“Chilling”: Trump Press Sec Hints Darkly at More Lawlessness to Come

President Trump’s lawlessness is escalating. First, he angrily tweeted that his predecessor’s pardons of January 6 committee members are invalid, while threatening to prosecute them. Meanwhile, the Trump administration appears to have violated a court order in deporting some Venezuelans. And his border czar flatly declared that the administration is set to ignore what judges say. At Monday’s briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt spun madly about all this, but her lack of clarity strongly hinted that Trump is on the precipice of a new level of lawbreaking. We talked to legal scholar Matthew Seligman, a skilled decoder of complicated legal messes. He explains why Trump’s latest moves are “chilling”—and why Leavitt’s ambiguity is only cause to anticipate more lawlessness, not less. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.