Immigration has been the cornerstone of Donald Trump’s political career, and in his second successful Presidential campaign he promised to execute the largest deportation in history. Stephen Miller, Trump’s key advisor on hard-line immigration policy, said that the incoming Administration would “unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” possibly involving the use of the military. “I do think they’re going to strain the outer limits of the law on that,” the staff writer Jonathan Blitzer tells David Remnick. “We’re entering unprecedented territory.” Blitzer unpacks some of the anti-immigrant rhetoric, and explains measures that the new Administration is likely to take. “I.C.E. has a policy that discourages arrests at schools, hospitals, places of worship, courts,” he says. That policy can change and, he believes, will. “You’re going to see arrest operations in very scary and upsetting places.” The aim, he thinks, will be “to create a sense of terror. That is going to be the modus operandi of the Administration.” Blitzer is the author of “Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here,” a definitive account of the immigration crisis.  

The Washington Roundtable discusses Donald Trump’s transition back into the White House, the world he will inherit in 2025, and his provocative nomination of Pete Hegseth to be Secretary of Defense. In their final Roundtable episode of 2024, Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos also reflect on the twists and turns of the past year in politics, including what to make of President Joe Biden’s legacy.

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A year ago, Donald Trump was facing four separate criminal indictments, and had become the first President to be charged with and convicted of a felony. Now that Trump is President-elect, and with the Supreme Court having granted sitting Presidents broad immunity, the Justice Department’s efforts to hold Trump accountable appear to be over. Even so, Trump’s legal saga has radically changed American law and politics, the New Yorker staff writer Jeannie Suk Gersen argues. “These prosecutions forced the Supreme Court to at least answer the question [of Presidential immunity],” Gersen says. “It will affect the kind of people who run for President, and it will affect how they think of their jobs.”

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Since the founding of the nation, just 116 people have served as Supreme Court Justices; the 116th is Ketanji Brown Jackson, appointed by President Biden in 2022. Jackson joined a Court with six conservative Justices setting a new era of jurisprudence. She took her seat just days after the Dobbs decision, when Justice Samuel Alito’s majority opinion overturned Roe v. Wade. She wrote a blistering dissent to the Harvard decision, which ended affirmative action in college admissions, in which she accused the majority of a “let-them-eat-cake obliviousness” to the reality of race in America. She also dissented in the landmark Presidential-immunity case. Immunity might “incentivize an office holder to push the envelope, with respect to the exercise of their authority,” she tells David Remnick. “It was certainly a concern, and one that I did not perceive the Constitution to permit.” They also discussed the widely reported ethical questions surrounding the Court, and whether the ethical code it adopted ought to have some method of enforcement. But Jackson stressed that whatever the public perception, the nine Justices maintain old traditions of collegiality (no legal talk at lunch, period), and that she sometimes writes majority opinions as well as vigorous dissents. Jackson’s recent memoir is titled “Lovely One,” about her family, youth, and how she got to the highest position in American law.

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The Washington Roundtable discusses how people in D.C. and across the country are preparing themselves for Donald Trump’s second Presidency, and what tools citizens have to protect their rights and push back on abuses of power. The American Civil Liberties Union has called attention to the strategies of litigation, legislation, and mobilization—strategies that are proven to work. David Cole, a former legal director of the A.C.L.U. and a professor of law and public policy at Georgetown University, joins Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos to discuss the checks and balances that exist as guardrails in government and civil society, and how those may be utilized in the coming four years.

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The New Yorker staff writers Dexter Filkins and Clare Malone join Tyler Foggatt to examine Donald Trump’s appointments of former congressman Matt Gaetz and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., to his Cabinet.Gaetz, who has been nominated for Attorney General, is one of Trump’s most vociferous defenders and the former subject of a sex-trafficking investigation run by the Department of Justice. (Gaetz has denied all allegations.) Trump has chosen Kennedy to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, giving one of the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activists broad powers over public health. How would these men reshape the legal and medical infrastructures of our federal government? And will they even be confirmed?

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American voters have elected a President with broadly, overtly authoritarian aims. It’s hardly the first time that the democratic process has brought an anti-democratic leader to power. The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, who both teach at Harvard, assert that we shouldn’t be shocked by the Presidential result. “It’s not up to voters to defend a democracy,” Levitsky says. “That’s asking far, far too much of voters, to cast their ballot on the basis of some set of abstract principles or procedures.” He adds, “With the exception of a handful of cases, voters never, ever—in any society, in any culture—prioritize democracy over all else. Individual voters worry about much more mundane things, as is their right. It is up to élites and institutions to protect democracy—not voters.” Levitsky and Ziblatt published “How Democracies Die” during Donald Trump’s first Administration, but they argue that what’s ailing our democracy runs much deeper—and that it didn’t start with Trump. “We’re the only advanced, old, rich democracy that has faced the level of democratic backsliding that we’ve experienced. . . . So we need to kind of step back and say, ‘What has gone wrong here?’ If we don’t ask those kinds of hard questions, we’re going to continue to be in this roiling crisis,” Ziblatt says.

 The second Trump Administration might dramatically reshape the foundations of the federal government for decades to come. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party is reckoning with what could be interpreted as a generational rebuke of its platform and presentation. But is this the beginning of a mass political realignment in the United States? And how will politicians communicate their platforms in a world where the “attention economy” has so radically shifted? Author, political commentator, and MSNBC host Chris Hayes joins guest host Andrew Marantz for an election postmortem and to discuss where the Democrats go from here.

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The Washington roundtable is joined by David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, to discuss how Donald Trump, a convicted felon and sexual abuser, won both the Electoral College and the popular vote—a first for a Republican President since 2004. Democrats lost almost every swing state, even as abortion-rights ballot measures found favor in some conservative states. On this crossover episode with The New Yorker Radio Hour, they discuss Kamala Harris’s campaign, Trump’s overtly authoritarian rhetoric, and the American electorate’s rightward trajectory. 

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Four years after refusing to accept defeat and encouraging a violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, Donald J. Trump has once again been elected President of the United States. The former President, who in the past year alone has been convicted of a felony and has survived two assassination attempts, campaigned largely on a platform of mass deportations, trade wars, and retribution for his detractors. On Tuesday, he secured the Presidency thanks to a surge of rural voters, high turnout among young men, and unprecedented gains with Black and Latino populations. What does a second Trump term mean for America? Clare Malone and Jay Caspian Kang, who’ve been covering the election for The New Yorker, join Tyler Foggatt to discuss how we got here, and the uncertain future of the Democratic Party.

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