Defeating Trump’s Chaos Playbook with Our New Age of Insistence

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Cricket Media.

I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

We are recording this episode on Tuesday, January 21st.

That's the day after Trump's second inauguration, where he in a single day signed nearly 200 executive actions and laid out a dark and troubling vision for our future.

Rather than addressing our nation's most pressing challenges by offering real solutions, Trump instead launched into the many unethical, unlawful, or unconstitutional ways his administration plans to roll back protections for the LGBTQ community, to reverse progress on clean energy and climate action, to demonize immigrant communities, to weaken our military, and erode equal access to opportunity.

Starting yesterday and for weeks and months to come, executive orders, administrative rules, and a manipulated media will signal a storm of change.

Not to solve persistent crises like unaffordable housing, minimum wages that can't match basic costs, or a gun safety crisis that threatens our youngest Americans.

Instead, they will focus on manufactured crises and pinning blame on people who did nothing but simply exist.

Our job then in this first stretch of what will undoubtedly be a long four years is to understand how much of his invective and mean-spiritedness is policy and how much of it is polemical.

Because there will be a difference.

Trump operates like a flim flam artist who uses sleight of hand, misdirection, and cacophony to ensnare his audience while picking their pockets.

With that knowledge in hand, we will be required to filter through the noise and through the very real terror or depression that his actions will undoubtedly cause.

More worryingly, though, he's not in this alone.

Tech billionaires have decided to cater to his hypocrisy in order to curry favor, and political leaders who decried his lack of patriotism in years past will now blindly follow his direction.

I'm here to remind us, though, that we're not in this alone either.

Just yesterday, as his flurry of edicts emerged, so too did a series of lawsuits.

More quietly, organizations prepared for take two of the Trump era put their plans into motion.

It won't be enough to stop everything, but we only lose our nation's soul if we decide they've already won the war.

For today's episode, we're going to start with what we know on day one and two,

and most importantly, what we can do about it together.

I couldn't think of anyone better to help you and me process, analyze, and respond to the events of the week than my guest today.

Melissa Murray is a constitutional law professor at NYU and one of the esteemed hosts of Cricket's very own legal podcast, Strict Scrutiny.

Melissa, lovely to see you as always, and thank you so much for joining me.

Well, thank you for having me.

Congratulations on the new show.

Well, thank you.

Thank you.

Okay, well, let's go past the niceties and plunge into chaos.

I'd like to start with where we are.

We know that a core tactic of Trump and his ilk is this intentional sense of chaos.

The constant barrage of news and the personnel changes, the shocking policies and the absurd pronouncements.

He does it because chaos is a very effective tool.

We know it's distracting, it's emotionally exhausting, and it obscures reality.

So, with that as background, my first question to you is: how much of America can he break in the next four years?

Oh, my God, lots of it.

We are a very fragile country.

Democracy is by itself a very fragile enterprise.

We are a democracy that has, as I think we saw in the first Trump administration, administration, relied all too often on norms rather than rules.

I think a big part of what the Biden administration did with uneven success was try to put more rules in place so that we were not reliant on norms that could be discarded.

And the truth of the matter is, we're still pretty norm-based, and we're going to find out how much those norms hold.

And often, whether or not norms are durable really depend on the people observing and enforcing those norms.

And I don't know about you, but I think, you know, what I have seen over the last couple of weeks are a lot of people who are really ready to bend the knee.

And that I think is concerning.

So I don't want to be hyperbolic about this.

You know, people used to say that our podcast direct scrutiny was super hyperbolic about the court and we were all a bunch of screaming, hysterical women.

And then everything we said would happen actually happened.

And so

there you have it.

You know, we're not trying to be Cassandra's here, but it does seem like there are times when we definitely see what's coming and are not believed.

And I think maybe this is one of those times to take us seriously.

So let's assume we're taking you seriously.

You've said he can break a lot.

How much of what he breaks, assuming we can sustain ourselves for four years, would be eligible for repair?

Harder to say.

Again,

I think it's a very real concern that what might get broken might be really difficult to put back together, right?

You know, norms around the peaceful transition of power, I think we saw, can be really fragile.

You know, they're put back in place now, but I think that's likely because he won.

And Democrats were willing to have a peaceful transition of power, unlike the Republicans in 2020.

So it's hard to say what can be irreparably broken, but I think there are a lot of things that we take for granted that might very easily go away.

I mean, we're already hearing discussions about his executive order around TikTok.

You know, say what you want about TikTok, and we can talk about the relative virtues and vices of TikTok.

But the fact of the matter is, a bipartisan Congress passed a ban on TikTok requiring TikTok's divestiture of its Chinese ownership because of national security concerns.

It's passed by Congress with bipartisan support and upheld by the United States Supreme Court.

And now this president is saying that he can just issue an executive order that proposes a 50-50 hybrid ownership model where there is 50% American ownership and 50% Chinese ownership.

That is not what the law.

requires.

The law requires complete divestiture of the foreign ownership.

And that executive order that he's proposing would basically give a giant FU to Congress and then also give a giant FU to the court that upheld it.

That's two coordinate branches of government.

And so we're already on that path because this is what he's proposing.

And I've heard very few people talk about this as basically

a giant middle finger to the whole concept of separation of powers and the idea that we are a government with three coordinate federal branches.

The Atlantic has an amazing article that came out earlier this month about the 53 days it took Hitler and his party to take over and basically dismantle democracy.

One of the goals I have on this show is to absolutely understand the looming specter of what could come, but also to make sure we understand what tools we have to push back, to understand, to respond.

So let's talk about the TikTok ban and the issue of his essential ignoring, his essential decision to ignore the three branches of government.

What would the right response be?

So, let's not say we're going to get it, but let's talk through what should happen in a democracy that does not want to be dismantled in 53 days.

What should we be demanding of those concomitant branches of government in this moment when it comes to the TikTok executive order?

So, I never thought that I would be like, go Tom Cotton, but I am now in a situation where I actually applaud Tom Cotton saying very clearly, we passed this ban, right?

We required TikTok to divest itself of its Chinese ownership.

And again, I'm putting to the side the substantive concerns about a law that focuses solely on TikTok and ignores the ways in which we have normalized the harvesting of data by American-held companies.

There are apparently real

foreign, adversary, national security interests, all inextricably linked to the harvesting of data by TikTok and by dance, that Congress, who had a lot of classified information about this, thought was significant enough to pass this law and to do so with bipartisan support.

And it's also worth noting, Donald Trump's administration was the first administration to actually see the threat here.

Mike Pompeo started talking about this in July of 2020.

In August of 2020, Donald Trump issued a statement about an executive order that he was going to put in place that would address, quote unquote, the threats posed by TikTok in the United States.

It was enacted, the executive order immediately challenged in a federal court and a preliminarily enjoined, a preliminary injunction was imposed.

And then there's sort of a shift in the administration.

The Biden administration picks up the cause and starts running that ball.

They're unsuccessful with an executive order.

This leads Congress to step in.

So we've had deliberation from different branches here.

And now, of course, the Supreme Court has weighed in.

I think think we have to respect that.

It seems very likely, according to Donald Trump, that there might be an American buyer for TikTok, which would, again, fulfill the requirements of the law.

But it seems that he doesn't want to sort of take the ordinary protocols in doing this.

He wants to be the sort of consummate deal maker and get this deal going.

And it seems like a big part of this deal is sort of

the company's currying favor with the administration in order to be the one to get the final rose and be able to buy TikTok for American interests.

I don't know what more to say about it than that, but it should concern you that we are essentially ushering in

a leader who thinks it's okay to ignore what the other branches of government are doing and instead to sort of have a kind of bidding war between a set of brolegarts over this company, like basically the spoils of war.

Like, this is stuff like that you heard about when you read the Iliad in high school, like Agamemnon sitting down with Odysseus and Menelaus and all of these other Greek kings and divvying up the spoils of Troy.

Like, that's basically what's happening.

And we're letting it happen.

This is monarchial behavior.

This isn't democratic behavior.

One of the things I was going to talk to you about, and you referenced this with the brolegarchs, is that the tableau we saw yesterday with this reimagined inauguration,

it was more than just the fact that it was moved inside.

It was the fact that, unlike previous ceremonies where you had family and political allies who got the prominent seats,

yesterday was basically a bending of the knee at the Game of Thrones, where you had this coterie of tech CEOs.

You had Amazon's Jeff Bezos, you had Meta's Mark Zuckerberg, you had Google's Sundar Pichai, you had TikTok's Sho Chu, and you had Trump's new bestie, Elon Musk.

Their role in that space was exactly what you described.

It was, we are not only bending the knee, but we are here to show our tickets to the lottery to get to be in the bidding war for even more power and even more money.

You talked about it a little bit, but talk a little bit more about how you understand this shift in tone.

I mean, Mark Zuckerberg eight years ago was involved very heavily in actually protecting democracy through his foundation.

Talk about

what this means for policies and practices in this current world order.

I refuse to say new, but in this current world order.

I think it shows how malleable these interests are, especially when it comes to their bottom lines.

Like Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, have the Zuckerberg Chan Health Initiative.

Right?

They have named a public health program at Harvard after themselves.

And they showed up and sat in a very prominent space at the inauguration of someone who subsequently, like hours later, divested the United States of its membership in the World Health Organization.

Make that make sense.

I mean, I think we have to like continually call out all of this behavior for what it is.

This isn't about national interest.

It's about shareholder interests.

And maybe that's okay if you own Facebook stock or Meta stock and you care about that.

But for the rest of us who don't, this is really concerning.

And we have to talk about this.

I think Democrats should be shouting this.

This is your populist king.

This is the guy that you went to the polls talking about your eggs and your milk.

Like, this guy is hanging out with actual billionaires.

Instead of giving the seats in his inauguration to ordinary Americans who supported him and believe that he is going to make a better life for them and their families, he stacked the deck with a bunch of people who literally have the collective GDP of this country in their pockets.

I mean, make that make sense.

And we should be talking about that.

What is this populism?

Like, this isn't populism.

This is oligarchy.

And we should be really clear about that.

These people have been sold a bill of goods and they're going to get shafted.

And what's going to happen when they get shafted?

Who's going to pick up the the pieces?

If we even have shards that we can put back together, those are the real questions.

We are divesting ourselves of all of the guardrails, whether it's on the health front with the World Health Organization or abandoning the Paris Accords and thinking about climate change as

California literally burns.

Like, what's left?

We're just going to have a country that's safe for oligarchs and not for the rest of us.

And we need to be shouting that.

We need to be talking about that.

And

again, we just cannot go quietly into this good night.

And that's what they're counting on.

People literally just shutting up, sitting back because it's too exhausting to participate.

Chaos as a strategy.

I mean, we haven't even talked about like, like, this is the whole, the whole chaos theory is the entire theory behind the nominees to the various positions in this administration.

I mean, absolutely.

We get Matt Gates and all we talk about is like how unbelievably chaotic and abnormal that would be.

And when it doesn't happen, we're less willing to interrogate the appointment of Pam Bondi, who also raises some real red flags, which is not to say she isn't qualified.

She's a lawyer.

She was the Florida AG, but The DOJ is a huge, complicated organism where you are not just in charge of Maine Justice, you're in charge of the 93 U.S.

attorneys' offices around the country.

You're in charge of ATF, DEA, FBI, U.S.

Marshal Service.

This is a huge organization.

What are your managerial chops?

Like, that's a question we should be asking.

What happened as Attorney General when this guy who's now nominated you, there were all of these complaints about his for-profit university?

Like, let's talk about that.

We just gave, we're giving this a pass, essentially, because it's not as crazy.

as some of the other things that have been put before us.

And I think part of the way I describe it is that he marries chaos with iconoclastic behavior.

So he breaks cultural norms, he breaks political norms, and then we spend all of our time sort of trying to explain or complain about it.

And we ignore that this is blitzkrieg.

This is shock and awe.

And it allows him to then stand there before the American people and use his inaugural address as a revenge tally and a target list against the vulnerable and marginalized communities.

It's also a litany of promises that are both within and completely outside his authority, such as it's currently situated.

And we just talked about the tech contingent that bit the knee, but let's talk about his executive order, for example, to end federal censorship.

So there are a few ways to interpret those comments, but this is more than likely a reference to the before times of Mark Zuckerberg, when we had leaders in our country who controlled social media, who wanted to stop the spread of dangerous misinformation online.

But what we are now facing is this incursion into free speech.

How can we understand this saga?

And when we hear about an executive order banning censorship, what does that mean?

Well, so I think one way you have to understand this is the interest in quote-unquote government censorship as part of a broader complaint,

a conservative grievance, if you will, about wokeness, so-called wokeness, sensibly about government censorship, because there is no government arm saying you can't say this or you can't say that.

Like, first of all, all of these platforms are private.

The First Amendment doesn't apply in private circumstances like those.

The First Amendment only applies as against state actors.

So the federal government, state, and local governments, not TikTok, not Meta.

So the idea that the government was doing any of this and there was a First Amendment problem is just fundamentally misguided in the first instance.

But it is a long-standing conservative grievance that on these platforms, quote-unquote conservative speech is being censored because of quote-unquote wokeness.

It's not confined to this president.

Like we've heard the same litany of complaints from members of Congress.

We have heard the same litany of complaints from members of the United States Supreme Court.

This is something that the conservative legal movement and conservatives more generally have been stoking for a long time.

This idea that if you raise objections to how they want to talk to people about people then it's wokeness and it's intended to censor them as opposed to simply observing a set of norms that provides for civil discourse in a pluralistic society and i would lump the end all government censorship in with the other executive orders or proposed executive orders that will invoke Martin Luther King Jr.

and call for a quote-unquote colorblind and merit-based society.

Talk to me more about the merit-based society after we confirm Pete Hegstad, because I've got real questions about merit.

All of it, I think, is clustered around this antipathy for woke, this idea that conservatives are being persecuted for their beliefs, for their speech, by this broad woke mob.

And,

you know, like I'm going to get into the weeds here, but I think this is part of a larger movement,

both in legal culture at the Supreme Court and in our broader social discourse generally, to kind of remake who we understand

as minorities who are under siege, besieged by external forces in society.

I mean, I think traditionally we have thought of racial minorities, religious minorities like Muslims and Sikhs as being sort of the classic minority groups.

who are often subordinated at the will of the majority.

I think they are completely inverting that right now with a lot of sort of woke language and this concern about censorship and conservative grievance.

Now the real minorities in their view are the Christian evangelicals, the white people who are subject to these DEI mandates that keep jobs away from them or whatnot.

Does that make sense?

It does.

I mean, last week we had this conversation with Kenji Yoshino about the resilience of DEI.

And in fact, the fact that we

had the inauguration on the day that we celebrate Martin Luther King Jr.

and his deeply misappropriated sentiments, what we talked about was the fact that in 17 years, this is a nation that will be a majority-minority country, and that no racial majority, that no racial group will hold the majority.

But we also had a conversation about all of the other groups that are contained within the conversation of diversity, equity, and inclusion, and that the notions of merit are

facile at best.

But what Trump is doing is he's using a playbook, and you're absolutely right that this is not new, and he is not the progenitor.

He is simply a fairly effective user of this playbook.

They intentionally misrepresent the aims of the civil rights movement.

They misrepresent the aims of the women's rights.

They are not.

It's not just misrepresenting, they're co-opting it.

Like they're the new woke warriors.

They're the ones restoring, you know, society and making things colorblind and merit-based.

Like they, they're taking the language of civil rights, but now they're just applying it to these other groups, like whether it's the faithful, Christian evangelicals, or, you know, working class whites whom, you know, the Supreme Court says it has been completely aggrieved and put out by the fact that Joe Biden had student loan relief for people who went to college.

I mean, like, it's that kind of thing.

Like, they are literally using the language of Brown, of Martin Luther King Jr., of the civil rights movement to undermine the groups that those movements were trying to lift up because they had been subordinated for so long.

And instead, they're uplifting a group of people who I think in most circumstances, we would have understood to be part of the majority that had enjoyed power for all of that time.

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We know that this attempted perversion, while it is taking the headlines, it has not been completely achieved.

And I think part of what I want to always bring us back to is that the point of today's conversation is to hallmark what we should be concerned about, but to remind ourselves that we're not there yet, that there are ways to impede the stampede towards ignominy.

You, I think, very eloquently described our responsibility to speak up.

We have to understand that chaos and that breaking cultural norms are tactics in their strategy, but they're also structural impediments to his executive orders, to his actions.

Can you talk a little bit about what he can do by fiat and what we can do that can prevent some of his more dangerous ideas from taking immediate effect?

So I think one thing

we need to recognize is that we are a government of limited powers.

Like each branch has limited powers.

The president is not a king, although the Supreme Court has perhaps expanded the scope of presidential authority beyond what we might have understood it to be even a year ago.

But these executive orders, I think, are subject to legal challenge and they should be challenged in court.

And, you know, there are a lot of people who think, you know, like that's just a dead letter because once it gets to the United States Supreme Court, you've got a conservative supermajority of six justices, three of whom were appointed by Donald Trump.

It's in the bag for him.

Maybe, maybe not, right?

You know, I think we have seen flashes of conscience and integrity from some of these judges.

You know, I think Amy Coney Barrett has very much made clear

and almost, I think, shown flashes of independence from the president who nominated her on circumstances where she thinks the text of the Constitution is really plain.

Like, I don't agree with all of her decisions.

I don't agree with most of her decisions, but I do think there have been times when she's held the line.

And all it takes is a couple of people to hold the line.

So, no, I don't think we're going to have like Brown versus Board of Education, where it's a unanimous court saying that segregation is absolutely terrible and defies constitutional norms.

But I do think it could be five to four.

And I think we have to hope for that.

So, you know, the filing of lawsuits, you know, staying on this, talking about this, like when you hear about the TikTok executive order, we should be talking about like, how can he do that?

How can he defy two branches of government who also have power?

We shouldn't be just accepting going, well, that sounds really interesting.

I would love to get back on these reels.

No, we should be talking about the fact that that doesn't make any sense in a system of limited government.

And we have a system of limited government because we have a constitution.

When he starts talking about ending birthright citizenship, we should be like saying, excuse me, I thought you just literally took an oath to the Constitution.

The Constitution is very plain.

The 14th Amendment says that if you are born in this country, you are a citizen.

And that amendment was literally put in place after the Civil War to repudiate Dred Scott versus Sanford, where the United States Supreme Court said that black people could never be citizens because they would always be descended from African slaves.

The 14th Amendment is a repudiation of that.

If you're born in this country, you are a citizen.

So when he moves to say, no, I'm ending this, he cannot do that unilaterally.

He can amend the Constitution if he can do all of the things laid out in Article 5 to do that, but he cannot suaspante just go and end birthright citizenship.

And we should be talking about that.

Well, another group that is under siege, of course, is the LGBTQ plus community.

The GOP has weaponized transgender rights.

And Trump, in his flurry, signed an order to make it the official policy of the U.S.

government that there can only be two genders, male and female.

Let's ignore the fact that male and female are not genders, but

We know that he framed it as protecting women from gender ideology extremism.

Can he really do that?

And let's talk a little bit about how this rigid definition of gender, which is actually separate from sex,

can harm people of all genders.

I don't even know what to say about this

executive order defending women from gender ideology extremism and restoring biological truth to the federal government.

One thing I will note is that it specifically calls out the Supreme Court's 2020 decision in Bostock versus versus Clayton County.

That was the decision of the United States Supreme Court that said that Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex,

that kind of discrimination includes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity.

That's a decision of the Supreme Court.

Here it says the prior administration has tried to expand that decision and this administration doesn't believe that that decision was right.

Well, it doesn't matter if they don't believe that it's right.

That's a decision of the Supreme Court.

And to be clear, the Supreme Court will have an opportunity this term to determine whether or not the Constitution goes so far as to allow a state to ban gender-affirming care for minors on the basis of sex.

But until the Supreme Court actually says what the Equal Protection Clause means in that circumstance, it's not for the president to do that.

So, I mean, I think we have to be really clear about this.

Like, yes, you can say all of these things, I guess.

And yes, you can impose this ban on transgendered identity recognition in the military in your role as commander in chief, but you can't do all of this.

And it's not as, your powers aren't as sweeping in this arena as perhaps you might think.

And we just have to push on this continually.

And also remind people, like, yes.

This is targeting the trans community, but it doesn't end with the trans community.

If you read this executive order, order, the language is broadly about sex and gender and Title IX and Title VII.

These are all federal statutes that were initially enacted to protect women in the workplace and to allow women the right to obtain an education on equal footing with men.

You start rolling back these protections, whether it's by executive order or something else.

It's not just the trans community that's impacted.

It's women.

It's men who don't comport with traditional gender roles around masculinity, like men who may think it's okay to wear a baby b-worn or take care of their kids publicly.

All of those people get dinged on something like this.

I mean, it's basically an executive order that traffics in trans hate, but really has at its bottom line the imposition of traditional sex roles for both genders, whether you want those roles or not.

This is just for those who did not go to law school.

Which amendment of the Constitution includes the Equal Protection Clause?

That would be the 14th Amendment, Stacey.

That's the amendment they most dislike.

It's the amendment where you have that pesky clause about not being an insurrectionist and then subsequently running for office.

We've handled that.

The Supreme Court has handled that one.

It's basically dead on arrival.

Now they're going forward trying to kill the whole thing.

And Sherilyn Eiffel, who is just fantastic in every possible way, has literally been doing a public service, like reminding everyone that the 14th Amendment is not just a figment of the woke imagination.

It's an actual thing.

It's in the Constitution.

It was passed in the wake of the American Civil War to effectively roll back.

all of the damage that enslavement caused in this society and the whole idea of status hierarchies like enslavement caused in this society.

So it impacts racial discrimination, gender discrimination, discrimination for a variety of different reasons.

And yes, we have a Supreme Court who, I think, would studiously like to avoid or pretend that the 14th Amendment doesn't exist, but it does exist.

And we have to keep reminding people that it does exist.

It is a means for Congress to act to remedy discrimination, and it serves as a font of individual rights for all of us.

Even those of us who are not here lawfully get the benefit of the 14th Amendment.

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So we've talked about his chaos playbook.

We have talked about his iconoclast playbook.

One other thing he likes to do, one of his other tools, is to mock and delegitimize the names of what he doesn't like and then to bestow what he considers honorifics to promote what he prefers.

You and I saw this when we were in elementary school because this is a classic tactic for bullies and it's a great way to gain sycophants.

And we think about how nicknames in school either made you a laughingstock or made you very popular.

Trump just brought it to the White House.

So in a moment of national fracture, he decided that Denali, the highest peak in North America, would be renamed for President William McKinley.

And so for some history here, President Obama changed the name of the mountain to Denali in 2015 to follow through on a decades-long request by the state of Alaska to honor Native Americans.

So let's talk a little bit about both the tactical intent of this, but also what are the legal implications of a change like this?

And if there aren't any legal implications, why do you think he is so focused as a president on insulting the wishes of Native Alaskans?

Let me just say one thing.

I object to calling him an iconoclast.

I don't call him an iconoclast.

I use the definition of iconoclastic is to challenge norms.

Yeah, okay.

So his actions may be iconoclastic, but no, I he is absolutely, he's a flim flam artist.

He is a

better, better.

So the Denali thing is actually really fascinating because who was really mad about this?

I mean, it simply was a nod to the fact that the indigenous people of Alaska had called this Denali for centuries to refer to this mountain and this area.

I think part of it is just kind of undoing everything that Barack Obama did.

That's part of it.

I also think there is

a view among some that changing the name to a name preferred by Native Americans that reflected Native American heritage was somehow woke as opposed to respectful or whatnot.

And no one was really complaining in Alaska.

Lots of people were fine with this.

But I think this is just generally, again,

the disruption, the overturning, like the

meat to the base.

Like, here's more wokeness that we're going to completely eradicate.

Like, you know, they tried to strip William McKinley.

I mean, they're basically acting like people were sandblasting the faces off Mount Rushmore and replacing them with Cardi B and Glorilla or something.

Like, it wasn't that deep.

Again, it's more chaos.

I think just we're talking about this now when it's not actually as big a deal as some of the other things that are happening.

It didn't have to happen.

It is a big deal in that it's, again, just sort of disruption for the sake of disruption and disrespect for the sake of disrespect.

But I think we should object to it, but I also think we ought to be aware that this was not even the worst thing that's been announced.

It wasn't the worst thing.

And I completely agree with you.

I think the reason it's important is it gives us an example of what not to pay attention to.

What I want to accomplish is that when people leave this conversation, they know how to process what they're hearing.

He's not mad at Mount Denali.

He's mad at Barack Obama.

See, I refuse to use that word because they have completely perverted the intention of what a group of black women described as a way of understanding and navigating spaces that were hostile.

And this intention is important.

So much in the way that you pushed back on iconoclastic, which I think is completely appropriate.

And I'm glad you had me explain it.

Part of the reason for this show is that we're going to get bombarded with so much information.

We've got to learn how to filter what we're hearing.

He's changing the name so we don't pay attention to the fact that he intends harm.

He's changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico.

And this one's more obvious.

He clearly has this long-standing demonization of our neighbor to the south and our trading partner.

And he's hoping that by changing the name, we will ignore the fact that he is now abdicating his core campaign promise, which was to enact universal tariffs on all foreign goods on day one.

Except day one came and went.

And instead of enacting the tariffs, he issued a trade memoranda.

And then he also created an external

revenue service.

Yeah.

Exactly.

So I want to

say

you can't create the external revenue service without Congress.

So

I was about to ask.

So, and and part of the importance of this conversation and pointing these things out is that he's going to,

like a flim flame artist, and I use that because it is the most precise term I can think to describe how he does it.

He's going to have us pay attention to changing the name of the Gulf of Mexico, hoping we won't remember that he swore for the entirety of the campaign that he was going to impose these tariffs.

He's going to create Doge and the External Revenue Service, neither of which can he do under his own imprimatur.

And he's going to issue a trade memorandum that has what force and effect.

And so what I'd love for you to talk about for a few minutes is when we hear these things, how should we filter the impact?

Because there is a difference between policy and polemic, between practice and what he hopes we won't notice, which is that it's wishful thinking on his part.

And then there's just this basic thing we've had in this country for a while called law.

And so can you do a little bit of unpacking?

Because I think whether it's Denali or the Equal Protection Clause or the Gulf of Mexico, they're all designed to distract us from pettiness and weakness, but also from what we should hold accountable in our government.

It's not just meant, I think, as a distraction.

It is meant to gin up and inspire his base.

Like, I mean, he has a base of people

who want Mount Denali to be Mount McKinley again.

And, you know, like,

I don't know if many of them know about what McKinley stood for as president.

I don't think any of us really know what McKinley stood for as president, but they know that they don't want an American president to be subverted for

this older Native American term that suggests that maybe we are actually a pluralistic country and that natives have some stake in what we do here.

So I think that's part of it.

Like it's not simply about distraction.

It is about feeding the beast, right?

He's a quote unquote populist president who trades on America first.

This is part of America first.

Taking the Gulf of Mexico and asserting dominance.

Talking about manifest destiny in an inaugural address.

I mean, like, you know, Frederick Jackson Turner would like a word.

Like, what if we heard manifest destiny and we weren't purchasing the Louisiana territory from France?

Like, I mean,

we've kind of gone to the ends of literally this continent.

And now he's talking about like we're going to populate Mars as well.

I mean, so some of this just seems outlandish, but it is meant for his supporters, his most ardent supporters, not the people in the middle, not the people who are interested in the price of eggs, but the people who believe that America is in decline because it no longer looks the way it used to.

So

you've got to triage some of this, like recognizing that's for them.

And the rest of this stuff is actually for us and will impact our lives in real and material ways that may not extend to his bays.

And they're not supposed to.

But the stuff that's important, like that's the stuff we have to address.

Like the stuff for them is often superficial and not terribly substantive.

But the other stuff.

That's the stuff we've got to pay attention to and keep our eye on the ball.

And, you know, Lisa Murkowski came out and issued a statement about renaming Mount Denali.

Good on her and good on her for respecting the people, her constituents in Alaska, many of whom are native.

I want her to talk about other things too.

I think part of our responsibility is to

understand all of those pieces.

Yes, we want her to talk about other things.

We just watched the incoming president pardon 1,500 people who had been convicted of crimes related to an insurrection.

And as I mentioned earlier, there's that article in The Atlantic about how Hitler dismantled democracy in 53 days.

The importance, I think, of laying out what is superficial but attention-grabbing, what is substantive, and what is, if not impossible, then improbable, is that we've got to live with all of these pieces all the time.

That's the difficulty of triaging.

I mean, like, it's hard to triage when

everything is coming through at once.

I mean, like, and that's, I think, also what they are counting on.

How do you prioritize when you're just literally drinking from a fire hydrant of absolute crap?

Well, part of it is that you figure out which part is crap versus which part is hydration.

And you figure out, and that's part of why I think today's conversation has been so much.

A lot of this is cholera water, Stacey.

I mean, like, I don't think you're getting electrolytes from this.

Well, we may not be getting electrolytes, but part of the responsibility we have in this moment, and this goes back to your point of people saying they're going to just check out.

People check out when they think there's no reason to pay attention.

And so one of our responsibilities is to give them a reason to pay attention, but then to also give them,

going back to Greek mythology, we've got to also give them a map through the labyrinth.

So, you know, ignore the pretty doggy that's been carved into the hedge because that's actually you know cerebrus and he's going to eat you alive so go this way

we've got this we've got four years of this we've got four years of

these attacks and of these faints we've got four years of

absurdity that will often be used to cloak intentional harm and we've got to be able to navigate it and part of that is understanding that as fragile as the Supreme Court has made the nature of the rule of law,

we still have laws.

As terrifying as it is that we live in a legal landscape where the president can suborn the violent overthrow of our government, Congress has to get reelected in two years.

So what I want us to think about, and I want to close with this, is I want you to help me give people a way to understand the overwhelming so we can get to the parts of the problem we can tackle.

You used the Minotaur and the Labyrinth as an allusion here.

And I think it's an apt one.

I am reminded of the fact that Theseus, who made it through the labyrinth unscathed by the Minotaur, got all the tools to do so from a woman, Ariadne.

She often goes unmentioned as we hail Theseus for his bravery.

I think there are a lot of tools available,

many of them offered by women who are trying to sort of focus on the current moment, many of them black women.

Like I, Sharla Eiffel's substack is, I think, a huge source of filtering for me, like trying to like push out the dross and actually, okay, this is what I need to focus on.

This is the real problem.

So I read her sub stack constantly.

And on our podcast, Strict Scrutiny, and this is not a plug for strict scrutiny, but we've been talking.

Plug away.

Well, I mean, like, we've been talking for a long time about like, you know, how do we focus and filter?

Because it gets really monotonous and it will get really monotonous if we're just like, well, here comes this next case.

Like, I wonder what the conservative supermajority is.

So, we are trying to identify, you know, listening really carefully at oral argument, parsing really finely in the language of their opinions, like where is the play in the joints?

Where are there opportunities where someone unexpected, like Amy Coney Barrett, is going to do something that is actually really useful?

Where are the arguments that can be made in the future?

Because they missed this hole in the argument and it opens something up for us.

So, I think you need people who are doing those.

Like there's a flood of stuff coming in.

How do you triage and find, you know, the diamond in all of that crap that you can use going forward for a better argument, for a more successful appeal?

Who are the people that you're going to listen to as you make these arguments over the Thanksgiving table with your MAGA uncle?

Like that might convince him, that might help him to understand what this moment actually means.

And I don't think you have to do this alone.

I appreciate that it feels really lonely right now and it feels really dismal, but there is actually, I think, uplift in community.

And your community is not just who's physically around you.

It's like who are the people with whom you are engaging across time and space and in these different spaces.

And so I'm really glad that I have Leah and Kate on strict scrutiny to bounce these things around with.

It has helped at a time when it has felt overwhelming what's coming.

And

it's good to know that we can work together to kind of sift through this and find

the places where, you know, there's a little push and perhaps some play in the joints.

And I think that's exactly right.

And I also want to remind people that triage is the first step.

We also have to get to treatment.

And part of getting to treatment is diagnosis.

And for the foreseeable future, we're going to be facing chaos.

We're going to watch the wielding of legitimate power that is in search of illegitimate ends.

We're going to have have the complicity of brolegarts who have abandoned any pretense of moral interest in favor of having expanded influence.

And we are going to face yet again the pageantry of a presidency that is used to attack the weak and the vulnerable and those who are unable to fight back.

But in this moment, when we get past triage, treatment is also about how can people of courage and good faith, how can activists and ordinary citizens push back against these policies?

Because part of our responsibility, and I think this is what you all talk about so much on strict scrutiny from a legal perspective, is that we have to fight back

because our complacency gives them permission to do more.

Or worse, when we think that we no longer deserve more, they take it even further.

So

what kind of homework do you want to give to our audience?

As you can imagine, many folks write in asking for ways they can personally do something.

And you talked about taking care of each other.

What's your advice for how we get through the next four years?

What are the active things we can do besides listening to strict scrutiny?

I think one thing that has served me well, just in lots of times, not just this time, where I felt overwhelmed by, you know, whatever is coming at me, is like,

you can't ostrich.

I'm talking about just completely sticking your head in the sand to what is going on because it is too overwhelming or depressing to even contemplate.

I get that it's depressing.

I get that it is overwhelming.

But, you know, to your point about triage diagnosis and treatment, if you found a lump in your stomach, you wouldn't just be like, you know what?

I'm going to like ignore this and maybe it will go away.

You would get yourself to your primary care provider to figure out what it is so you could address it.

That's kind of where we are.

Like there is literally a cancer in our society.

And are we just gonna like, what's this tumor?

I don't know.

I'm just going to ignore it because it's awful.

We have to figure out what it is, what its likely impact will be, and how we are going to treat it.

And that requires you to just literally get your head out of the sand, even though it is more comfortable, it is safer, it feels better.

You know, I had a moment after the election where like, yeah, I was looking my wounds and it was, you know, awful, but I'm back and I'm engaged and like I'm reading, I'm looking at things, I am watching news, I'm reading lots of different outlets at this point.

And I'm just to make sure I understand what's going on.

What are the threats to me?

What are the threats to my family?

What are the threats to the people that I care about and the communities I care about?

Because If you are someone who genuinely cares, I think most of us do,

you've got to take your head out of the sand.

I mean, and I I get it.

I know it's hard.

I know it's difficult.

And I know nobody wants to watch this, but we have to.

We have to stay watching.

Melissa Murray, thank you so much for being on Assembly Required.

Thanks for having me.

Yesterday marked the return of what had once been an era of resistance and now must be an age of insistence.

We must insist on holding our values, our beliefs, and our right to demand more.

How we can do that together is by acting against what can feel inevitable until we examine it more closely.

Like we have from the beginning, we're going to find opportunities to make a difference, to work on solutions, and share resources through our toolkit.

At Assembly Required, we encourage the audience to be curious, solve problems, and do good.

So let's start with being curious.

If there's a policy Trump mentioned or an executive order coming through in these first 100 days that sounds troubling to you, and many of them will, do what you can to learn more.

Listen to legal experts like Melissa and her strict scrutiny co-host who can break down what is and is not allowed under our law.

And that gets us to solving problems.

Trump's actions aren't edicts from a monarch.

They can be challenged.

So, if an issue stands out to you, find the local and state groups and the organizations doing something about it and get involved.

This can include political organizations working to elect people who will push back against Trump's agenda, mutual aid organizations that provide direct services to vulnerable communities, or legal entities working to challenge his unlawful executive orders in court.

And as always, whatever you can do to help your friends, your family, or your neighbors, it can make a world of difference.

If you know people being directly impacted, reach out, check on them, and learn more about how you can support them.

Now we're going to take a listener question.

This one is from Tanya, and it's in two parts.

The first question is, what recommendations do you have for civil service employees who want to get involved without running afoul of the Hatch Act?

Thanks.

For those who are not aware, the Hatch Act is a federal law that prohibits any federal employee from engaging in partisan political activities.

Try saying that three times fast.

They can't do it while they're on duty, in a federal facility, or using federal property.

However, The First Amendment protects your right to become involved in civic activities and to participate in partisan actions, but not at work, during work hours, or or using work resources like your desk, your phone, or even a pencil.

The Office of Special Counsel has a good guide on how the Hatch Act actually operates, so visit osc.gov to get a copy.

The bottom line, though, is that your rights as an American are not eviscerated because you are a federal employee.

There are limits, and your obligation is to respect those limits while you're at work.

The second part of her question was, what would be more impactful or have the the more expedient impact, abolishing the Electoral College or expanding the size of the House of Representatives, which would lower the ratio of constituents to Congresspeople?

I did my very first episode of Assembly Required on the Electoral College, and I'm going to start there.

The abolition of the Electoral College would address the issue of fair representation.

The current system, which was created to mollify slaveholding states and count the bodies, but not the votes of enslaved Blacks, should be eliminated because it distorts the will of the people and it unfairly promotes the interests of a handful of states.

Now, separate from that, there's the issue of expansion of Congress.

So, we can fix or at least start to address challenges in the executive branch, but we also have to look at the challenges in the legislative branch.

So, the expansion of Congress, which I would argue should include not only increasing the number of representatives in the House, but also granting DC statehood and investigating statehood for American territories.

That combination would serve the purpose of expanding fair representation in our legislative bodies.

And it's about time.

And so while this is not in your question, I'm adding a third part, which is about the judicial branch, because we need to think about all three branches of government if we want our democracy to work right.

So let's do judicial.

We should also right-size the federal judiciary.

That means expanding the number of judges on our district courts, our courts of appeal, and yes, the number of members of the Supreme Court.

These numbers have changed throughout our history.

So this notion that we're stuck with what we've got is simply not true.

And in reaction to population changes, we have expanded the number of judges because justice should be swift.

And we are overdue to recalibrate for the size of the country we have and the expanded needs of people for equal justice done in a timely fashion.

I'd love to hear from the rest of you.

I'd love to hear examples of ways you've taken action.

Pepper me with questions about what you're concerned about, or ask me about topics you'd like to see us talk about here on Assembly Required.

Send us an email at assemblyrequired at crooked.com or leave us a voicemail.

And you and your questions and comments might be featured on the pod.

Our number is 213-293-9509.

That's it for Assembly Required.

Thanks for

Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams is a crooked media production.

Our lead show producer is Alona Minkowski, and our associate producer is Paulina Velasco.

Kirill Polaviev is our video producer.

This episode was recorded and mixed by Charlotte Landis.

Our theme song is by Vasilius Vitopoulos.

Thank you to Matt DeGroat, Kyle Seglund, Tyler Boozer, and Samantha Slossberg for production support.

Our executive producers are Katie Long, Madeline Haringer, and me, Stacey Abrams.

Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.

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