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Isaac Saul is a politics reporter and the founder of Tangle, an independent, nonpartisan news outlet.
In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Isaac Saul discuss the importance of exploring both sides of an argument, whether Donald Trump’s executive overreach amounts to authoritarianism, and how to handle immigration.
This transcript has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
Yascha Mounk: I’ve been reading Tangle for a long time. It’s a really interesting publication, and is doing something that perhaps every publication should be doing, which is to be a fair guide to this political moment: to express and explain the views both from the left and from the right, and to help people orient themselves through that.
Tell us a little bit about how you stumbled onto this format and what you think is so important about it.
Isaac Saul: I have two genesis stories. The first is just that I grew up in Pennsylvania—in particular, in Bucks County—which is a purple county in a swing state, critical to every presidential election. So I have friends and family from all across the political spectrum and grew up in a really politically divided area, where people spent time with each other despite the fact that maybe they didn’t see the world the same way.
The second genesis story is that I got into the media world when I was 23, with my first job at The Huffington Post, which is a media outlet that has a clear ideological tilt. So I got to see a little bit how the sausage was made in a newsroom where there is an opinion, viewpoint, or a worldview being expressed through a lot of the news that’s being published. I didn’t love what I saw there—not because HuffPost didn’t have great reporters; it does—but because I realized that they were giving their audience a lot of the news they wanted to consume, and a lot of the perspectives they wanted to embrace. The result was that they weren’t reaching people who didn’t share those political views. So conservative readers weren’t reading my columns when I published them on the HuffPost blog, because there were no conservative readers there—it was just liberals.
That kind of bifurcation seems obvious now, but 10 or 15 years ago, the sort of echo chamber that social media was creating—and the more divided and fractured media space it was creating—was a new concept. I had this idea, this desire, to go somewhere or build something where I could bring conservatives, liberals, independents, people on the far left and people on the far right under one roof. That media organization doesn’t really seem to exist in today’s America. That was kind of the idea.
Mounk: What’s interesting about this is that in a sense, what you’re suggesting was what most mainstream outlets at least pretended to do until quite recently. They would have said that The New York Times is the newspaper of record. It didn’t deliberately try to say, here’s the left-wing view, here’s the right-wing view. But the caricature of what a New York Times news report would have been was: there’s some controversy, something that’s being debated in Washington, D.C., or somewhere else in the nation, and you’re going to get quotes on both sides, and the write-up is going to meticulously sound as though the journalist has no opinion one way or the other. I think conservatives will say that wasn’t really true of The New York Times 40 years ago, and it wasn’t really true of The New York Times 20 years ago—but it certainly was much more true than it is today. What’s interesting is that what—at least in how journalists would have described themselves and these outlets would have described themselves—was absolutely mainstream 20 years ago has now gone very quickly to being kind of countercultural.
I can already hear the questions that some of my listeners are going to have: But isn’t one side more right than the other? With Donald Trump in the White House, isn’t an attempt to be like, here’s what the left is saying, here’s what the right is saying, just going to lead you to pretend that there’s an equality—equal justifiability—of worldview, of outlook, even of factual truth, when one side is actually interested in truth and the other side just isn’t? I’m sure you get that kind of question all the time. So how do you deal with that in what Tangle does, and why do you think that sort of concern—perhaps a logical reaction—is misplaced?
Saul: Yeah, well, first of all, I think the “both sides” kind of criticism is probably one of the most common criticisms we get, which typically happens before people actually engage with the work that we’re producing.
So, two things. First of all, we are not trying to say that all opinions are equal or that viewpoints on every issue are equal. What we’re trying to do is actually just show people strong arguments that exist across the political spectrum. It’s more about exposure than anything else. I think the reality that I’ve observed—and that I think a lot of social science studies have borne out—is that a lot of Americans just don’t really understand the other side, or they don’t really have an accurate representation or picture of who those people are. That’s true about even basic questions like the demographics. You can ask conservatives what percentage of the country they think is black or LGBT, and they will wildly overestimate that percentage. That’s before they even get into what those people believe or what their political views are. So I’m working from a premise that we don’t actually understand each other that well.
Mounk: My favorite formulation of this is the ideological Turing test. The idea of a Turing test, of course, has traditionally been whether or not a machine can successfully pretend to be a human in some kind of interaction. You join an online chat, you think you’re talking to a human at Apple—but really you’re talking to a bot. And if a bot manages to make you think that it’s a human, then it’s passing the Turing test.
The idea of the ideological Turing test, which I think is really smart, is: you get a bunch of liberals into a room and a bunch of conservatives into a room, and you tell the liberals, write a conservative argument against abortion. And you tell the conservatives, write a liberal argument for choice. You then give that text to a bunch of conservatives and say, does that sound like the conservative argument against abortion to you? Does this express what your objection to abortion is? You do the same with the liberal side.
That’s the ideological Turing test—a kind of metric by which partisans on one side of the political spectrum are able to successfully channel the arguments of partisans on the other side, so they say, yes, that is what we believe. One interesting finding about the United States—in part, I think, because so many mainstream institutions do have a little bit of a tendency toward embracing the views of progressives and of the left—is that conservatives tend to be better at passing the ideological Turing test than liberals are. So, conservatives are better at understanding what liberal arguments about some subject are than liberals tend to be about conservatives. And I can see why. If you were a conservative—for example, in a graduate degree at an elite university—you would definitely know what the liberal arguments are, because they’re all around you. Whereas, as a liberal, you can go through those institutions and, unless you’re seeking out right-wing publications, you’ll just never really hear conservatives put forward their arguments in their own voice.
Saul: Yeah, and in fact, a lot of the recent studies on that I think have been encouraging: people are getting better at that. I think that indicates more exposure, which I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see as a product of the fracturing of the media that we’ve had in the last 10 or 15 years. That part is one element of it—getting the country closer to a point where we’re good at articulating the views of the people we disagree with.
To just address the second point, I would just say: some people who hold liberal or conservative views read our content, and it actually hardens their own positions, where they feel like, I better understand the other side, and I still disagree with them. So our goal is not to say, let’s all get in a circle, hold hands, and agree about everything. It’s not that. It’s fundamentally that most people don’t have a great grasp—or aren’t being exposed to—the really strong arguments that exist across the political spectrum.
Sometimes that’s the right-left continuum or the traditional conservative and liberal tribal politics that we talk about. Sometimes it’s injecting heterodox opinions into the articles that we’re sharing, or the opinions that we’re sharing in our newsletter, to give people a look at maybe how somebody who’s thought of as being liberal or conservative is kind of breaking away from the pack and charting a new ideological path forward. We’ve seen a lot of that with Trump in the last 8-12 years, who’s really scrambled the political North Stars, I think, for both parties in very meaningful ways.
So it’s a really interesting time to be doing this work. But I think, generally, people who engage with our content find themselves a lot more open-minded, with a lot more flexibility to hear other people’s perspectives and have a better, more holistic understanding of the worldviews that exist out there on really divisive topics.
Mounk: This is all interesting, and it sounds very worthy. It’s also a little bit abstract. So perhaps one way of making this concrete is to look at what insights we can gain about the world by really trying to understand the viewpoint of each side.
To just start in one place: one of the big debates for the last—certainly six months, but also the last few years more broadly—has been about the Supreme Court. Parts of the right would think that the Supreme Court is finally redressing decades of wrong jurisprudence on really important issues—decades of judicial activism that basically misshaped the Constitution by trying to make it serve progressive political priorities.
A lot of the left, and the mainstream—I mean, a lot of people who are not particularly radical—perceive the Supreme Court and its conservative majority as basically writing a blank check for Donald Trump. Basically saying, you can do whatever you want, you’re going to have immunity for whatever you do, you can dismantle the institutions of the government—like the Department of Education recently—without a congressional mandate. They are just rubber-stamping whatever Trump wants to do.
Having covered this issue carefully and followed the arguments from both sides, what do you think is actually happening?
Saul: I think that’s a pretty good lay of the land about some of the common, 30,000-foot, baseline arguments. I would say my personal view on this—which I think steals a little bit from both sides—is that the Supreme Court is basically making it clear that Congress has kind of abdicated its duties for a few decades. A lot of the decisions that they’ve handed down have come down to a really simple premise, which is: this isn’t our job, it is Congress’s job to legislate into existence a more clear and direct law that we can follow.
Trump is certainly taking advantage of that posture that the Court has taken by gearing up executive actions, which I personally find very alarming. I think a lot of the things that liberal and mainstream pundits have said about the Court pushing through some green lights for him can be overstated at times, but the general thrust of it is true: that executive power has continued to grow over and over across every administration.
Trump has just turbocharged that over the last four years. Many Democratic and liberal groups have tried to stop him via the courts because they lack power in Congress, and they’ve failed so far in a lot of meaningful ways.
Now, it is worth saying that there’s typically more nuance to some of these decisions than you’ll gather from logging onto X or just reading the headlines and not really parsing them. I think the nationwide injunction story is a really good example of that, where the blaring headline was that the Supreme Court stopped all nationwide injunctions, which wasn’t really true.
Mounk: Let’s take a step back on this. So this is a case that was ostensibly about birthright citizenship. You’ll have the details more accurately here than I do, so in case I misspeak, please correct me. I believe it was a district court judge who basically stopped the Trump administration from changing its interpretation of who was entitled to citizenship, because they believed that the Trump administration’s actions violated the amendment of the Constitution which grants birthright citizenship. The legal issue was not about the substance of this case. It was about whether or not any one of, I believe, many hundreds—but not quite a thousand—federal judges should be able to stop these kinds of nationwide injunctions.
But when I read about this in the mainstream press, I got the feeling that if you were not legally sophisticated, if you did not know what was going on, you might not even realize this was about nationwide injunctions. You might just think this was about birthright citizenship. You might think, look, the Supreme Court has rolled over and said Trump can revoke birthright citizenship.
Whereas if you read the ruling of the Supreme Court, it says very clearly that they’re not in any way taking a judgment on the substance of this legal question. That’s going to be negotiated at a later stage and may very well make its way back up to the Supreme Court at the appropriate time.
So I think what’s interesting is that often when you read mainstream coverage of legal news, there’s not even a disentangling between procedural questions—where courts have to decide, does somebody have standing, is there some question of procedure that’s at issue here, etc.—and the substantive ruling. Papers report on those procedural decisions as though they had decided the substance. And normally, in paragraph 13 of the article, it explains to you that it’s not really about the substance. But unless you’re pretty legally knowledgeable, if you just look at the headline and the ambient news, you’re going to think that the Court has basically said, go ahead, Donald Trump. Birthright citizenship doesn’t apply to children of illegal immigrants, for example.
Saul: Yeah, and I would add two things to that for emphasis. One is that in the oral arguments of the case, most of the conservative justices on the Court made it pretty clear that they were not viewing his birthright citizenship push favorably. They always use hypotheticals in their arguments, and everybody reads the tea leaves, and none of the hypotheticals they presented created a framework where eliminating birthright citizenship—getting rid of the 14th Amendment—was constitutional. They all were basically like, you’re going to lose this case. I am very confident that if the question of stripping birthright citizenship ever gets before the Supreme Court, it will be an 8–1 or 9–0 ruling basically striking it down. So I think what Trump did is fundamentally unconstitutional.
But the second thing is also that the Court didn’t say nationwide injunctions are no longer something that any federal judge can do. They just raised the standard for when and where judges can invoke them. One of the things they did was to very clearly open the door for class action lawsuits brought by a state or state attorneys general to be able to invoke these nationwide injunctions.
The process has actually panned out fairly well for the people challenging the birthright citizenship push that the Trump administration is making, even though at the same time the Trump administration is sort of celebrating this as a green light to do whatever they want. It’s this very interesting example of how the lenses distort reality. And I would say, again, when we covered this, a lot of conservatives made really good arguments about why this was bad for the conservative movement in the long term—which was that President Biden was slowed down significantly by nationwide injunctions, and Trump won’t be president forever. I think really smart, wise conservative commentators are looking ahead and knowing that at some point a Democratic president will be back in office, and he’s going to have a lot more power in the future—which they don’t find particularly appealing, I think rightly so.
Mounk: This is the thing that I find most frustrating about a certain kind of partisan politics: Democrats are in office, Republicans shout murder about a federal deficit; Republicans get into office, suddenly the federal deficit is not important. The same is true even for certain kinds of procedural issues. Should college students be allowed to vote in the states in which they go to college if their permanent residence continues to be in some other state? I don’t think there’s any particularly deep principle to the matter one way or the other, but each party pretends there’s a deep principle to which way around that regulation should go, based on its calculation about where its partisan interest happens to lie.
I think often what’s interesting is that movements can be quite naive about their long-term interests. The filibuster is a relatively recent invention, certainly in the way in which it is used nowadays. I don’t have any deep constitutional attachment to it. But I always thought that Democrats were a little bit naive in thinking that abolishing the filibuster would be in their interest, as I think many people in the party seem to believe. In part because Republicans have an inbuilt advantage in the Senate, given their stronger support among rural voters. It’s not inbuilt in the Constitution, but it is inbuilt in the way that American politics has panned out over the last 30 or 40 years. So abolishing the filibuster, by and large, is going to help the party that tends to hold a majority in the Senate. It’s striking to me that Democrats haven’t really thought that through very much.
Let’s talk for a moment about this actual legal issue. I can see arguments on both sides here, which is to say that if there are hundreds and hundreds of federal judges, and any one of these judges can basically stop the executive from taking just about any action based on a nationwide injunction, then we don’t just have the veto power of the House of Representatives and the Senate, and the president who has to sign a law, and the Supreme Court that has to accede to something. America already has incredibly many—and unusually many—veto powers to get action done in our political system. With federal judges, we now basically have over 500 veto powers spread around the country. Anybody who wants to stop something from happening can shop for the venue. They can make sure that they bring the suit in whatever district of the country is known to have the judge who’s most favorable to their political point of view, and they can cripple the administration. That seems like a real problem, right?
Now, on the other hand, the argument that Ketanji Brown Jackson and others have made is that if you can’t stop unlawful executive action in any way, if you don’t have nationwide injunctions, and the executive starts to do something really wildly dangerous and constitutionally inappropriate, and you have to wait for a three or four-year judicial process to play out until judges can put a stop to those executive actions—then you really don’t have effective control of abuses of power by the executive anymore.
What did the substance of the Supreme Court judgment actually mean for how to maneuver through this, and what’s your considered judgment about whether or not that gets the balance right between these different considerations?
Saul: You raise two of the core arguments that were being made, not just before the Supreme Court, but nationally. I actually think the Supreme Court landed somewhere in the middle of those two, which I found particularly heartening. We wrote about this. I didn’t know whether it was a hot take or maybe a lukewarm take, but I thought the outcome of the ruling was actually fairly positive. I say that it didn’t do the thing Ketanji Brown Jackson said it would do, and it also didn’t raise a lot of the issues that the current system raises now—which is basically that, as you said, you can get 99 out of 100 federal judges to look at what you’re doing and think that it’s constitutional, but if you find one who doesn’t, you can basically halt a president’s executive power, or a new law that’s been passed, or whatever it is, in its tracks. I don’t think that’s a real functioning system. And it’s absolutely true that we’ve seen the proliferation of the national injunctions—the nationwide injunctions, universal injunctions, whatever you want to call them—over the last 10 or 15 years. We are now living in a situation, like I said, where it’s not impossible to get a universal injunction, but it is a little bit harder, and the bar for it is a little bit higher.
It’s this kind of class action lawsuit bar, which is one example of how groups are gonna bring something forward to a federal judge and hold these policies. Also, Justice Brett Kavanaugh in the ruling signaled the Supreme Court is open for business. If we are going to do this thing where we are limiting the degree to which federal judges can institute universal injunctions, we have to take on some of the responsibility and fill the gap there. He penned his own opinion, and it’s not totally clear whether the other conservative justices are on board with him or not, but he basically said the Supreme Court can’t hide in the tall grass. We have to stand up and actually address these issues in a timely fashion if we’re going to make a ruling like the one we’re making today.
So I think what’s really possible is that we see, on one hand, the class action lawsuit stuff ramp up, which will be slower, and there are more procedural hurdles for people to get through, and the bar is higher. I think all of that is good. We’ll also see the Supreme Court addressing things on their emergency docket in a faster way when people come to them seeking immediate relief. That’s a good backstop for the situation that some of the liberal justices brought up. A Democratic president in the future could decide he’s gonna seize everybody’s firearms, and he wants to amend the Second Amendment in some particular way, and he writes an executive order and they start collecting Americans’ guns. What’s the mechanism to stop that if we don’t have a universal injunction? And so the Supreme Court’s saying, well, we can step in if somebody comes straight to us in situations like that. So I think that’s good.
Typically, these court rulings play out in ways that we can’t really expect. It’s actually really hard to predict the nuances, because lawyers are so good at finding angles on particular language in rulings like this and exploiting them to their own benefit. So I’m sure we’ll see some iterations of how this will play out that none of us can really think of right now. That’s just how the law works. It’s a very interesting, exciting, and odd thing to live through. But on net, I think this was a fairly middle-ground position that they staked out, even though it didn’t address the big elephant in the room, which is unfortunate, which is that Trump’s trying to do something blatantly unconstitutional and they did nothing to stop him. So that’s problematic to me, obviously, about the ruling. But in terms of what kind of rulings it’ll trigger in the future, I think it actually is a pretty good outcome. Maybe we’ll see Congress act in particular ways to address some of this stuff—which, by the way, they can do. This was another thing I really only saw conservative writers talking about: Congress could wrest some of its power back by removing references in all these laws they’ve written about “the judgment of the president” or “the opinion of the secretary.” I know it’s hard to imagine Congress doing its job right now because it hasn’t been doing that for a very long time, but there’s an opening here where the power that Congress has can be flexed in a way where they can bring some clarity to some of the laws that are already on the books. They can also craft future bills and legislation in a way that doesn’t open them up to universal injunctions because they’re poorly written or because they’re giving too much power to a different branch of government.
Mounk: So we did a quick deep dive into one particularly important judgment of the Supreme Court in the last weeks. Let me try and get your view overall on what the Court has been doing. And perhaps, rather than taking what I think are the simplistic views of left and right, let me try and give you what I hope is a more sophisticated optimistic and a more sophisticated pessimistic reading.
I think the most sophisticated, optimistic reading of the Supreme Court is to say that conservatives are not being truthful when they say that the Supreme Court is merely rectifying the misjudgments of the last 30 or 40 years. We are seeing a very clear conservative majority that is, broadly speaking, doing what the Federalist Society has aspired to for a number of decades. And so, on many cultural issues of longstanding concern to the conservative legal movement, the Supreme Court is clearly trying to change where the balance of forces lands in the United States.
But that is very different from thinking that the Supreme Court either sees itself as an ally of Donald Trump or is going to be quiescent in constitutional abuses. When it comes to questions like abortion, the Supreme Court hews closely to the long-articulated views of a conservative legal movement. But when it comes to questions about whether the executive is going to be able to hugely extend its powers—certainly when it comes to questions about whether the executive is going to be able to abuse its powers—the Supreme Court is going to stand up quite clearly. And it has proven willing to do so in a number of cases. In fact, one of the striking things about the last months is that in the vast majority of cases which pitted the federal government against some plaintiff on these questions of constitutional concern—whether in the Supreme Court or in lower federal courts—it is the state that lost. That is certainly not something you would see in Turkey today, or in India today, or in other places where populists have effectively gained control over the judiciary.
Now, I think the pessimistic reading is to say, yes, that’s broadly speaking where the preferences of the majority of Supreme Court justices might lie, but they also deeply dislike the political left in various ways, and in some cases have good personal reasons to be upset with it. And they also might be a little bit scared about Donald Trump. They also might think, whether for the prestige and long-term interest of the Court, or because they don’t want angry people outside of their houses, that they shouldn’t go for a full-frontal confrontation with the executive.
So perhaps they’re pulling their punches a little bit. Perhaps they are being overly indulgent, trying to bend backwards a little bit to appease the executive when it is doing things that really are questionable in terms of its authority. I would take that to be a more sophisticated articulation of the optimistic and the pessimistic case about the Supreme Court. Having covered not just this case that we talked about, but a lot of them over the last few months, where do you land on those?
Saul: First of all, we’re living through a pretty extraordinary moment that touches on everything you just said, which is that we have a sitting president who has appointed three of the nine Supreme Court justices, so a third of the Court, and is also somebody who is very clearly interested in stretching the bounds of his power. So the optics that creates are difficult to process if you’re somebody who’s concerned about the gathering of executive power and a president who is willing to flex that power to the maximum degree. And it’s always hard not to wonder the degree to which any particular justice is trying to appease him or doing intellectual gymnastics to get to the outcome that they want.
That being said, I do think this Court has been much less predictable than people thought. It’s typically constructed and talked about in the media as a 6–3 conservative Supreme Court, which I think is mostly right. But there is sort of this 3–3–3 split that really exists on the Court. You have the liberal wing of the Court: Sonia Sotomayor, Justice Elena Kagan, and Justice Jackson. Then there’s this less predictable middle, which is Amy Coney Barrett, Brett Kavanaugh, John Roberts. Then there’s a more predictable conservative right, which is Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Clarence Thomas. I think that dynamic is actually more important than the 6–3 dynamic that we typically talk about in the media and that a lot of people focus on. When you zoom out to the last two terms of the Supreme Court, unanimous 9–0 decisions are far and away one of the most common outcomes of cases that come before the Supreme Court. The 6–3 ideological split of Republican-appointed versus Democratic-appointed justices happens in one in ten cases that the Supreme Court hears. And it’s true that often those one in ten cases are really big, divisive topics—issues like trans rights or this birthright citizenship case that became a case about universal injunctions—but it’s still a minority of the rulings that they have. The thing that’s really common is the cross-ideological agreement, where you see Justice Jackson and Justice Kavanaugh joining an opinion together. That, to the public, I think, is a very untold story, because we focus so much on the really divisive rulings that come down.
So again, my general view of this particular Supreme Court is that they’ve been a little bit less predictable than I thought. They’re definitely not willing to just wrangle in Trump for the sake of wrangling executive power. However, a lot of what they do is to say: we’re not going to step in here because this isn’t our job, when that’s a convenient position for Trump. Or: We’re going to step in here and stop this thing, when that’s a convenient position for Trump. And I do find that worrisome. I don’t love the optics of that. There’s all sorts of legalese and justification for it—and ideological justification for it—that comes out in the legal writing that I find plausible and convincing, but it’s just hard not to be made uncomfortable by it.
So I’m not hair-on-fire freaking out. I’m skeptically watching what they’re doing and pleasantly surprised in a lot of instances where they come out, I think, with really strong consensus against the Trump administration’s wishes in a way that I think speaks to the ideological independence of the Court. For what it’s worth, I think these people are human. Brett Kavanaugh, for instance, had a really bruising confirmation hearing. I remember that I spoke to—when I was reporting a piece—somebody off the record who was fairly close to him and they basically said, he’s pissed and he’s hurt. And I expect that to come out a little bit in his ideological positioning. I think we saw that in his first term on the bench. In the years since, we’ve seen him moderate back to the center. When he was in Washington, D.C., as a district court judge, he was not somebody who was known as being this hardline right-wing partisan hack, though that’s his image to a lot of the public right now.
Amy Coney Barrett, until recently—until she penned this nationwide injunction opinion—was public enemy number one in MAGA world, because they all thought that she was undermining the Trump administration, when really I think she was just ruling on cases with genuine independence and not coming out on the side of things the way they expected. I just don’t think that the Court is as corrupted as a lot of people on the left think. You can see that when you look at the whole breadth of their work, rather than just these really controversial, hot-button cases that they take up.
Mounk: All right, so the Supreme Court was for hors d’oeuvres. The main course is executive overreach by the Trump administration. I think there are clearly all kinds of ways in which the Trump administration is pushing the limits of executive power in ways that violate longstanding democratic norms—that go against what I think are some of the basic principles of liberal democracy—and that may actually breach longstanding law in various ways. I think it is much harder to see, in the fog of war, what that actually amounts to. Will we look back in three years and say: those things were bad, but they were contained, and they didn’t fundamentally transform the nature of the American government—they’ll be remembered in history books as bad episodes in our nation’s history, but they’ll be footnotes rather than lead stories? Or are we looking at the beginning of an authoritarian drift, which in retrospect is going to very clearly look like step one and two and three of a rapid march toward the breakdown of democratic institutions?
Obviously there are very strong views about this—from, let’s say, the very alarmist side, which says, we’re on the road to fascism, to the area of moderate concern, that this is some significant violation of the rule of law that is very concerning but might be contained, to people who—presumably on the right—refuse any of those interpretations and say, this is just the executive rightly reasserting its authority to set public policy, rather than letting the deep state determine everything. Where do you fall on that scale? How would you formulate what is going on?
Saul: Yeah, so I would say this is—for me personally—the most alarming part of the Trump administration, for a couple reasons.
One is that it’s a continuation of successive presidencies going back to George W. Bush, where the executive has been pushing the limits of its power further and further. Every president has done this since then. Bush did it. Obama did it. Trump did it. And then Biden did it. And then Trump did it again. Each time, it feels like the Overton window is moving—to the point where now we’re sitting in the second Trump administration, and he’s just having Rose Garden press briefings where he’s announcing massive tariffs on all of our trading partners—blanket global 10% tariffs with 150-plus nations across the world—without consulting Congress, without any kind of legislation, without any kind of oversight. This is totally insane stuff that we would never have accepted 20, 30, 40 years ago, but we’ve been kind of conditioned, through every presidency where that Overton window has been shifting, to view something like that as a little bit crazy but on the outside edge of normal. Because we’ve seen a president conduct a military strike without authority from Congress. Or we’ve seen a president declare a national emergency around the border, or around COVID, or around student loans, and then implement a policy without Congress that has really big, meaningful impacts for the country as a whole. So Trump is pushing the limits further than I think any of his predecessors have.
Of the things that worry me, the one part of it is that this is really just the continuation of a trend. So I would expect it to keep going. The next president who comes into office is going to see what Trump got away with and think, I guess I can do that too. And that’s really dangerous.
The second thing that really worries me is that Congress has done nothing—practically nothing. They have not stood up for the very basic responsibilities that they’re supposed to have: the power of the purse, of taxing Americans, of our foreign trade. These kinds of things are so basic and so elemental to what Congress is supposed to be doing. And yet they are ceding the field to Trump, because they don’t have any long-term vision about how this is going to turn against them at some point, or they don’t care, because they’re in power right now and they’re worried about the next election. I find that really alarming. I think I would have expected a little bit more action there—and my expectations were pretty low.
And then there’s the stuff I think that falls more into the authoritarian bucket for me. It’s hard for me to declare the tariff stuff authoritarian. It just doesn’t have that kind of authoritarian, fascist feel that really concerns me.
Mounk: Yeah, that’s an interesting distinction. One question is, where does the rightful competence of the executive lie and to what extent are the limits on it being breached? This might be in ways that might be bad for all kinds of reasons, including the fact that a lot of literature suggests that when one person makes a decision without any real input, that decision might end up being a lot worse than if they have some mechanism by which they have to consult others, such as Congress. But that is different from the question of whether an executive is taking actions that rig the rules of the game, that help it to sustain itself in power, that make it harder for the opposition to run a political campaign.
So I think what’s interesting about the tariff stuff is that it’s really bad on that first count. It feels like this is something where we’ve had very longstanding economic policy. I happen to think that that economic policy has all kinds of advantages, but there’s nothing democratically legitimate about changing that policy unilaterally. Certainly, it is absolutely legitimate for the United States to say, we want to have 50% tariffs on everybody in the world—but that should not be the decision of one man. That should be the decision of Congress. And Donald Trump, with his majority in Congress, should be willing and able to push that legislation through Congress. And if he can’t, well, then he doesn’t have the majority to do that. So that’s an example where we’re really overstepping in that way. But despite the concerns that some people have that basic tariffs are the way of opening the door to corruption and all kinds of other things, I don’t think instituting these tariffs is what’s going to stop us from having fair elections in 2028.
So then we get into the second area, where the concern is not, this is a policy question that should rightly be decided by the legislature and is now being absorbed by the executive, but rather, we are starting to make an even playing field less even. We’re starting to create disadvantages for the opposition. There you might get into the obvious case: constitutionally, it is probably true that the Secretary of State has great leeway in deciding who should be allowed to get a visa to come to the United States—and even whose visa should be recognized—on grounds of national security. From my limited understanding of the law, Marco Rubio has very large leeway in making those decisions.
Having said that, I think it’s really concerning—for both fundamental values, which do go to the heart of our systems, like freedom of speech, and for the maintenance of an even playing field of political competition—that the executive can’t suddenly say, anybody who criticizes Donald Trump is not allowed to visit the United States. Anybody who is already in the United States who expresses the “wrong view” on the Israel-Palestine conflict is just going to have their visa not be recognized and be put in deportation proceedings. All of that may be perfectly legal. It may not overstep the boundaries of executive authority as they have been construed for a long time now. But it is really concerning in this other way.
Saul: Yeah, some of it is perfectly legal, but a lot of it’s not. And the Trump administration’s goal here, I think, is not to win these cases in court—it’s to kind of inject the shock and awe and fear into the populace. It’s to get the “self-deportations.” It’s to get people back underground who previously felt comfortable lifting their heads up and speaking out about the administration or saying “the wrong thing” publicly.
I think you really hit the nail on the head with zeroing in on immigration, which was the second thing that I was going to say. If you’re looking for something that has that authoritarian or fascist texture, I would say the way the Trump administration has been handling the whole of its immigration policy is that thing. To me, nothing sends a chill down my spine like seeing the masked federal agents who are hiding behind cloaks of anonymity, raiding workplaces or suburban neighborhoods in vans with tinted windows and grabbing people off the street and arresting them and throwing them in the back of a car and trying to put them into deportation proceedings without any real due process. Even the bare minimum—which I don’t even know would qualify as due process—looks like some kind of adjudication of a person’s immigration status or legal status in the country and gives them an opportunity to represent themselves in front of an immigration judge. A lot of them aren’t even getting that bare minimum.
We’ve seen U.S. citizens getting caught in this dragnet, which is not the only thing that’s problematic about it, but it’s happening already where maybe they’re not getting deported to Bolivia or a foreign gulag somewhere, but they’re getting held in custody for eight hours or twelve hours or sixteen hours or two days or two weeks, without being able to contact a lawyer, without being able to contact their family. We’ve seen that happen on numerous occasions now. Again, I don’t think Trump is doing this because he thinks that’s a legal way to handle his deportations. I think he’s doing this because he wants to send the message that he can, and that he wants to scare people, and particularly scare the immigrant community—the illegal immigrant community—into going back underground, into leaving the country on their own.
That kind of stuff really worries me. I think seeing people justify it— we have this big, broken immigration system and therefore it’s okay that we have masked federal agents who are concealing their true identities and conducting these arrests and raids in public places, dressed in army fatigues or rolling up in Humvees and tanks. What feels to me just as scary as the fact that Trump’s doing it is that there are so many people who have convinced themselves that it’s okay. There’s a lack of imagination there about what it’s going to look like in the future when a president who doesn’t share their priorities is in office.
That falls into this national emergency bucket that I think we’re seeing more of. It’s less exciting to talk about, but it’s just as important to get there—which is that Trump is declaring that there’s an invasion at the border, and therefore he can use the National Guard, he can use the military, he can use the Alien Enemies Act. He’s setting the table with, I have this major national emergency problem, and so I can use the absolute maximum force of my powers to do these certain things. These immigration enforcements—getting Secretary of State Marco Rubio to start revoking people’s visas or deporting people who’ve been here for ten years, who have no criminal record, just for saying the wrong thing about a foreign conflict—all this stuff is really frightening to me.
Again, I wish that Trump supporters—and this is something I’ve talked to my readers about, of which I have many Trump supporters, in my family, friends and in my audience—would realize that it’s not hard to imagine a world where, in five or ten years, some of the more extreme views that people in Trump’s base hold on immigration are deemed terroristic threats, domestic threats, by a future Democratic administration who goes out and jails those people. It’s like what we saw after January 6th on a mass scale, where far more people are being caught up in this kind of prosecution of right-wing extremism. And yet they just won’t go there. They just accept that this is good because we’re detaining illegal immigrants. And I don’t buy that. I think it’s really dangerous. I think it’s bad that we’ve let so many people into the country illegally. At the same time, I don’t think we should sacrifice American values and laws or the rights of those people in order to solve the problem. So that’s a really good example of one of the things that I would say really worries me about the administration.
The second thing that comes in there too is just the media treatment—threatening all the journalists with lawsuits who report accurately on this stuff, the constant creation of this myth that the media is the enemy of the people and that’s what his supporters should focus on—which has been really effective and really potent. We see some people bending the knee—whether it’s Paramount or 60 Minutes or whatever. There are people who want access to the administration, news producers who want access to the administration, so they’re willing to do what the Trump administration wants them to do in order to maintain that access and in order to not be sued. And I think that’s creating all sorts of problems in the industry that worry me a lot.
Mounk: On immigration, it’s very difficult to get a handle on what has actually happened so far. Part of the difficulty is that Trump has just won a lot of money in the “big, beautiful bill” to expand immigration enforcement. And it’s quite clear they’re trying to ramp up efforts very significantly. From some of the numbers I’ve seen so far, the number of deportations isn’t actually that much higher than it has been at previous junctures. And there’s this incentive that people—both on the left and the right—have to overstate the number of deportations that are happening so far. The left, because it is rightly concerned about some of those steps, and it wants to say that the Trump administration, in this ruthless and lawless way, is just deporting people willy-nilly. And the right, of course, because they’re boasting about it. Trump wants people to believe that he’s stepped up deportations a lot, even if it’s not true, because that’s what he promised his base. He wants them to believe that he has.
There are some things that are extremely unusual that have happened, that don’t affect a lot of people, but that are consequential. That’s the category of derecognizing people’s F-1 student visas because of views they’ve expressed, for example, about Israel-Palestine. There’s not a ton of people that that’s happened to, but I do think it has a very significant chilling effect. For anybody who’s concerned about freedom of speech—as I am—that’s a very significant thing. But compared to the number of people who are deported in a regular year in the United States over the last 10 or 15 years, that is a very small number indeed. When it comes to absolute numbers, have we actually seen a significant step-up of deportations?
I’m trying to channel here one of your right-wing readers and think about how they would respond to the concerns you express, which I personally share. But I think what they might say is: we’ve had so much undocumented immigration. We have so little control over the southern border with Mexico. More broadly, we see that countries—whether in North America or in Western Europe—have so little effective control over their borders. The laws as they stand, and the rule of law as it’s set up, make it incredibly difficult to actually deport people. For example, you don’t know where somebody is from because they burn their papers once they cross the border. It can be incredibly difficult to get any nation to readmit them—as is particularly a problem for European nations. This has basically led to a frustration of popular will for a very long time. Most Americans actually have much more favorable views of immigration than most Europeans, but even those who think that we should be a nation of immigrants, that immigrants have made very significant contributions to the well-being of the United States—many who are themselves immigrants—will say, we have to get this problem with illegal immigration under control. The truth of the matter is that if we completely follow all of the restrictions on how these agencies can act, it’s going to look like the last 30 years. We’re not actually going to have any effective control of the border. So what are we supposed to do? What’s supposed to be the solution to this problem?
Saul: Yes. Those questions are actually directly related, which is interesting. The short answer to the first one is that Trump right now, with the most recent updated numbers that we have, is still deporting fewer people than President Barack Obama did. So, to just put that in historical context, it’s early yet. He’s only six months into his administration. And right now, there’s something like 50,000 unauthorized migrants who are in detention facilities in the United States, which does represent a significant increase. So they’re arresting more people, though those people haven’t gone through deportation proceedings. The reason that it’s slower than Obama’s numbers, and that he’s deporting fewer people than Obama did, is that Obama set up a system where he was deporting a lot of people immediately after they crossed illegally. So they would come across the border—and this gets into some kind of boring nuances in immigration law and how it works in the United States—but the general thrust of it is, Obama changed some of the rules about what we could do when somebody crossed the border illegally and created a window for removal. He acted on that window. That was one prong of a multi-pronged strategy he had to reduce illegal immigration. So more people were coming under Obama, and he was deporting them quickly after they got here. So his deportation numbers are really high.
Right now, very few people are coming across the border—historically low numbers of people. That’s one of the big wins of the Trump administration. And I do think that’s a good thing, which I’ll talk about in one second. But because there are fewer people coming across the border, Trump can’t just do what Obama did in order to deport people. What he has to do is go all across the country—like we’re seeing now—and go find people who are in the U.S. interior, who are working, who are going to school, who have families, who have been here for many years and are here illegally, and try and find those people, and then arrest them, and then get them out of the country. If he were to do it my way, he’d be respecting the rights that they’re entitled to, and their rights to representation, and their rights to due process, which in a lot of cases he’s trying not to do because that is so cumbersome. Our system makes it really hard to get rid of people once they’re here if they come illegally, which is why it’s been so hard for so many presidents to do.
It’s also a really good justification for keeping the rate of illegal immigration low, which I think is something Trump deserves credit for. I don’t think it’s a humane system to allow people to cross the border illegally and then they have to slip into the shadows, or claim asylum and get put into a system that’s going to take them five years to get before an immigration judge, or go live in hiding and off the grid for the next 20 years, and have to start a family in order to eventually apply for a visa or whatever it is. That’s not a good, humane system. There’s a couple of ways to fix it.
Mounk: Can I cut in here for a moment—because this is a bugbear of mine—and I completely agree with you on this. A lot of the time, I speak to people about this topic and I’m very deeply torn on it. My family have been refugees practically in every generation in living memory. I have the deepest concern for people fleeing civil war and persecution in big parts of the world. And there are still a lot of people who have genuine reasons for that. I also have a deep understanding of people who are here for economic reasons. If you come from a place where you just have very little opportunity, and you don’t know if you’re going to be able to put dinner on your table even if you work hard, and you have an opportunity to come to a place like the United States—well, of course, the most ambitious and courageous people are going to try and take that option. So I have deep empathy for all of that.
At the same time, I think the empathy for those people in those groups can sometimes lead to a complacency about just how messed up the current system we have is. And that is true in the United States—it’s perhaps even more true in Europe. At the moment, if you can afford the money to pay criminal bands to get you across the Mexican–U.S. border or to get you across the Mediterranean to Europe, if you’re willing to risk your life in the Darién Gap or in the desert on the southern border of the U.S. or in the Mediterranean, then you get to the country. But you are, at the very best, a second-class citizen. In the United States, the fact that you don’t have a work permit means you can stand outside a Home Depot and be hired for odd jobs at somebody’s home for the day. But you don’t have the kind of economic opportunity that citizens and residents of our country should have. You’re vulnerable to all kinds of forms of exploitation. You’re not able to participate in many basic systems of our social security setup. You may not be able to go see a doctor because it’s going to be hard to get health insurance. You’re probably not saving for a pension. And by the way, if your parent back in Central America or elsewhere in the world is deeply sick and you want to go and say goodbye to them or attend the funeral, you probably can’t do that. It is a deeply unfair existence.
In Europe, you are immediately given an apartment and monthly stipend, which probably is rather more pleasant than what you had in the country where you came from. But you’re not allowed to work, and you’re at the margins of society and have few prospects in the country in which you’re in. At the very moment when you, in principle, are most likely to integrate—to learn the language, to learn a trade—you are legally barred from doing any of that while you’re waiting for three, five, ten years for your claim of asylum to be adjudicated. So even if ultimately you gain that claim to asylum—or, more likely, it’s rejected but nobody actually deports you—you have gotten used to sitting around and doing nothing and vegetating. And the people who have the most energy, who don’t want to sit around and do that—well, they’re going to do the one thing they can do, which is to engage in criminal activity.
So, just to step back—I think a lot of the things that people are suggesting for how to fix all of these problems are morally very fraught and unjust. But let’s not kid ourselves and pretend that the status quo is particularly rosy or morally just either.
Saul: I think it’s beautifully said. I’ve seen a lot of your writing about this, which I also really appreciate, because I think the way you just articulated it is really in line with my views here. I’ll just add to that something that the Trump administration did in the most recent bill—the “big, beautiful” reconciliation bill—that didn’t get a lot of attention, and they haven’t gotten much credit for it, which I think they should. Part of all the funding they dumped into the immigration system included funding for new immigration judges on the border, which is so critically important. Because that backlog of asylum seekers who are waiting to have their cases adjudicated is a really big problem for the people who are genuine asylum seekers, because they are in the mix with a lot of economic refugees and economic migrants. My personal view is that I’m happy to welcome those people to the United States. When people come here and work, it’s good for the economy. I think it’s interesting culturally. I think there are all these benefits and upsides to it. We’ve actually demonstrated that we’re much better at assimilating people in the United States than I think a lot of folks on the right give us credit for. But those people aren’t here for the same reasons that someone fleeing a civil war is, or someone fleeing a governmental collapse is. And I think they should be treated differently by our immigration system. Right now they’re not. Our asylum system is effectively a loophole to get into the country and buy yourself a couple of years without having your case heard or without being properly assessed for whether you should be allowed here legally. The Trump administration wants to put more judges on the border. And their motivation for doing so is not to allow more people in—I don’t want to twist that—but long term, the structure that we have on the border should be representative of the democratic will of the people.
So if we have 800 more judges on the border in four years and there’s a Democratic president whose authority is pushing the federal immigration system to allow more asylum seekers in, then we’ll be able to actually process those people who are showing up at the border. And that, to me, is a good thing. So getting that backlog clear and limiting the amount of illegal immigration that there is—those are two really important parts of bringing order to the system, which will let us make it more humane. And Trump is doing that right now. We have historically low legal border crossings, and he just dumped a bunch of money into the system. Now, he’s doing it for a different reason than maybe many liberals want, but in the long term, I think it’ll be good for the immigration system to have more resources and have more funding in that way.
I don’t think we need ICE agents and funding for ICE and law enforcement—immigration law enforcement—that is more than many countries’ military funding. But I do think the immigration system is sorely lacking the kinds of resources and money that it needs to bring that kind of order, which I think is upstream from having a humane, functioning system, which we don’t really have right now. So there are elements of that that I think are hopeful for the future.
Mounk: I’m struck that a few years ago I was a fellow at the University of Oxford. I arrived late in the day to occupy the rooms I had kindly been given, and I had trouble accessing them because I first had to prove my right to be in the country. The person qualified to ascertain that wasn’t in the office, and so they wouldn’t give me the key. For a while, it looked like I’d have to sleep on the street for the night or whatever.
I’m saying that as a small anecdote to illustrate that in most countries, in order to work somewhere—including being a fellow at a university—you have to prove that you’re legally entitled to be there. And if an employer fails to ascertain the right to work of their employees, they’re going to face very, very stiff penalties. I know there are some such systems in the United States, and they’ve in some ways become more rigorously applied over the last years, but isn’t the much-mocked idea by Mitt Romney—to use that as the lever to control illegal immigration—actually plausible? Isn’t the point that we should want a workforce that is actually legally entitled to be here, with all of the rights and all of the ability to advocate for themselves that comes with that? And then we can hopefully win the political argument for various groups of workers that should be able to come to the country—because America has historically been a country of immigration—and that is going to have all kinds of economic benefits. But shouldn’t we be much more strict about clamping down, for example, on employers—like virtually every restaurant in the country—that employ a lot of illegal immigrants? And isn’t it something on which there’s a weird bipartisan consensus? Because Democrats don’t want to do that out of some understandable but perhaps misplaced sense of humanitarianism. Republicans don’t want to do that because they worry they’re going to piss off corporations and chambers of commerce and some of the rich donors.
Saul: Yeah, I think there are solutions out there that exist—like the mandatory E-Verify system—which wouldn’t be perfect, but would be a step in the right direction. It would set up a system where employers are required to verify that the people they’re employing have legal status to be here.
The big picture is that there are basically three ways to solve this problem. One is the Trump method: limit the number of people coming here illegally by sending the message that they’re not welcome and by enacting draconian policies designed to scare them away.
The second way is to implement a range of legal pathways to citizenship, which Biden tried to do—but he tried to do it without Congress. So, a lot of what he implemented is now being undone by Trump, because it was all based on executive power. But the idea is: if you open more legal pathways, you get fewer people coming here illegally.
The third approach is some kind of combination of the two: you have strong border security and you close the loopholes in the asylum system, but you also create many more legal pathways—for temporary status, for people who want to come here to work, to study, to train, or whatever it might be. I favor that third method because I think it combines the best of what both sides have to offer in our tribal, duopoly politics. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for a country—a sovereign nation—to say: we want to know who is here, we want documentation, and we want to make sure that if someone is working, claiming benefits, attending a public university or school, they’re here legally. That they fall under the same umbrella as the citizens and legal residents of our country. I think that’s a completely fair and reasonable desire for a nation to have—and we’ve done a poor job of it. I think Joe Biden really made a mess of the immigration system. And we’re seeing the backlash now, because Trump has found a powerful wedge issue. He’s used it to consolidate executive authority and power, and he’s finding broad political support for it—because people were so fed up with what they saw under Biden. Which, again, is a good reason to keep illegal immigration low in the first place.
In the rest of the conversation, Yascha and Isaac discuss being wrong about Donald Trump, and whether we can accurately predict Trump’s next move. This part of the conversation is reserved for paying subscribers…
