Welcome to the "occupation" (Video with Harry Litman)

This conversation originally aired in a Substack Live on Thursday.

The three-day trial against Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth and the Department of Defense was bookended by defiance.

Days before it began, the Defense Department extended the deployment of troops in California for 90 days, pushing past Election Day in November. On Day One, Trump doubled down again by sending the D.C. National Guard into the nation’s capital. His decision to put D.C.’s Metropolitan Police Department under federal control sparked a lawsuit.

In this video,

Harry Litman

and I unpacked what that trial revealed. Perhaps presciently, Senior U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer spoke about the emergence of a "new national police force" designed to "intimidate" and bring about "certain types of behavior." California’s lawyer Meghan Strong described the deployment of nearly 5,000 troops in the state as an “occupation.”