During a conversation this morning on “Coffee with the Contrarians,” Norman Eisen kicked off the conversation with a deceptively simple question about where things stand in relation to Donald Trump’s attack on the rule of law.
Trump’s growing pile of defeats speak for themselves: Courts have stopped his plans for military occupations of U.S. cities, always the ones that didn’t vote for him. His so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs have been found illegal, and his birthright citizenship ban was ruled unconstitutional. His former election lawyer Harmeet Dhillon is 0-22 (so far) in her effort to grab sensitive voter-roll information from states across the country and Washington, D.C. Nationwide protests forced his administration to abandon an archipelago of immigration warehouses. Universities, law firms, and media companies that have chosen pushback over capitulation have won.
So, I argued, observing Trump’s losing record isn’t an exercise in optimism. It’s realism. Norm Eisen replied by invoking the late, legendary playwright and dissident Vaclav Havel’s words to him.
“Havel used to think I was too optimistic,” he reflected. “And he used to say, ‘Norman, don't be optimistic, but you can be hopeful.’”
With that introduction, we launched into a wide-ranging conversation about Trump’s ambitions to skirt the law and Constitution to turn the nation’s capital into a self-glorifying “Versailles,” including in the Kennedy Center, Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the court-blocked East Wing ballroom. We then moved on to Attorney General Todd Blanche’s failed effort to keep unqualified Trump loyalists in U.S. Attorney positions, despite their failure to achieve Senate confirmation — and ended with the “objectively bizarre” saga of Trump’s executive assistant Natalie Harp.
Watch the full video at the top of this newsletter.
