Your Trump 2.0 Questions, Answered [TEASER]

Hey everyone, this is Leon from Prologue Projects.

On this subscriber-only episode of 5-4, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are taking your questions.

As the second Trump administration continues to wreak havoc, the White House and its allies are testing the limits of their power by ignoring existing laws and pretending the Constitution is just a set of suggestions.

Peter, Rhea, and Michael can't save you, but they can tell you what would happen if the Supreme Court overturned same-sex marriage, and what to do if ICE agents show up at your workplace, and how to protect yourself against the paralyzing effects of panic and despair.

This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and everything else sucks.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have frozen our civil liberties, like Donald Trump freezing the federal budget.

I'm Peter.

I'm here with Michael.

Hey, everybody.

And Rhiannon.

Imagine how everybody, imagine if Michael was the one that just said,

it's that scary, folks.

It is that scary.

Yeah, things are not good.

No.

No, we should get into it.

We should.

First of all, I would like to complain.

I've been woken up at the crack of dawn by my co-host to

record a podcast at 10 a.m.

Yeah, I was about to say, tell them what the crack of dawn is, Peter.

Say it.

It's 8 a.m.

over here.

When you record at 10, you have to get up at 9.

It's insane.

All right.

So we're doing a mailbag episode, and we got a couple of questions about this.

And because it's so pressing, we do want to give a quick overview of the situation.

It's very much in flux.

We're recording several days in advance, so things will have changed.

But Donald Trump has taken several steps to sort of secure his grip over the federal bureaucracy.

And many of those steps are questionable in their constitutionality, by which I mean anyone who's not a psychopath would recognize these steps as unconstitutional

because they extend beyond the president's powers over the federal budget.

So, Michael, I'll let you take the lead here because you're the politics guy.

Yeah.

You're the literate guy, even on the podcast.

Michael will have read the NBC News articles that have come out about this, whereas Rhiannon and I will have not.

Yeah.

So this, I mean, I don't even know where to start.

Yeah.

I do think like

it's worth saying explicitly like in fourth grade, you learn that, you know, Congress has the power of the purse.

And what the president is saying here, what Donald Trump is saying here is, no, they don't.

I do.

I get to decide what we spend money on, which turns Congress almost to like an advisory function.

It is

like, goes to the heart of the separation of powers.

So it's pretty wild.

It's a pretty wild power grab.

It's also one that I think

goes to show how disconnected the MAGA movement is and the conservative legal movement is that they all hate the government, you know, capital T, capital G, the government, and think everybody else hates the government.

And a lot of people do, in part, because they don't know what the government does.

They don't understand the way it intersects with their lives.

And when you freeze federal spending like this, it hits every corner of society.

Like it's meals on wheels, it's legal aid, it's Medicaid.

You know, my wife's a mental health professional and works at a clinic for, you know, low-income people.

All her patients.

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