The Washington Roundtable discusses with the Stanford University political scientist Larry Diamond about President Trump’s attempts to claim broad powers, why most Republican lawmakers have fallen into line out of fear, and whether the United States has already tipped over into authoritarian territory. Plus, how the courts, Congress, and ordinary citizens might course-correct American democracy.

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The New Yorker staff writer Kyle Chayka joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss Elon Musk’s seizure of power within the U.S. government, the tech industry’s slide into right-wing politics, and how the ideology of techno-fascism is taking root in Silicon Valley. Can the populists and the technologists coexist in Donald Trump’s Washington? 

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In Donald Trump’s first term in office, the American Civil Liberties Union filed four hundred and thirty-four lawsuits against the Administration. Since Trump’s second Inauguration, the A.C.L.U. has filed cases to block executive orders ending birthright citizenship, defunding gender-affirming health care, and more. If the Administration defies a judge’s order to fully reinstate government funds frozen by executive order, Anthony Romero, the A.C.L.U.’s executive director, says, we will have arrived at a constitutional crisis. “We’re at the Rubicon,” Romero says. “Whether we’ve crossed it remains to be seen.” Romero has held the job since 2001—he started just days before September 11, 2001—and has done the job under four Presidents. He tells David Remnick that it’s nothing new for Presidents to chafe at judicial obstacles to implement their agendas; Romero mentions Bill Clinton’s attempts to strip courts of certain powers as notably aggressive. But, “if Trump decides to flagrantly defy a judicial order, then I think . . .  we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country.”

The essayist and cultural critic Brady Brickner-Wood talks with Tyler Foggatt about the opposition Donald Trump encountered in his first Presidential term, why many liberals are feeling a sense of resignation, and the Democratic Party’s struggle to present a unifying message. Plus, the political commentary embedded in Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime show. 

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Many of the most draconian measures implemented in the first couple weeks of the new Trump Administration have been justified as emergency actions to root out D.E.I.—diversity, equity, and inclusion—including the freeze (currently rescinded) of trillions of dollars in federal grants. The tragic plane crash in Washington, the President baselessly suggested, might also be the result of D.E.I. Typically, D.E.I. describes policies at large companies or institutions to encourage more diverse workplaces. In the Administration’s rhetoric, D.E.I. is discrimination pure and simple, and the root of much of what ails the nation. “D.E.I. is the boogeyman for anything,” Jelani Cobb tells David Remnick. Cobb is a longtime staff writer, and the dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. “If there’s a terrible tragedy . . . if there is something going wrong in any part of your life, if there are fires happening in California, then you can bet that, somehow, another D.E.I. is there.” Although affirmative-action policies in university admissions were found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, D.E.I. describes a broad array of actions without a specific definition. “It’s that malleability,” Cobb reflects, that makes D.E.I. a useful target, “one source that you can use to blame every single failing or shortcoming or difficulty in life on.”

The Washington Roundtable is joined by Atul Gawande, the former head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, to discuss Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s rapid-fire dismantling of the agency. They explore the life-and-death implications of the Trump Administration ending foreign aid, why the agency was targeted, and which federal agencies might be next.  

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Matthew L. Wald joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss the political aftermath of last week’s horrific collision between an American Airlines plane and a Black Hawk military helicopter. They look at the current state of airline safety, the changes afoot at the Federal Aviation Administration, and President Trump’s wild pronouncements that somehow diversity initiatives were to blame for the crash that claimed sixty-seven lives. “The culture warriors, with such a vengeance, are now turning to the F.A.A.—it’s something new and it’s not healthy,” Wald says. 

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In the nineteen-eighties and nineties, Bill Gates was the best known of a new breed: the tech mogul—a coder who had figured out how to run a business, and who then seemed to be running the world. Gates was ranked the richest person in the world for many years. In a new memoir, “Source Code,” he explains how he got there. The book focusses on Gates’s early life, and just through the founding of Microsoft. Since stepping away from the company, Gates has devoted himself to his foundation, which is one of the largest nonprofits working on public health around the globe. That has made him the target of conspiracy theories by anti-vaxxers, including Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., who has asserted that Gates and Anthony Fauci are together responsible for millions of deaths during the COVID-19 pandemic. Gates views the rise of conspiracy thinking as symptomatic of larger trends in American society exacerbated by technology. “The fact that outrage is rewarded because it’s more engaging, that’s kind of a human weakness,” he tells David Remnick. “And the fact that I thought everybody would be doing deep analysis of facts and seeking out the actual studies on vaccine safety—boy, was that naïve. When the pandemic came, people wanted some evil genius to be behind it. Not some bat biology.

 The Washington Roundtable discusses the fallout of the White House releasing, and then rescinding, a memo intended to freeze trillions of dollars in federal grants and loans. The incident, as well as this week’s Senate confirmation hearings for controversial Cabinet nominees such as Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and Kash Patel, offers Democrats an opportunity to seize control of the narrative—if they can get organized, Sheldon Whitehouse, the Democratic senator from Rhode Island, says. “If what Democrats are doing is running around calling them chaotic and incompetent, that’s not going to win the day unless those charges are connected to actual harms happening to regular people.”

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On Tuesday, the Trump Administration sent out a memo attempting to put a blanket pause on most federal funding, sowing confusion about financing for  student loans, SNAP benefits, nonprofits, and more. The next day, after a backlash, the Administration rescinded the memo, while maintaining that a freeze remains in “full force and effect.” The order created chaos across the federal government, threatening a power struggle between the President, Congress, and the courts. The New Yorker contributor and Harvard Law professor Jeannie Suk Gersen joins Tyler Foggatt to discuss how Trump’s directives are testing how far a President can go.  

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