Trump's Trials - In legal battles over his agenda, Trump puts support for his policies to the test

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

As courts continue to push back against President Trump and his policies, the White House is showing no intention of allowing the narrative about the administration's legal challenges to stay inside the courtroom. Read more.Support NPR and hear every episode sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

It's Trump's Terms from NPR. I'm Scott Dettre. We're going to be doing all sorts of things nobody ever thought was even possible. It's going to be a very aggressive first hundred days of the new Congress. Unpredictable, transformative next four years. The United States is going to take off like a rocket ship. Each episode we bring you NPR's coverage of President Trump acting on his own terms. And that means sometimes doing things that no American president has tried before. NPR is covering it all in stories like the one you are about to hear right after this.

On the Embedded Podcast. No, no. It's called denying us freedom of speech. It's misinformation. Like so many Americans, my dad has gotten swept up in conspiracy theories. These are not conspiracy theories. These are not conspiracy theories. These are reality.

I spent the year following him down the rabbit hole, trying to get him back. Listen to Alternate Realities on the embedded podcast from NPR, all episodes available now. I'm Elsa Chang. President Trump is going to battle against the judicial system and against the critics who argue that he is denying immigrants due process. Trump is betting that Americans care more about removing gang members than whether they get a by-the-book court hearing. And Piers Franco Ordonez has this story on how Trump is picking favored political issues to test the U.S. system of checks and balances. Last week, President Trump spent days attacking the judge who tried to stop him from deporting members of a Venezuelan gang, trained de Adagua and other migrants.

He laid out why he felt the various fights he's having with the judicial branch help him more than hurt him. I just can't imagine that the Democrats are taking this issue where they want to have them back. You know, so now they have men playing in women's sports, they have transgender for everyone, they have open borders, they have all of their crazy policies that are, I think, 95-5, not 90-10, okay? And their new policy is, let's bring Trenton DiIragua back into our country. Let's bring the worst, these are the worst gang members there are. Trump and his team have no intention of allowing these cases to only play out in the courts.

Instead they're driving headlines. His spokesman, Harrison Fields, tells NPR that Trump is quote, delivering on the common sense policies that helped him win the election. And that quote, leftist judges shouldn't stand in the way. It's a strategy that one veteran Republican strategist compared to a matador waving a red cape of a provocative political issue. Doug High says Trump knows very well that all of Washington and the press will follow him like a charging bull.

Well, there are legal proceedings and then there's the politics to this. And the politics are the rhetoric that we hear from Trump. That's what drives the attention. He says by constantly churning out aggressive rhetoric, Trump is able to set the parameters of the debate so that Democrats and the media are responding to him and not the other way around. In politics, you always want to be talking about what you want to talk about and have your opponent talk about what you want to talk about.

Legal cases move slowly and can be boring. They often hinge on complexities the ordinary public doesn't care about or understand. Sandy Moyer is the chairwoman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly of North Carolina. She says Trump knows what the public does care about. They want to be able to be safe in their own neighborhoods. She says her neighbors worry about quote activist judges encouraging other judges to make questionable rulings that will make it harder for Trump. There is a concern that all right is this going to delay this issue that we want to see swiftly being handled? The White House

says it's going to obey court orders and they're confident they're ultimately going to win the court cases. And there are a lot of them. Trump has also attacked a judiciary for hampering his efforts to cut the federal workforce. This weekend, Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, criticized a judge who blocked an executive order banning transgender people from serving in the military. John McHenry, a Republican pollster with North Star Opinion Research, says it makes sense that Trump and his team are picking these specific issues to go public.

So, when you're picking the fight, you're essentially fighting from your safest ground. McHenry says reasonable people may disagree about immigration and who should be allowed to remain in the country. But Trump is making this about deporting criminals. It's harder for the other side to argue it on the point of, no, you shouldn't be deporting gang members. 80% of Americans probably do think you should be deporting gang members as quickly as possible, and they don't really care about any constitutional rights or separation of powers between, you know, the presidency and the judicial. The administration has given little evidence that the deportees even are gang members.

But Jenny Stromer-Galley, who studies political messaging at Syracuse University, says if Trump and his surrogates allow the lawyers to start telling the story, they lose the message. The Trump administration wants the fight with the judicial branch. She says it's about reinforcing Trump's image that only he, a strong executive, can cut through the gridlock of Congress and the judiciary. They're not willing to let the judiciary and these processes just play out because then to some degree they're acknowledging that the judiciary could be a check on the executive

branches power. Which, she says, appears to be the only constraint on the president's power, since the Republican-led Congress appears to have deferred to Trump's authority. Franco Ordonez, NPR News. Before we wrap up, a reminder, you can find more coverage of the Trump administration on the NPR Politics Podcast, where you can hear NPR's political reporters break down the day's biggest political news with new episodes every weekday afternoon. And thanks, as always, to our NPR Plus supporters who hear every episode of the show without sponsor messages. You can learn more at plus.npr.org. I'm Scott

Detro. Thanks for listening to Trump's terms from NPR.