Good morning to you. It is Saturday, June the 6th. Donald Trump was really looking forward to this summer. The stars aligned for him to oversee both the country’s 250th anniversary and America’s turn hosting the World Cup. Grand events with massive audiences and plenty of pomp and circumstance. And Trump was planning on being at the center stage for all of it.
Trump, who as you know is the recipient of the inaugural FIFA Peace Prize, is expected to be involved throughout the World Cup tournament. And as part of the 250th anniversary festivities, he’s constructing a massive stage at the White House for a UFC cage fight on June 14th, which also happens to be Trump’s own birthday. What a coincidence.
And then there’s the Great American State Fair, a week weeksl long event to be holded hosted on the National Mall. Now, this was originally supposed to kick off with a big opening day concert, but the majority of artists who were announced as part of that lineup dropped out when they learned it was actually a Trump event.
And now Trump plans to headline it himself. So now a ma a MAGA rally will serve as the kickoff to what is ostensively a celebration of the anniversary of the founding of the United States of America, which is right out of the authoritarian playbook. Get the people to conflate the strong man with the state itself. And Trump has been deploying this tactic prolifically across the second term, seeking to lodge himself in our national consciousness so that he becomes interchangeable with the idea of America itself.
Consider the many things that have been named after Donald Trump since he retook the White House. A government website to buy medication, a new class of battleship, tax-free savings accounts with the IRS, the United States Institute of Peace, which is a congressionally funded think tank, and the John F.
Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts, which was created by Congress. Both cases, the name changes, came after the Trump administration installed handpicked boards of directors, and both are likely illegal. We’ll have more on that in a moment. For the country’s 250th anniversary, the administration has put Trump’s vis on passports, on commemorative coins, the national park season pass, and a $250 bill with his face has also been proposed.
In each of these cases, Trump enjoys some deniability. According to him, it’s always someone else’s idea. Ruth Bengat, who literally lo wrote the book on strong men, argues that what Trump is doing is what we’ve seen from autocrats around the world for the past century. Quote, “The leader must be everywhere.
His face must be everywhere. His name must be everywhere. His aesthetic, his taste must be reflected in buildings, in the people around him. The autocrat wants to remake the world in his own image.” End quote. But here’s the thing. Trump is undertaking this effort to project power that he does not actually possess.
Donald Trump is a deeply unpopular figure with unresolved misadventures at home and abroad, a looming election where his party is all but certain to lose ground, and some of the worst polling of any time that he’s been in office. Even as he tries to project a grand image, he’s losing political capital every single day. 61% of Americans disapprove of how Donald Trump is handling his job as president.
That’s according to a poll released this week by The Economist and Yuggov. Trump’s approval rating among independents is downright awful. 21% approve, 71% disapprove, putting him 50 points underwater in that same Yuggov poll. In a new Fox News poll, 71% of disapprove of Donald Trump’s handling of the economy. That’s a record low for Trump across both his terms for a president who ran on dealing with the economy.
And take a look at Trump’s overall approval over both terms. This chart shows net approval, meaning approval minus disapproval. As you can see, we’re under the net zero line. That means that Trump has had a net negative approval for almost his entire time in office. The lighter learn the lighter line is his first term approval.
The darker is his second term approval. But throughout his first term, Trump’s never hit the lows that he’s already hit so far in his second term. And we’re not looking at ups and downs either. The second term has been straight downhill. He’s finding a new bottom with each poll. And there’s a cost to that unpopularity.
Republicans facing tough re-election battles in the fall are acutely aware of how unpopular this president and so many of his policies are. On Wednesday, the House of Representatives passed a war powers resolution which calls on the president to either withdraw troops deployed as part of his war against Iran or to come to Congress for approval.
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Four Republicans, Tom Barrett, Warren Davidson, Brian Fitzpatrick, and Thomas Massie joined Democrats to pass the measure 215 to 208. Barrett and Fitzpatrick are in particularly difficult elections in toss-up districts this November. The House also passed an $8 billion aid package for Ukraine with 18 Republicans joining Democrats to push the bill through in defiance of the president who has been apprehensive about further funding for Ukraine.
Two times in one week, the Democrats in the House have advanced a foreign policy measure with the help of Republicans and against the wishes of Republican leadership. In the Senate, three Republicans who are fighting to keep their jobs, Susan Collins of Maine, Dan Sullivan of Alaska, and John Huad of Ohio, voted alongside Democrats on an amendment which would stop Donald Trump from creating a 1.
8 billion slush fund that could be doled out to January 6th riers. The measure still failed 49 to 50. But the Trump administration had already walked back on that fund earlier in the week amid furious public and judicial backlash. And all of this is with Republicans controlling the presidency in both chambers of Congress, which is very unlikely to be the case after November’s midterm election.
So the push back you’re seeing now, which is in many crucial cases working, is ascendant. It is building. It is gaining strength. Donald Trump is plastering his name and his face on American institutions and documents and events to trick you into thinking that he is all powerful. But the truth is, he only has the power that we that you allow him to take.
Even as we speak, we’re waiting for Trump’s name to be literally chiseled off the facade of the Kennedy Center building after a judge ordered it removed by the end of next week because Donald Trump was grabbing at power that he did not possess and because the people did not allow him to take that power.
For more on this, I’m joined by the historian Tim Snyder. He’s a professor at the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. He’s the author of several important books, including on freedom and on tyranny, 20 lessons from the 20th Century. Professor Schneider, good morning to you. Thank you for being with us.
Last month, you wrote about the era of quote super losers. Uh, in which you said, I’m quoting from you, a super loser is a leader of great power or one-time superpower whose disastrous choices lead to a crash. He possesses a combination of skills that allow for a rise to personal power and the collapse of state power. Tell me more about this.
This is a portrait of a couple of leaders, most importantly for us, Donald Trump. He has undeniable political talent which has allowed him to rise to the office of the presidency, but he has no sense of what the national interest what might be or what a country might be. And so you have a very lethal combination, a skill set that allows for power, but once in power, all he’s really able to do is make the state weaker.
This is something which has been observable around the world from the beginning. And I think the polling you’re showing reveals that Americans are starting to see it too. All that the man brings is destruction and weakness. >> I think Ruth Ben brought up an interesting point. We we were talking about the $250 bill, which is not a legal thing.
We don’t have you’d have to introduce a bill in Congress to authorize it. It would have the president’s face on it, which is again not something that we do in America. All sorts of things are changing. And she said the the interesting point about this is that in order to get some of these things done that Donald Trump is doing that are clearly uh not legal or or outside the normal uh course of law.
He’s got to get a lot of people to prove their loyalty to him to do it. And that that’s part of the system that these authoritarian rule rulers have. They they get people to break the law for them. >> Yeah, this this is exactly right. And this is a crucial underlined theme of I think of 2026.
As we look towards the elections that are coming up in November, how many people will be willing to break the law for Donald Trump and all these little examples, all these kind of embarrassing examples and involving coins or writing on walls or likenesses or whatever, they’re test cases of that. The big case is the military, right? Where yes, he’s trying to bribe the military by giving it half a trillion dollars so that the military will break the law for him in November.
That’s what this is all about. It’s about building up a custom where it’s normal to break the law for a person. That’s what he’s trying to do, but it’s not going to work. What? And let’s talk about why it’s not going to work. Cuz it’s actually fairly obvious, although you really lean into this in your writings and your social media reminding people that what we still have in this country is agency.
We still have the ability to demonstrate on many levels, including voting in primaries and voting in uh in elections and public demonstrations and uh taking positions on things, but this is the moment to do it, right? You don’t want to you don’t want to have to answer to your kids and your grandkids in 25 years when they ask you, “What did you do in 2026?” You don’t want to say nothing.
>> Yeah. Number one, you’re absolutely right. You’re always in history and your choices matter. And and not making a choice to act is also a choice. Number two, this guy has weaknesses, greedy. These are weaknesses that one has to exploit. One can’t imagine that history is going to bring this to you.
You have to take the fight to them. And the third thing is absolutely right. When there are conventional things you can do like vote, get out the vote, do those things, but also do unconventional things. Protest, organize, make sure people around you realize this is a special moment. >> Talk to me about that a little bit and maybe maybe through some of your personal experience.
There are a lot of people who look at this and see it’s wrong and and you can make comparisons to Germany in the 1930s where, you know, freedom started to erode and things started to go wrong, but most people said, “Hey, we’re pretty solid. Uh you’re not going to take a country like Germany, which is so ascended and uh academically advanced and scientifically advanced and culturally advanced.
He he’s not going to ruin it.” Uh how do regular people get involved in how do you cross the line into unconventional things if you don’t think you’re a radical or an activist? Yeah, that’s a wonderful question. I appreciate the comparison to Germany because we in a way the one way that it’s similar that people don’t think about is that Germany should have been the superpower of the 20th century, right? And apart from every all the horrible things they did, they also just blew that chance.
Just like with Trump, you know, Trump is trying to blow our chance to be a power in the 21st century. But yeah, you put your finger on the key. It’s not about necessarily revising who you think you are. It’s about remembering who you think you are and then just doing some little thing with other people regularly that affirms who you are.
If everybody does that, that will be enough. >> You said something to me. It was right after Donald Trump’s re-election uh last year. Uh we were together on air and you reminded people something changed. You didn’t change. Remember who you are. And I I remember that very clearly that we’re still the same people that we were.
U professor, stand by for a moment. I’m going to take a quick break and we’ll continue this conversation on the other side. Professor Timothy Snider uh is a professor at the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. I’m back with Timothy Snyder, historian and professor at the University of Toronto.
Um, professor, here’s one of the things that that, you know, I I don’t really like spending a lot of my time talking about ballrooms and arches and reflecting pools and things like that, but there’s always another story here. It’s never just what you think it is. The Washington Post uh has written about some of these things and said that more than half of the publicly identified donors to President Donald Trump’s White House ballroom project have won new or expanded federal contracts worth more than $50 billion dollar during the past 6 months
according to a report released Thursday by a government watchdog group. This is the thing, right? It’s never just what you think it is. It went from being a $400 million ballroom that neither of us were going to have anything to do with. Then it became a mill billion dollar boardroom that taxpayers were going to pay, but neither of us would probably ever be invited to anyway.
And now it’s it’s a $50 billion transfer of wealth to companies that are involved in it. I don’t know whether it’s a protection racket or it’s bribery. It’s something that that seems less obvious some was less obvious than what it seemed like when it first was announced. It’s it’s a laundromat. And the fact that it has this giant sign outside now, you know, makes it look like a laundromat. That’s what it is.
It’s a laundromat. If you look at Trump’s real estate career, the man didn’t make money by building buildings or selling them. He did make money by having buildings and using them as laundromats, having them as places where money could go in and out, especially Russian money and money from outside the country.
This is how he operates. So now he’s taken our White House, the people’s house, and he’s turned it into his own personal laundromat where money can go in and money can go out and there’s no oversight and his personal friends profit and everyone else suffers. That’s what it is. He’s turning the White House into a laundromat.
>> What do you make though of people who say, “Well, he’s not going to run for a third term.” Which, by the way, I never know whether that’s true or not with Donald Trump because he does talk about it from time to time and he’s got hats that are sold at the White House that say Trump 2028.
But putting aside putting that aside, making the assumption that he’s not going to run again. Um, what’s this for? >> Well, I mean, his default, I mean, I I take a different view. His default is that he’s going to stay in power forever if he can. He’s going to he’s going to do whatever we let him do. So, the question isn’t is he going to run for a third term or is he going to be a military dictator? The question is what are we going to let him do? Because if we let him do it, he would stay in power forever and name everything after
himself and put fake gold on top of everybody, you know, like that’s what he would do if we let him. So this is I I think Ruth Benji has it exactly right. He’s trying to create the impression that he’s inevitable, that there’s no choice besides him. This is what this is all about.
And it’s up to us to create other ideas that not just for the elections in 26 and 28, but in general better, different, more attractive ideas of what the 250th anniversary of our country means and what the future of our country could be. And what’s interesting about this is is while many in the country have have developed a sense of despair, you um have not.
You’ve almost taken a different view. You’ve taken a view of empowerment. you you’ve decided you’re going to use parts of your agency that you may not have even you’re going to use muscles you you may not have used in the past and didn’t know you had. And I’m seeing that increasingly with rallies with uh with voter registration with turnout in in primaries with the kinds of people who are getting elected.
People are reclaiming agency that was sitting dormant for a while. >> Yeah. I mean I think people are making a couple of connections. One connection is that the reason why everyday life is hard is because this government is specifically corrupt. And then once you correct once you connect rule of law and democracy on the one side to why is life hard on the other side, you realize okay there’s a politics which makes sense which is getting rid of the crew who are unbelievably corrupt and replacing them with people who are going to obey rules
and have some kind of brighter future. But I think the second people are make the connection people are making is as you say with history itself. If you think about the 250th right the the people in 1776 were far from perfect. They were very flawed and so are we. But they were rebels in their own time. And the only way for America to be better is for people to be rebels in their own time.
Right? Stealing a phrase from Frederick Douglas. You have to say I’m involved in this. I’m a part of this. I’m a little bit of this flow and I can make things different. And the thing is it it’s catching when you see other people do and you find people who are better at it than you are or more courageous than you are. Then it’s catching.
Then you do more and you’re more effective. But also you feel better about yourself as a as a citizen, as an American, as somebody in the country. >> Uh I was discussing the fact that 18 Republicans crossed over and voted with Democrats to uh to continue funding the fight in Ukraine. You remember when we started funding Ukraine, I think it was one one Republican member of the House voted against it.
It was almost unanimous. And now we’re celebrating the fact that 18 Republicans crossed over to support the defense of Ukraine. This was a a Republican party priority. >> Yeah. Yeah, I mean it’s a good it’s a good example how people will take the cult of personality which is Trump over the interests of the United States of America which it just to be fair most Republicans and most Democrats understand very similarly along with independents on this issue.
It’s quite clear that a China backed Russian attempt to destroy the western order um and undermine the rule of law in general is not in anybody’s interest and Republicans understand that perfectly well. So Ukraine is a test of whether people can return to thinking about the interests of the country or prefer the personal whims of someone who likes to imagine that he lives in a world of oligarchs and dictators.
The pro Trump’s problem is that he wants to be like Putin. But the rest of us should want to be like people who care about our own country. And I think you know I think people people have always understood that. And that’s what makes Ukraine a kind of classic oligarch issue. It’s about dictators who sympathize with other dictators.
people generally understand that Ukrainians have the right to defend themselves and that they can and should win this war. >> Professor, I have to thank you. This will be your last appearance with me on this show, but I I suspect it will not be our last appearances together, but thank you for your uh your support and your friendship to of our show for the last several years.
Professor Tim Snyder is a professor at the Monk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy at the University of Toronto. Coming up, closer look at an unsigned late night order from the Supreme Court. As the Atlantic’s Adam Server puts it, the high court has invented a right to discriminate. I’ll talk to our friend Melissa Murray about it next.
There’s a region in Alabama called the Black Belt. It originally got its name from the rich, fertile soil which is abundant in the region, which makes it ideal for planting crops like corn, peanuts, and in the early years of the United States, cotton. It’s a 23count region that spans from east to west across the southern and central parts of the state.
Remember this map, please, because it’s going to be very important for the context of the rest of the story. Slave plantations once thrived there, which meant that a high concentration of enslaved black people ended up in the area. And to this day, much of the state’s black population still lives there. As a result, the black belt took on a second meaning, one that has political implications.
Loc located located along the black belt are some of America’s most historic towns and cities, including Montgomery, considered the birthplace of the civil rights movement. That’s where Rosa Parks was arrested for refusing to move to the back of the bus, which sparked the Montgomery bus boycott.
Also located in the Black Belt is Selma, where civil rights activists began a protest march that culminated with Bloody Sunday in March of 1965 when law enforcement attacked the marchers at the foot of the Edund Pettis Bridge. Images of the brutal attack shocked the nation. It garnered support for the marchers and the cause they were fighting for, the right for black people to vote and for their votes to count equally.
The Selma March laid bare why it was necessary to enact legislation that would guarantee that right. Just days after Bloody Sunday, Congress prioritized the passage of the Voting Rights Act, which Lyndon B. Johnson signed into law later that summer. Fast forward to today, 61 years later, and Alabama might be where the Voting Rights Act dies, too.
Alabama has a history of diluting black voting power by gerrymandering the congressional districts along the black belt. Following the 2020 census, the Alabama state legislature drafted a new congressional map in 2021 that included one black majority district, District 7. You can see it there. Bottom left side of the map, the green district.
It’s located along the western half of the black belt. Makes sense. The eastern half, however, was broken up among three other districts, some of district 6, but primarily district 2 and district 3. A group of Alabama voters sued, accusing the state of racially discriminating against black voters, which would be in violation specifically of section two of the Voting Rights Act.
And the case made its way all the way to the Supreme Court, which affirmed in 2023 that yes, Alabama’s map was illegal. So, the case was sent back to a lower court and Alabama was ordered to create a new map. But the new map that they submitted was not that different from the previous one. You can see it here. The maps look pretty much the same.
District 7 in green expands just a bit to the south in the 2023 map, but the demographic makeup of the districts didn’t meaningfully change. The federal court overseeing the case rejected it and appointed a special master to take over the creation of a new actually fair map which included two black majority districts.
District 7 and now a new district 2 both in green. You can see them there located along Alabama’s black belt. This is the map that the state used for its 2024 elections. And for the first time in its history, guess what happened? Alabama elected two black lawmakers to the House of Representatives in the same year. Still, Alabama decided to continue challenging the case and pursued it to full trial in February of last year.
That hearing lasted 7 days. The court heard live testimony from 17 witnesses. It reviewed more than a thousand pages of briefings and more than 350 exhibits. And ultimately the three judge panel of the district court of the northern which included two Trump appointees concluded that the state had engaged in quote an intentional effort to dilute black Alamians voting strength and evade the unambiguous requirements of court orders standing in the way. End quote. Okay.
So it’s pretty clear that the courts keep saying that they were trying to do that we’re doing the wrong thing in Alabama. All of that work is being undone in the aftermath of the Supreme Court decision in Louisiana v. Cala, which is a similar case of racial gerrymandering that was decided by the Supreme Court in late April.
It effectively gutted section two of the Voting Rights Act, severely narrowing what the courts may consider to be racebased discrimination. But we’re still in the process of finding out the full extent of that decision. In the wake of the Cala ruling, Alabama went back to the US Supreme Court. It wanted to get rid of the court enacted map that created the two black majority districts that you’re looking at on your left in favor of the older map that the district court found to be racially discriminatory, the map with only one black majority district. The Supreme
Court entertained the idea last month. It ordered the district court to reconsider the case using Louisiana vala as the new guidance. So, the three judge panel at the district court reviewed the case again, and it held its ground. Quote, “Our previous review of the undisputed evidence left us in no doubt that Alabama’s legislatively enacted plan intentionally discriminated based on race in violation of the Constitution.
” Our re-examination in light of Cala yields the same conclusion.” End quote. I mean, how many times you got to lose a case in court before you get the message? But that wasn’t good enough. In an unsigned order released this week, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ignored the district court, they ignored what I just read to you and told Alabama that it can go ahead and use the map that it wants to use despite years of review and a full trial overseen by the district court signaling that it is now effectively impossible to challenge
racially discriminatory gerrymandering or other voting practices in the aftermath of Louisiana versus Cala. Joining me is Melissa Murray. She’s an a professor of law at NYU and an MS Now legal analyst and co-host of the podcast Strict Strict Scrutiny. She’s also the author of the new book U the US Constitution, a comprehensive and annotated guide for the modern reader.
Melissa, welcome. That’s a that was a lot of explanation, but sort of necessary to make the point, right? that that section two of the voting rights act says you can gerrymander for certain reason for certain reasons including partisan reasons but not for racial reasons. >> Uh there are people who make the case that first of all in places like the black belt those two things are very similar.
>> Well virtually indistinguishable. So uh the court in an earlier case 2019’s Russo versus common cause said that there’s nothing for federal courts to do visav partisan gerrymandering. So effectively, states are doing it and they can do it and the federal courts can’t do anything about it. The problem in the south and in other parts, but especially in the south, is that partisan affiliation is often inextricably intertwined with race, which is to say that in places like Alabama, like the black belt, whites
tend to be Republicans and blacks tend to be Democrats. So if you are organizing your congressional districts to consolidate partisan advantage, you are doing it in a way that will disadvantage minority voters in the South. And the court in the Cala case really prioritizes partisan gerrymandering which is perfectly permissible to do and says like we can’t really figure out if it’s racial gerrymandering.
It’s probably partisan jerrymandering without really understanding or at least acknowledging that the two often run together and are indistinguishable. And so the court in Cala says you’ve got to show intentional discrimination here. And I don’t see that prove that you’re actually doing it to minimize black representation. >> Here’s the thing.
States aren’t dumb, right? They’re not going to be like, “You know what? I would love to disadvantage my black voters.” So, they all say, “Actually, we were just doing this to consolidate Republican advantage. We were doing this to ensure that incumbents can continue to win, and that’s why we did it.” Those are permissible grounds, and the court ignores the racial undertones that undergard it.
>> So, one watching the show might say, “We would rather not there not be partisan gerrymandering or racial jerry, right? That would be fun. >> That would be great.” >> But what has hap what has Louisiana vala done? It’s it’s narrowed how the court can interpret this, >> but the court has purposefully narrowed it, which I think is important to understand.
Louisiana versus Kelly is a watershed moment and it has really narrowed the moves that minority voters can make to challenge either under section two of the voting rights act or the constitution itself to maximize their opportunity to elect the candidates of their choice. I mean, and the other thing that I think is really important to emphasize here, and your leadup really made that clear, we had lower federal courts, which included Trump appointees.
The three judge panel had two Trump appointees here. >> They had a hearing. They addressed this question, very thorough, and they’re closest to this evidence. And the court, which is often the case in these voting rights cases, and we don’t call it out nearly as much as we should, the court constantly secondguesses these lower courts that are closest to this record evidence.
Like the lower court side was like, “Okay, you told us to come back and look at this in light of Kelly.” We looked at it. >> We looked at it. >> Yeah. Alabama is doing intent racial >> because I don’t follow this as closely as you do. I didn’t know that happens a lot that when the court says to the lower court, “Look at it.
” And the lower court says, “We looked at it. We’re good.” So this happens a lot in voting rights cases where there’s often a voluminous record like these cases are very fact intensive, very evidence heavy because you have to show that the state is doing something nefarious here like something purposeful. So there’s a lot of evidence.
Justice Alo who wrote the opinion in Kelly is almost always very skeptical of the lower courts and their factf finding in these cases and he’s almost always challenged by Justice Jackson, Justice Stomayor who incidentally are the only members of the Supreme Court who were district court judges before and understand how records are compiled, how district courts do their work.
So, you know, part of this is, I think, a neglect of the principles of the Voting Rights Act and their desire to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to be heard and that their votes aren’t diluted. But also, it is a huge kind of middle finger to lower courts that are doing the work and genuinely are trying to sus out what is going on here.
This court is like, we know best. >> Yeah. >> And they’ve constantly done that. >> Melissa, thank you for your clarity on this issue because I think it’s just one of those things that gets by a lot of people because we haven’t thought about it. It’s one of these things people threatened. They warned us that this was going to happen and then it happened and now we’re dealing with the actual uh circumstances, very specific circumstances because as you know I cover primary nights uh at the big board and some of these places the primary
canled, they’ve been suspended. They’ve been postponed. Some people have cast ballots in Louisiana that now are not valid because the districts have changed. This is really uh with with 149 days to go until the midterms, a very confusing situation. Melissa Murray is a professor of law at New York University and an MS Now legal analyst.
She’s also the author of the new and important book, The US Constitution, a comprehensive and annotated guide for the modern reader. All right, coming up, the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessum testified to the Senate Finance Committee this week that Bill Py once infuriated him so much that he told PY he was going to quote kick his ass.
But that’s all water under the bridge now because Besson says he supports PY’s appointment as acting director of national intelligence. PY has zero qualification for the spy chief job other than a history of going after Trump’s perceived enemies while heading the Federal Housing Finance Agency. The pick has incensed not only congressional Democrats but a significant number of Republicans as well, and it’s now threatening to derail Trump’s political agenda.
