go down in history as the University that didn’t do what Harvard did. This is starting to become true for the law firms. The first set of them fell, and now I think you’re seeing a number behind them. Realize what this moment is and stop and say no. Business leaders, I think, have power. Yes I think there’s a lot of power that the Trump administration understands is held elsewhere. And at the moment, that’s why I was saying that. I think it’s very important that Democrats win power in the midterms, because I think what the Trump administration respects ultimately is power. You can already see, with the tariff exceptions and carve outs, that there are companies he does not want to be on the wrong side of. I do believe protests are important. I just expect we will actually get there. I just think that when we get there, it’s going to be a very dangerous moment for sure. I expect him to invoke the Insurrection Act Yes Do you want to say a bit about what that would permit. The Insurrection Act allows the president to use the military for domestic law enforcement. Essentially, we would see military personnel in the street potentially arresting people or doing other law enforcement type activities, which I think normally the military has tried to not operate in that way domestically. I’m also worried he’ll invoke the Insurrection Act. And I think, again, going back to people, he’s appointed the message of appointing Hegseth Patel. He put loyalists in charge of and firing the Jag officers, firing the Jag officers, firing generals who he thought were disloyal or trying to fire some of them. At least he has tried to take control of the security agencies. And I don’t think that’s for no reason. Yeah, I think that’s right. I just think that, as you mentioned, exercising all of those pockets of power regularly and systematically from now until the midterms. I mean, waiting until the midterms to me. Yes like I don’t I agree with you. I mean, if we’re here 500 days in I don’t know where we’re going to be. Look, that’s the point for me. The last thing I want to come off on in this show is a nihilist. But the point of for me, this whole conversation is to say that if it is not stopped now, it is going to get much worse. Yeah if people don’t take where we are now, it feels so cliche to invoke the poem we are all taught. First they came for the communists and I said nothing because I was not a Communist. And they came for the trade unionists. And I said nothing because I was not a trade Unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I said nothing, for I was not a Jew. Then they came for me, and there was no one left to say anything. It’s not that there would be no one left. It’s that by then people decide it is too dangerous to say anything that you climb up the ladder of power every time you are able to exercise power against a weaker set of enemies in society, and nobody stops you. And that’s why to me, the Abrego Garcia case is not a small thing. No if he can do this to some random Maryland father, three kids, nobody actually believes this guy is any threat to anybody, and then sit-in the Oval Office with Buckley and say, I would like to do this to US citizens, too. And people just shrug the shoulders and move on. I mean, then what he has learned is he can do it, right. Yeah listen, power is freely. I mean, all of these authoritarians. This is what Timothy Snyder says, right. That power is usually given to them. And people obey in advance. And I think that it is important, it seems to me that we’re definitely there in the red zone, but I think we’re still early enough that there’s still a lot that we can do. And just to go back to the Chilean example, just because I was a Latin American studies person, this is a country that 17 years in extricated itself. So you can always come out. It just gets harder and harder as I think, as you mentioned with this poem. And so the time to do it is now, and I think there is a complacency that the courts are going to save us. And the courts have a role. They are, I think, mostly holding their institutional role here, but they’re not going to save us. The other institutions. And I mean not just the co-equal branches, but Yes, Congress, as you mentioned, businesses, the legal profession, universities, all the press. All the institutions have to be robust. And the people at this stage. Look, I talked to Democrats in Congress all the time. And the biggest problem they face is that they actually just don’t have a lot of good options. I’m not sympathetic in every respect to the decisions they have made, but unless they want to use the debt ceiling to crash the economy, there isn’t a huge number of points of leverage. They can hold things up in the Senate. But the fact of the matter is, the Trump administration doesn’t have a huge legislative agenda at the moment, and Democrats are not in the majority in the Senate. And they have very, very little power in the House. I think people want them to have power. They don’t really have. But look, there’s going to be another government shutdown question in less than a year. And depending on where we are, I think it’s going to be much harder for Democrats if this continues in the way it has been to say on that one. Well, we’re just going to keep letting this ride, but that’s where the rest of society is actually really important. And that’s why I really am glad Harvard did what it did. I really was disgusted by these universities with massive endowments, bending the knee that easily by these law firms, by these business leaders who were so outspoken in Trump’s first term and have just decided to buckle under in his second Mark Zuckerberg is out there with Joe Rogan a couple of months ago saying, it’s so time for Facebook to return to its roots around free expression. Is all this not a threat to free expression. This thing where the kinds of people work at Facebook can come back into the country on a green card, be pulled into a room and sent back out because somebody found something that was critical of Donald Trump on their phones. What is the free expression content of that policy. At what point is it imperative on these people who do have not just economic but cultural capital in this country to speak about what’s going on. I mean, that stuff matters. Those signals are sent and then they’re heeded by other people. Everybody is a node for social contagion. Well, I mean, I’m not holding my breath for Mark Zuckerberg to me, to take a stand on anything, but to go back to the Democrats and people wanting them to do things that they don’t have the power to do. Fair enough. But this is also an information war. And to bring this back to Abrego Garcia, there are certain stories that can cut through the noise and that can be the only story. I mean, there are Republicans are actually really good at this that they get a message. They’re very good at distilling it into something very simple. They repeat it and they repeat it and they repeat it. Trump is a master information warrior in my opinion. Learn from that. And this should be the story I think, for because it’s something that people get for exactly the reason that you mentioned. I think people do understand, if the government can stop this guy who’s been here for 10 years, get him out of a car, put him on a plane to Salvador and wash their hands of him. That’s us. They’ve put a face on their own lawlessness. They have put a face on their lawlessness. And that is an opportunity to get people to wake up. And I think there are people who I mean, I think even Jon Stewart said Yeah, you got me. I was not taking this seriously. And now I am. And I think there are people who will at this point. I think that’s a place to end. Our final question. What are three books you would recommend to the audience. Three books I’d recommend. I was in Tulsa, Oklahoma last fall, and I got a book called The Burning by Tim Madigan about the Tulsa Race Massacre, which was very eye opening and astonishing that I did not learn that in history. I recently read Ben Mezrich’s “Breaking Twitter,” which is basically how Musk broke Twitter. But it is an interesting playbook that you are seeing replicated now. So it was a good insight into his mind. And then Jason Stanley’s “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” which is very prescient in terms of what the Trump administration is trying to do to universities right now. Asha Rangappa, Thank you very much. Thank you.