Guest: Elizabeth Saunders, professor of political science at Columbia University.

The U.S. Supreme Court surprised many constitutional lawyers last summer, when it granted presidents “absolute immunity” for their official acts. How has that ruling affected foreign-policy decisions in the first six months of the second Trump administration?

On this episode of “The Diplomacy Podcast,” we discuss the impact of the high court’s decision on the checks and constraints on executive power that have long existed in the U.S. democratic system.

My guest is Elizabeth Saunders, professor of political science at Columbia University. Having studied the gradual weakening of those checks over decades, she concludes that the 2024 ruling “essentially unbounds the presidency from the constraints of the law.”

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