If you’ve heard of the Roberts Court decision in Trump v. Wilcox, you’ve probably heard about it in narrow or abstract terms. You might have heard about how it allows Trump to proceed with the illegal firing of two specific agency heads, or how it undoes a longstanding legal precedent, or how it’s a hypocritical or inconsistent decision.
But, as I explained in this Substack Live chat with Anat Shenker-Osorio, it’s really about breaking century-old guardrails that have protected us when we go to work, when we buy things, and when we try to vote in elections. It’s ripping the fabric of some of the last constraints on corporations and the wealthy. It should be just as big a story, if not bigger, than Trump’s attacks on Harvard and his other authoritarian power grabs.
We also talked about the real “original sin” of the 2024 election: Biden ran in 2020 to “battle for the soul of the nation”—and then both he and most elected Democrats (J6 committee members notably excluded) failed to actually fight that battle once in office, treating Trump/MAGA as an existential threat one day and normal political actors the next.
Share this post