With a Republican Congress bending to Trump’s every whim, the judicial branch is the last check on his power—and now he, Elon, and the MAGA regime have decided to wage war against it. Meanwhile, Trump wants to ax the Department of Education and is going after colleges he doesn’t like. Jon and Dan break down Trump’s latest (probably illegal) moves, check in with the DOGE-bags, and dig into Trump’s broader effort to dismantle the federal government. Then they dive into a new 2024 post-mortem from Blue Rose Research, revealing who voted—and why. For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email transcripts@crooked.com and include the name of the podcast.
Chapter 1: What illegal orders has Trump issued against the Department of Education?
Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm Jon Favreau. I'm Dan Pfeiffer. On today's show, we'll talk about Donald Trump's probably unlawful order to kill the Department of Education and his move to starve colleges of funding that have political views he doesn't like. Doge is busy making it harder for seniors to get their Social Security, which seems efficient. And they literally staged an armed invasion.
of the U.S. Institute of Peace. We'll get to that wild story. And because we're nerds, we're going to dive into the election postmortem from David Shore and Blue Rose Research, which is notable because it includes 26 million survey responses. So lots of data to dig through.
Chapter 2: Why is Trump at war with the judicial branch?
But first, now that we have a Republican Congress that seemingly exists only to do whatever Trump tells them to do, the last remaining check on the president's power is the judicial branch. which Trump and Elon and the MAGA regime are now going to war with.
So for several weeks now, the president's billionaire top advisor has been using his social media platform to call for the impeachment of judges that rule against the Trump administration. But the situation escalated last week when James Boasberg, the chief judge of the D.C.
Circuit Court, tried to block Trump from jailing people in a foreign prison without due process, an order that the Trump regime partly ignored, arguing that some of the flights were already over international waters when the ruling came down.
The MAGA position is apparently that the president should be able to lock up whoever he wants in an El Salvador mega prison run by a brutal dictator so long as he tells us they're a threat to America. We just have to take his word for it. So one of Trump's minions in Congress, Brandon Gill, introduced articles of impeachment against Judge Boasberg.
Trump himself also called for the judge's impeachment. And here's what he said when asked about it by Laura Ingram this week.
Many people have called for his impeachment, the impeachment of this judge. I don't know who the judge is, but he's radical left. He was Obama appointed. We have very bad judges, and these are judges that shouldn't be allowed. I think at a certain point, you have to start looking at what do you do when you have a rogue judge.
The judge that we're talking about, you look at his other rulings, I mean, rulings unrelated, but having to do with me, He's a lunatic. You have local judges, local federal judges, local judges, period, and DAs and prosecutors, DAs, state attorney generals, attorney generals that want to really take over. I think some of it's for the publicity. They love the publicity.
All of a sudden, they're on the front page of every newspaper, but they have no right to be.
So we are only about 60 days into Trump's second term and we are in a very dark place already. So dark, we even got this highly unusual statement from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts this week. Quote, for more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.
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Chapter 3: How is Elon Musk influencing political decisions?
This is the Trump administration thinks that they are on solid ground on this one because it's they think, you know, who really wants Venezuelan gangs in the United States? But the more we learn about this and the more information that's come out, not because of the government, but because of reporting and because some of these people's families have and lawyers have learned about where they are.
It is shocking, shocking what is happening. The New York Times reports that the Trump folks believe that the Alien Enemies Act, which is what Trump invoked to do this, allows federal agents to enter homes without a warrant.
So currently, immigration agents without a warrant can basically just knock on your door and ask to come in, and that's all they can do unless they have a warrant because of the Fourth Amendment.
But Trump and the government are basically now saying, well, Alien Enemies Act, if we think that there's a Venezuelan gang in there and we've labeled them a domestic terrorist organization, then we can just send federal agents in, federal ICE agents into people's house without a warrant. Now you may say, okay, well, if I'm a U.S. citizen, then they're not going to come to my house.
Well, how is anyone going to know? How's anyone going to know? They can show up at a U.S. citizen's house and say they suspect that Trende Aragua is hiding in your house and then take you away. And who's going to know since we're not doing due process anymore? We're just fucking putting people on planes, sending them to El Salvador and locking them up for indefinite periods of time.
It is just truly astounding that they've taken all of the checks and balances out of the system, right? You don't need to go to a judge to get a warrant to go in the house. And the person you get in the house, you do not have to present to a judge before you send them out of the country.
And if the Trump administration can be so fucking stupid as to accidentally cancel an Ebola prevention program – Do we really think they're not going to make some mistakes on the people they're deporting? And we're already hearing stories of these.
There are people waking up in an El Salvadorian mega prison that is famous for how horrible the conditions are, infamous for how horrible the conditions are, who – We're not members of these gangs, right, who should not have been subject to this because the point is you stop in front of a judge and a judge helps verify that this is the person that the Trump administration says it is.
And then if they are a member of this gang or if there's another reason why they should be deported, then they're deported. But now this is just – I mean it is fully and totally authoritarian. It runs against everything that our system was set up for.
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Chapter 4: What are the stakes in the Wisconsin Supreme Court race?
And Tesla is currently suing the state of Wisconsin. So the case may come to Brad Schimel.
And if you want to send a message to Elon Musk and to every Republican in the country about how toxic it is to be associated with what Elon Musk is doing, the best way to do that right now, the best way to inflict some measure of political accountability on Elon Musk and Donald Trump is to win this election in Wisconsin on April 1st.
Yeah, and it's close, as they always are in Wisconsin, so it's going to be a really tight race. In order to tip the race, we're sending John Lovett to Wisconsin this weekend. He's doing six kickoffs, and he's going to be around Madison on Saturday and Milwaukee on Sunday, so go see Lovett if you're in Wisconsin. And he'll be with Ben Whitcliffe, so he's chaperoned on this trip.
Yes, to be clear, he's chaperoned.
Yeah, we don't send him to Wisconsin by himself. And you can also go to votesaveamerica.com slash Wisconsin, and there's plenty to do as we get to Election Day here. Also, Tommy and I are not going to Wisconsin, but we are going to Norco, California this weekend, Dan.
That is not Norcal, California. That is Norco, California.
Norco, yeah.
It's about an hour and a half from- I was like, stay on your side of the grapevine, okay?
It's about- It's about an hour and a half east of L.A. We're going to be with Ro Khanna, who's doing a town hall in the district of a House Republican who refuses to hold a town hall, Ken Calvert. We've already been to Ken Calvert's district once when we were trying to elect Will Rollins in this last cycle. So we're heading back this time with Ro Khanna.
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Chapter 5: Is Trump's plan to eliminate the Department of Education feasible?
So as you heard him there, they're acknowledging that they'll need Congress to officially shutter the department, though they certainly don't have 60 votes in the Senate for that. Republicans have already said they'll introduce legislation right after Trump's announcement. What do you think happens here? What do you make of all this?
As you mentioned, they're not passing this bill, right? Congress is not going to act on this. To put that in some perspective about how hard it is to... to shut down the Department of Education. Ronald Reagan ran on it. It was a big part of his campaign platform. After winning more than 500 electoral votes in 1984, he couldn't get any traction on it.
So it has not become any more popular since then. The Economist YouGov ran this interesting poll where they asked people about the Department of Education, do you want to expand it, keep it the same, reduce it, or eliminate it? The plurality was expanded at 39%. The combined keep it the same and expand it was over 60, and only 17% of people wanted to eliminate it.
There is absolutely no appetite for this anywhere. What it is is it's just – this is sort of like the birthright citizenship thing. EO he did, he can say, promise is made, promise is kept, and he did this, and then it goes nowhere. But it does sort of create the predicate for Musk and Doge to go in there and eliminate it even further.
Maybe the building will still stand and there will still be an office that Linda McMahon will have the opportunity to go to periodically, but the core functions, absent some judicial intervention, are going to be gutted and it's going to have devastating effects.
Yeah, I mean, you know, they keep I think they know how unpopular it would be to sort of cut the funding or disrupt benefits and services. You got student loans in there. You got the education of the federal education department is responsible for Title one funds for the state. Title one funding is for school, public schools and disadvantaged communities. So poor working class families.
It's for children with disabilities. And so you have kids with disabilities, low income schools and all the student loans in the country. And the Trump administration is trying to say, well, they're either going to move the distribution of those under other departments or they're going to have a smaller or they're going to have I don't know what they're going to do.
But the idea that those services are going to be completely uninterrupted. just doesn't square with what most people in education believe, experts in education believe, and also how the entire Doge process has gone so far. That's the key point. That's the key point.
They might think to themselves, genuinely, that they're not going to disrupt any services and benefits, but they keep firing everyone who knows anything about education.
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Chapter 6: How is Trump's administration affecting colleges and universities?
Alan Blinder at the New York Times reported on Thursday about layoffs, hiring freezes, lab shutdowns at universities across the country. What did you make of that story?
I mean, this is the end result of what they're doing. I thought what was notable in that story was that they wrote that academia was caught flat-footed. I was like, oh, the one time the famously nimble academia was asleep at the wheel. I mean, there is a longer term challenge. There is more appetite for what Trump is doing here.
And it's not just because of the protests around Gaza and the controversy of how a lot of universities handle that and what some of the presidents said before Congress. Pew – this was in the New York Times – Pew tracks how people feel about the impact of various institutions on American society, and they ask people about universities.
In 2012, only 21% of Americans thought that universities had a negative impact on our society, and by last year, it was up to 45%. That's not just Trump and Republicans. That is the high cost of college. It is student debt crushing people and this idea that – people have been told on this idea that the best pathway to success is a four-year college education.
But you're going to leave there with so much debt that it is going to crush you financially. And universities have done a very bad job of both in the short term around Trump and the time before that of – one, dealing with the sort of indefensible rise in tuition, but in sort of explaining the role they play.
And because they are these nonprofit institutions, some of whom, like the most famous ones, who have billions of dollars in endowment, but then take taxpayer money. And what we have not explained, and they have not explained, and maybe people before Trump did not explain well, is that these universities are the laboratories for America, right? They're
are the ones doing the research that is helping us build new technologies, discover new medicines, figure out how to fight disease. And the universities haven't made that case, and people supporting that sort of R&D funding have not made that case.
Well, and the two problems you just mentioned are undoubtedly going to get worse because of what the Trump administration has already done. Universities have not kept tuition down. They haven't done a good job.
And so, you know, therefore, we are subsidizing higher costs at universities through financial aid, student loans and all the other stuff that the federal government does to help students attend school. Meanwhile, the costs keep rising and rising and rising. So that's a huge problem. But gutting a bunch of federal funding at universities, do we think that's going to make tuition go down?
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