Recent events suggest that the balance of power is breaking down. Trump is achieving executive supremacy. In less fancy terms, Trump looks like he’s becoming a dictator. Rule of law might be slipping away. Shadi Hamid and Damir Marusic agree about all this. But they disagree about which recent event is the true inflection point.

Shadi thinks it’s the Mahmoud Khalil case: it’s a straightforward government action against freedom of speech, intended to have a chilling effect on the population. Damir believes it’s the deportation of Venezuelan migrants to Nayib Bukele’s megaprison in El Salvador: the policy relies on the bogus claim that we are at war with Venezuela, and it’s the clearest example yet of executive defiance of the courts.

How will we know when the constitutional order has truly taken a knock-out hit? Damir believes that, unless the Supreme Court votes 9-0 against Trump’s Venezuelan deportation, the “the cracks [will] start opening” on the balance of powers. “How do you break the Supreme Court? That’s the whole game right now. And you break it through pressure, through politics,” Damir argues. “Institutions are just beliefs,” he adds. “If you undermine these beliefs enough, it’s over.”

Shadi takes the conversation back to January 6 which, in retrospect, seems like it was the best opportunity to take down Trump. “Everyone seemed to make the wrong decision on how to deal with Trump, at precisely the time when it would have mattered most,” Shadi says. Shadi says that he is still surprised that more Republicans did not object to January 6. Damir is upset with how Democrats reached: “They had a theory of what is just and right, but no sense of politics or how to do things. They got the s**t kicked out of them and now the country is suffering for it.” What we are getting with Trump now, Damir says, is “a more lasting tribalism.”

We are making this timely episode free for all subscribers.

Required Reading:

* CrowdSource about the Mahmoud Khalil case (WoC).

* Santiago Ramos, “From the Harper’s Letter to the Khalil Case” (WoC).

* “Deported Brown University doctor acknowledged she attended Hezbollah leader’s funeral on visit to Lebanon, source says” (CNN).

* “Judge warns of consequences if Trump administration violated deportation order” (Reuters).

* En Boca de León - León Krauze, “The scale of El Salvador’s new prison is difficult to comprehend” (Washington Post).

* “Amy Coney Barrett Sparks MAGA Fury Over Trump Supreme Court Decision” (Newsweek).

* “Gavin Newsom and Steve Bannon find surprising agreement on Elon Musk” (CNN).

* Machiavelli on Savonarola (The Municipal Machiavelli).

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This post is part of our collaboration with the University of Pittsburgh’s Center for Governance and Markets.

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