00:00:17.600Whether we like it or not, we're in bed with the right.
00:00:19.760So, Adrienne, we are coming to our listeners today, nine days into the second Trump administration.
00:00:28.140We're recording on Wednesday the 29th, which is important because by the time this comes
00:00:33.100out, what we're saying here will probably already be out of date.
00:00:37.460There have been a whole flurry of executive orders coming out of the new Trump administration,
00:00:42.940many of them touching on RB, you know, gender, identity, inclusivity, the way these things
00:00:49.700are constructed by and limited by citizenship, right?
00:00:54.920So we thought we wanted to have somebody on the show who could sort of hold our hands and walk us through this new emerging legal landscape.
00:01:06.580And I'm so glad that we got a hold of Mark Joseph Stern, the intrepid legal reporter at Slate, one of the smartest and most principled and insightful legal writers working for my money and also a really sweet guy.
00:01:22.800So, Mark, thank you so much for being with us here today.
00:01:25.660Thank you so much for having me on and for those kind words.
00:01:28.460I am truly delighted to be here, even though we'll be talking about so many awful things.
00:01:33.160Yeah, I do wish it was under better circumstances.
00:01:35.500Yeah, and I guess so many is already giving us the first keyword.
00:01:38.280We're going to have to narrow things down.
00:01:39.620This is basically the first few weeks of any Trump term at this point are essentially decorative
00:01:45.300gourd season for the very niche slice of person currently comprising like 100 percent of this
00:01:50.060podcast, which is queer people who like, uh, constitutional rights. Uh, it's just, there's
00:01:55.640like, there's a lot to pick from, uh, there's basically a new outrage sort of down the pike
00:02:00.580every 20 minutes. And, uh, you know, we're already, we've planned to talk about a thing that has
00:02:06.080already been rescinded like an hour ago. So, um, one thing that I think we should probably do at
00:02:11.320the beginning is to kind of just delimit what really we're going to be talking about and what
00:02:15.940we're going to focus on as you walk us through it, Mark. I agree with Moira that I've been
00:02:22.980dying to talk to you about these because with some of them, I really can't make heads or tails of
00:02:28.020them. But there's just too many of them. And that appears to be part of the design, isn't it?
00:02:33.680Oh, I certainly think so. I mean, Steve Bannon, one of Trump's advisors, has said the plan is to
00:02:39.380flood the zone. That is precisely what he's doing. This is really unprecedented. I mean,
00:02:45.260typically presidents sign a handful of executive orders on day one, Trump just started and never
00:02:51.060stopped. And a lot of these orders are poorly drafted. They are sloppy. They look like they
00:02:56.620were written with the help of chat GPT. There are weird grammatical errors and repetitions
00:03:02.160and formatting errors. And the one renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America
00:03:06.620truly sounds like it was written by AI doing its best to sound like maybe a seventh graders book
00:03:12.680report. And so they're not all created equal. Some of them are more serious than others. Some
00:03:18.400of them are more sweeping than others. Some of them sound really bad. And then I read them and
00:03:21.960I say, I'm not even sure what this does. Some of them don't sound so bad. And then I read them and
00:03:26.240I'm like, this is horrifying. And so it's a real mixed bag. And I do kind of wonder if Trump is
00:03:34.520forever changing how new administrations begin with this, because the next president, if he or
00:03:41.060she is a Democrat, it's going to have to repeal all of these on day one. And I do think we're
00:03:45.320entering maybe an escalation cycle where the first 24 to 48 hours of every presidency is just
00:03:51.500consumed by repealing and replacing a massive number of executive orders.
00:03:57.640You know, like you, Mark, I've been like reading these and reading about them and trying to parse
00:04:02.540out exactly what they do. Right. And it seems like a lot of these are really ambitious,
00:04:08.580expansive um orders that seek to sort of you know sometimes really change or expand the powers of
00:04:16.940the presidency itself um but then some of them are a little weird and the extent of their uh reach
00:04:26.160is kind of unclear to me and one of these was trump's dei order could you tell us a little
00:04:31.380bit about this because it's opaque to me how much this expands, like what it would do for federal
00:04:40.240programs and then also what it would do for the private sector.
00:04:44.700Yeah. So before I get into the details, I just want to sort of remind everyone when we talk
00:04:50.420about executive orders, we are just talking about something that the president tells the executive
00:04:56.860branch to do. The executive branch is not the only branch of government. As of this moment,
00:05:02.160the other two still exist. So an executive order cannot change existing law that Congress has
00:05:09.380enacted, although they can certainly try. An executive order cannot overturn a constitutional
00:05:15.640amendment. All that Trump can do with these is tell other agencies or the armed forces,
00:05:22.420here is how you have to operate. And they're all susceptible to legal challenge, as we've seen.
00:05:26.860Some of them have already, in fact, been blocked.
00:05:29.220So the DEI initiatives or repeals, I should say, that Trump has enacted are first and
00:05:37.240foremost aimed at ridding DEI of throughout the entire government, forcing every single
00:05:44.960agency as well as the military to abolish DEI programs, to abolish DEI councils, to
00:05:53.120abolish any kind of position or contract or program that mentions or reflects upon diversity,
00:06:03.480equity, or inclusion. And I'll just add, troublingly, he has inserted an A into this,
00:06:09.760D-E-I-A. The A stands for accessibility. Well, accessibility is required under the Americans
00:06:16.160with Disability Acts and follow-up legislation. So that's one area where Trump might try to
00:06:22.520legalize discrimination against disabled people through these orders, but he really can't. Now,
00:06:26.980whether there will be a pushback is another story. So the main goal here is to just purge
00:06:32.500all DEIA from the federal government. And I think he succeeded. I mean, again, this is an area where
00:06:38.000the president has very wide latitude. And I think that he has scared most agencies into submission.
00:06:45.420We've seen a lot of agencies already fire people, lay people off, put them on leave,
00:06:49.140who had work in the DEIA area. And notoriously, his administration also sent around an email
00:06:56.400telling every federal employee, you have to report colleagues who are covertly engaged in DEIA work.
00:07:07.180And if you don't, there will be discipline and penalties for you. So they've set up a snitch line
00:07:11.840requiring reporting of this kind of work. Now, I'd say that's the main thrust of the orders so far.
00:07:19.140Again, less than two weeks in, a lot could change. There have not been as many orders aimed at the
00:07:26.920private sector here. But what I think Trump is doing is laying the groundwork for a lot of
00:07:32.980investigations into the private sector if it continues to use DEIA. So these orders are filled
00:07:38.780with language claiming that DEIA is itself discriminatory, that it is a mandate that the
00:07:47.460race be considered, that sex be considered, that people of color be given special privileges,
00:07:53.420and that it is therefore a violation of various civil rights laws. And he has begun to order
00:07:58.640both the Justice Department and civil rights offices within different agencies to look into
00:08:04.300and investigate alleged violations of civil rights law that take the form of DEIA. So I think private
00:08:10.540employers are worried right now. They have not been directly targeted, but I think they are very
00:08:16.960much up next. And a lot of their offices of compliance that have been doing DEIA for a while
00:08:22.980in part to try to shield themselves from liability to argue, hey, we're inclusive. We are following
00:08:27.480civil rights laws. They are now doing a 180 and trying to erase the existence of these programs0.84
00:08:32.660in the first place. So let me get this straight, because my understanding was that a lot of these
00:08:42.300you know DEI human resources um like you know diversity and recruiting uh and like sensitivity
00:08:50.000parts of the employment world right these like large sectors my understanding was these were
00:08:57.780initiated in response to civil rights laws that arose sort of in the latter half of the 20th
00:09:06.640century that sought to end historic forms of discrimination and harassment based on these
00:09:12.560various identity categories that were historically excluded from positions of like dignity, power,
00:09:19.340you know, remuneration, right? So we're talking about like people of color, we're talking about
00:09:23.060women, we're talking about anybody who might be LGBTQ, right? And these are efforts to remediate0.97
00:09:31.040Their historic exclusion, first in the law and then in this kind of broader industry or sector of inclusion, diversity and HR professionals that stepped in to try and assist employers in complying with that law and dealing with the fallout when they don't.
00:09:53.960Right. But now what you're telling me, Mark, is that the Trump administration is sort of like a re-envisioned civil rights law that was meant to ameliorate those historic exclusions into something that can be used, like maybe even to reaffirm them.
00:10:08.460Right. To say it's, in fact, the attempt to not discriminate against women and people of color that is a violation of civil rights law.
00:10:16.940Can you tell me a little bit more about that line of thinking and where it comes from?
00:10:19.940Yeah, I mean, I think you've interpreted it correctly. I might put it a little bit more cynically. I think that a lot of corporations have used DEI as a shield when they are accused of racism or sexism or discriminatory hiring practices. They will put money into these programs and trainings. And then if someone claims discrimination, they say, well, we couldn't be discriminatory because, look, we do all this DEI stuff.
00:10:41.700And that was to some degree encouraged by the federal government up until about January 20th.
00:10:47.560I mean, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which is sort of like the chief enforcer and interpreter of civil rights laws, it has been promoting DEI work in the workplace and not for the cynical reasons I just laid out.
00:11:01.060I mean, I think that there was a hope that some of this would really break through.
00:11:04.600it would encourage employers to think critically about implicit bias and harassment and hostile
00:11:10.120workplaces and root out some of the ongoing discrimination that exists. But as soon as
00:11:15.340Trump took office, he fired much of the EEOC and has now anointed a new acting chair who
00:11:23.260considers DEI to be discrimination, reverse discrimination against white people and against
00:11:29.220men. And now she is putting out all of this guidance saying that if you have DEI, then you're
00:11:34.560going to be susceptible to enforcement actions. And that is real whiplash that I will say, I think
00:11:40.040corporate America just doesn't like. They really like stability. It's now feeling to them a bit
00:11:45.740like they were tricked into adopting these policies that now are going to follow them around
00:11:50.940and mark them as discriminators. But I do just want to add before we move on one stinger to this,
00:11:57.180which is that to me, to some degree, the DEI orders are a distraction from Trump's bigger,
00:12:05.060broader repeal of all existing affirmative action programs in government employment and
00:12:11.380contracting. So a couple of days after he issued the DEI orders, he repealed a series of executive
00:12:17.320orders that go back decades and decades that required the government to be an inclusive
00:12:23.800employer, I think affirmative action is almost a misnomer to attempt to build out diverse workplaces
00:12:29.400to ensure that they were not discriminating against people of color and against women to
00:12:34.280make a conscious effort to bring underrepresented minorities into the government into government
00:12:39.460work. This is stuff that survived Ronald Reagan, that survived George W. Bush. Trump has repealed
00:12:46.060that. And I think that is going to have an even bigger and immediate detrimental impact on the
00:12:50.440lives of a lot of Americans who aren't straight white men. And I just think all of this comes
00:12:55.180straight out of like the Republican Party and the Project 2025 ideology that sort of takes the
00:13:03.040idea of colorblindness to a new extreme and argues that really it's straight white men who are being
00:13:08.900discriminated against today, that they are the ones who face violations of their civil rights
00:13:13.560and that there's way too much wokeness and it's going overboard and it's elevating mediocre people
00:13:20.580of color and women over qualified straight white men. And this is an attempt to sort of right the
00:13:26.700ship. And this is, I think, rampant throughout Project 2025, throughout a lot of the Republican
00:13:32.120Party's policy documents and Trump speeches. I'm not surprised that they're trying to put it into
00:13:36.940law, but all of this stuff can be reversed by the next president. The big question is, will they
00:13:41.860push something like this through congress that really sticks for decades right you're saying
00:13:45.900this is like you know this project 2025 it's clearly an sort of a very old GOP talking point
00:13:51.320at the same time it is also clearly how someone like Elon Musk sees DEI right where like DEI sort
00:13:56.800of becomes just code for the presence of non-white non-male people in positions of authority and0.81
00:14:04.620power right and you see that I think very very well in the military ban which we're going to get0.96
00:14:10.040to where it's clear that like the presence of women in the military is taken to be a negative0.95
00:14:16.820by itself it's not an indicator of bad practices only through bad practices could these women
00:14:21.340possibly have risen to these to these um uh to these positions of power and you got that with0.99
00:14:27.680in hexeth's confirmation hearing right where um he kept going on about quotas that that didn't exist0.85
00:14:32.760because like to him there was just no way that the ladies were just succeeding on on on the merits
00:14:39.200that they were measured on um i also i do want to briefly point out that like the um i always love
00:14:46.400it when the free speech to you know snitch line pipeline strikes again like i feel like republicans
00:14:52.320cannot ever safeguard anyone's freedom of speech should you maybe report on your neighbor do you
00:14:57.100do you need a 1-800 number you can call just uh very very fun and and i think you're right that
00:15:02.120that's of course how the chilling effects of this like will be suffused well beyond what the federal
00:15:08.080government is really able to direct the influences, the fear of being singled out, the fear of the
00:15:13.200bully pulpit, the fear of having bad stories about you circulate through these kinds of
00:15:19.860tip lines seems to me is going to be a bigger motivator for extremely publicity-averse
00:15:27.040corporations than any federal regulation ever could. Yes. And I think it'll encourage
00:15:32.340discrimination against women and people of color, right? Because it causes suspicion
00:15:36.280over all women and people of color and power for the reasons you just laid out.0.93
00:15:40.260You know, there's going to be a suspicion that they weren't they didn't earn their place.0.62
00:15:43.800They were DEI hires. And so I think, you know, moving forward in order to avoid being accused of wokeness and DEI,
00:15:51.880there will be perhaps even more over discrimination against non-traditional candidates applying for positions.
00:15:57.120And that is, again, the intent of these orders.
00:15:59.720Yeah, this strikes me as a function and part of like the like cynically wielded capaciousness of the term DEI. Like, Adrian, you were pointing this out that like, you know, there are these corporate programs. I think those of us on the left tend to specifically and like, you know, those of us committed to identity based social movements tend to kind of mock. Right.
00:16:19.760They are about covering your ass for litigation liability, sort of DEI industry was actually invented specifically by Sears, which at the time in the 1980s was one of the biggest employers in the country, as a way of forestalling this massive strike that was going to be put on organized by the National Organization for Women.0.86
00:16:44.580It's a really interesting story. And, you know, it was it became it was invented as a sort of counterpoint to these social movements. But then in the conservative imagination, it's come to stand in for them. Right.
00:16:57.540And so because DEI can mean either a like sort of specific corporate initiative with sort of capacious goals or because it can be kind of a euphemism just for the presence of women and people of color in positions of like dignity, power, authority, right?
00:17:16.220that means that something like this snitch hotline you know i'm trying to i'm trying to
00:17:21.240imagine like if you are a corporate employee with some right-wing grievances um or a federal
00:17:28.360employee with some right-wing grievances and you want to call the snitch hotline like what would
00:17:33.660you report exactly how do they delineate what is and is not dei because there's a whole vocabulary
00:17:42.000now, which has, you know, some place of prominence in the new Trump administration that just
00:17:47.860sees DEI as the moral offense to any white man who might have a non-white man boss, you
00:18:11.120But it's the same as everything else, right? It gets lumped together. And I think you're exactly right. The point is it increases risk. And as Mark is saying, these are some of the least risk-happy actors in America. And they're hearing the signals loud and clear, I think.
00:18:33.300so one theme we've seen i think moving on is the you know the attempt to give like culture war
00:18:41.360grievance and like outgroup animus the force of like executive branch policy right and that i
00:18:49.680think brings us nicely to the trans executive orders adrian and i were texting last night and
00:18:55.540he kept talking about like oh i'm reading i'm writing about this trans executive order and i
00:18:59.400was like, which one? There's been so many. So Mark, could you like walk us through a little bit
00:19:06.240about the new administration's attacks on trans people and their civil rights and access to the
00:19:12.340public sphere? And then we can get into the nitty gritty about these different orders.
00:19:16.620Yes. So they fall into two buckets. Essentially, there's the first order that attempts to ban
00:19:27.040transgender people from serving in the military, that seems to threaten ejecting the many
00:19:36.500transgender people who are currently serving in the military, because under President Barack
00:19:44.400Obama and then under President Joe Biden, they were allowed to enlist and to serve openly in
00:19:49.440the military. And this order directs the new Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, to craft
00:19:55.220some kind of policy that is anti-trans. We'll get more details in the coming weeks. This is
00:20:00.360already being challenged in a few different lawsuits, but the obvious goal is to prohibit
00:20:06.020trans people from enlisting, exclude and eject trans people who are already serving, and if
00:20:12.020somehow any trans people remain, to bar them from obtaining gender-affirming care. And I just want0.57
00:20:17.820to read from this order because I think it's quite striking. This is straight from the executive
00:20:23.080border quote beyond the hormonal and surgical medical interventions involved adoption of a
00:20:28.740gender identity inconsistent with an individual sex conflicts with a soldier's commitment to an
00:20:34.180honorable truthful and disciplined lifestyle even in one's personal life a man's assertion that he
00:20:40.300is a woman and his requirement that others honor this falsehood is not consistent with the humility
00:20:45.880and selflessness required of a service member. So this is horrific language, sheer animus,
00:20:53.340and it's really quite different from Trump's first effort to enact a trans military ban in
00:20:59.560his first term. In that go round, he tried to dress this up in a deep concern for military
00:21:09.560readiness and unit cohesion and also some concern for the budget. He argued that covering transgender
00:21:15.580people's healthcare was really expensive. He argued that it was demoralizing for troops to
00:21:20.920have a transgender person among them, that it was a problem in showers and other intimate areas to
00:21:27.240have transgender people, and that it prevented them from being able to train properly, to deploy
00:21:32.200correctly. All of that was pretext. All of that was bogus, right? There were no actual problems
00:21:37.360with transgender people in the military, but he tried to dress up in a pretext. Now it is all1.00
00:21:42.020out there, right? He is not holding back. He is not pretending. This is just openly rooted in
00:21:48.820hatred and bigotry toward transgender people. And that is also very much true of his other order,1.00
00:21:55.440which is an attempt to severely restrict the provision of gender-affirming care to people
00:22:01.660under the age of 19. And just note, that includes 18-year-olds. That includes legal adults.
00:22:06.440This order folds in people who are 18 and of legal age. And the order attempts to deny coverage for gender-affirming care on various federal health insurance plans for federal employees, for members of the military.
00:22:22.280It attempts to defund all medical and research institutions that support or provide gender
00:23:26.600Like the fact that like there now is supposed to be a category of young people who are over
00:23:33.660the age of 18, who can buy guns, smokes, start an OnlyFans, all that, but who mysteriously0.69
00:23:41.860cannot consent to gender-affirming procedures of any kind. They mean even puberty block, I mean,0.89
00:23:49.440yes, yes. That includes hormone therapy, I should be very clear.
00:23:52.960Yeah. I mean, you're right. It's already an adult trans care ban, right? So it's really
00:24:01.040quite amazing how, you know, I thought they would have been more incremental. And I think you're
00:24:05.700absolutely right to say that, like, they're just really barely bothering to hide their animus,
00:24:10.440Right. There is the the version of this argument that you can sort of launder where it's like about the very young and about, you know, they're so impressionable and they're all exposed to social contagion and all that shit.0.94
00:24:22.420You can get people to nod along with that, but they didn't go for that. They went for a far more maximal version.
00:24:29.400The second thing that I think is so interesting is, you know, I had forgotten that the first trans ban and the first Trump administration had been all about unit cohesion.
00:24:39.100They were still reheating the arguments about gay people in the military and about gay marriage in their first go-around with the trans panic.
00:24:49.020This time, this seems far more oriented towards—it's far more internationalized.
00:24:55.520This is looking at how the UK is banning gender-affirming surgery, gender-affirming care, and that kind of thing.
00:25:02.380Right. Like they've become far more recognizably in their attitude towards towards gender and sexuality.
00:25:08.780Part of sort of this. This international illiberal movement, haven't they?
00:25:14.400I certainly think so. I also think that they believe they have the courts in their pocket this time around and they weren't so sure last time.
00:25:21.620I mean, remember when Trump took office in 2017, that was, you know, the Supreme Court that had decided marriage equality.
00:25:28.180That was a small with four liberals and Anthony Kennedy, who had some sporadic concern for the rights of minorities.
00:25:35.140Now Trump enters office with a six justice conservative supermajority.
00:25:40.560And so I think that across the board, with everything we're talking about today, he and his aides are just less concerned about pretext, less concerned about coherence, less concerned about something they can sell to the courts.
00:25:53.140They assume that they are starting with implicit approval from the courts.
00:25:57.160And so, yes, they are adopting this language that the illiberal right has sort of peddled internationally about how this is protecting children from mutilation and from transing and all of all of that stuff.
00:26:11.220But they also probably don't even think they need a reason.0.52
00:26:14.020That strikes me as campaign rhetoric and window dressing.
00:26:19.280Yeah. This this might bring us to one thought I had about this sort of longer view legal strategy, you know, such that there is any behind a lot of these EOs is that it seems like the Trump administration is sort of like asking for the moon under the anticipation that there's going to be a TRO and that like some of it is going to get thrown out.
00:26:42.460But I think that, you know, by the time the federal courts are done with some of these executive orders, policy will have still been changed in a pretty significant way. Right. Like I'm thinking about the the Muslim ban in Trump's first term. Right.
00:26:58.080It was a campaign promise he had made in pretty explicitly racist terms, you know, and then he gets in and he bans travel from seven Muslim majority countries.
00:27:12.440And what the when the Supreme Court, you know, ultimately does uphold this because they find a way to ignore his stated motivations for the ban.
00:27:23.160Right. Yeah, I think the Muslim ban is is clearly the model here.0.96
00:27:27.120You know, you come out the gate with the broadest possible version. It gets blocked. You refine it. It gets blocked again. You keep refining it until you figure out exactly where the courts are willing to draw the line and exactly what they're willing to let you do.0.99
00:27:40.500But again, you know, these are just much more conservative, Trump friendly courts than last
00:28:08.820And so even though that is the model to try, try, try again until you got something that squeezes through the courts with enough votes, I just think it'll be a whole lot of an easier process for them in 2015 than it was in 2017.
00:28:22.020Yeah, I mean, they might be just going by the fact that they listen to oral arguments and scrimetti, right? And that they're like, well, clearly, they do not give a shit what the arguments are for a trans care ban. They're just going to do it.0.95
00:28:33.560So this also brings me, I think, to the third trans executive order, which was issued a few days ago, which now feels like a few decades ago.0.77
00:28:42.340But there's one ordering that for the purposes, like for executive branch purposes, the agencies will only acknowledge two sexes, male and female.
00:28:58.320And it had a little like a Easter egg of fetal personhood in there, too, didn't it?
00:29:02.720Yeah, the sex that you are assigned at conception as an embryo, that that is the sex that you are locked to for your entire life under the federal government.
00:29:13.020And under this order, all government agencies have to assign to you that sex, your embryonic sex, one might say, which, as you just indicated, Moira, suggests that embryos are somehow people that can have, you know, definitive sex and seems to maybe lay the groundwork for some further orders down the road that try to establish fetal personhood or embryonic personhood, as the Alabama Supreme Court has already tried to do.
00:29:43.020you know, that will have an immediate impact in maybe a narrower way than some of these other
00:29:49.240orders, but still a really alarming way. I mean, the State Department almost immediately took away
00:29:54.540the ex-gender marker for people applying for passports or renewing passports. That is wild
00:30:00.740to me because intersex people exist. Yeah. And that marker was actually partly the result of a
00:30:08.000court case in which an intersex person sued and said, I am not male or female as a matter of
00:30:12.560biological reality. Now that it's gone, I have no idea what intersex people are going to do.
00:30:18.620And the State Department and other federal agencies also claim that they're going to
00:30:23.280only recognize the so-called birth sex of a transgender person. But, you know, most states,
00:30:30.500including all blue states, allow you to change your birth certificate when you transition.
00:30:35.420And normally the federal government doesn't undertake a holistic investigation to ensure
00:30:40.360that your current birth certificate is the one that aligns with what the government sees as your
00:30:45.180sex. So I don't know how that's going to work. I'm also not totally clear on whether this only
00:30:49.560applies prospectively. The administration has suggested that it might, but it's been going
00:30:53.300back on a lot of its promises. So there's a lot of chaos and confusion for transgender people right
00:30:58.060now, particularly over identity documents like passports and visas, where it's just unclear if
00:31:04.940transgender people can ever get, you know, legal recognition from this federal government, or
00:31:09.860if Trump is going to just mandate four years of relentless discrimination against trans and
00:31:15.420intersex people. I understand this also has some implications for trans people incarcerated in
00:31:20.220federal prisons. Is that true? I know that there is a lawsuit already challenging the order on
00:31:25.960these grounds. Yes. So this order purports to force transgender people in federal prisons to
00:31:34.340essentially de-transition and to be housed with people from their sex assigned at birth. So it
00:31:41.220purports to cut off all access to gender-affirming care in prison. That includes hormone therapy.1.00
00:31:48.080Again, that is just forcibly de-transitioning people. And it will force, for instance,0.89
00:31:53.380you know, a transgender man to be housed with cisgender women and force a transgender woman
00:32:00.400to be housed with cisgender men, which is, we know from years of experience, certain to increase
00:32:07.020the odds of sexual abuse, of violent assaults, among other inmates. It's going to be really0.79
00:32:12.500devastating. It is being battled in court. It's not clear at all that Trump has the legal authority
00:32:17.520to withhold gender affirming care, especially from adult patients. But, you know, this is the
00:32:25.140new frontier. And as Adrian said, the Supreme Court sounds like it's going to abandon the
00:32:30.980rights of transgender people after oral arguments in the Scrimetti case. So this is one where Trump
00:32:35.260just thinks he'll be able to get away with it. One of the things that looking over these is so
00:32:40.540chilling, more I just call them Easter eggs. They're these things that have buried further
00:32:44.460down where you're like, oh my God, this is even scarier. And I guess I'd like you as a legal
00:32:51.440expert to sort of tell me how that then works. I mean, because ultimately this is just, as you say,
00:32:56.500these are sort of the marching orders that the executive gives to its organs, right? It's saying
00:33:02.600like, this is how we will now enforce existing statutes. But, and I guess the question is these
00:33:10.700really serious kind of hat tips towards, let's say, fetal personhood or the threat to come after
00:33:19.840parents who let their children transition in the most recent trans care ban. What do you make of
00:33:25.540those? Is that essentially red meat for someone or does this really have, does that have potential
00:33:30.960teeth? Well, so some of it is red meat and I think some of it is just chum for the base. And I'll
00:33:37.280note that Trump has issued some really awful orders on abortion. He has pardoned some extremist
00:33:44.400activist who blockaded abortion clinics illegally. His Justice Department is going to stop enforcing
00:33:50.780the federal ban on the blockade of health clinics, reproductive health clinics. He has reinstated the
00:33:56.620Mexico City policy, the so-called global gag order that strips money from organizations around the
00:34:02.300world that even mention abortion. But he has not gone further yet. Now, that is a big yet.
00:34:09.760he's got plenty of time left to wreak havoc, to try to restrict medication abortion, to try to
00:34:15.420prosecute doctors who provide abortion, especially medication across state lines. But he hasn't done
00:34:21.240it yet. And I think that some of this stuff, like the fetal personhood, wink, wink, is maybe an
00:34:26.580indication to his base that he's going to get there, that he can't do everything at once. Yes,
00:34:30.620he's flooding the zone, but they have to be at least a little bit careful in how they structure
00:34:34.480this stuff. And by planting these, I don't even know, time bombs, he's just telling all of his
00:34:42.740coalition, don't worry, I will tend to you as well. I might not be there yet, but I will get
00:34:48.080there. And I'll also just note, I mean, I'm not usually one for Nazi comparisons, but people may
00:34:55.560be familiar with the expression working toward the Fuhrer. This was how Adolf Hitler governed.
00:35:01.080He would sort of set out a broad and vague goal and then encourage his underlings to try to work toward that goal in increasingly extreme ways.0.62
00:35:11.040I mean, I think that perfectly describes how Donald Trump operates, right?
00:35:14.460He is not a stickler for policy details.
00:35:18.440He doesn't care about or even understand policy.
00:35:21.440What he does is declare a very, very broad goal or vision and then hire a bunch of people who have extreme and radical views who are in constant competition with each other to work the fastest and the hardest to achieve that vision.
00:35:36.040And that is a lot of what I think is going on with these orders.
00:35:38.620Or to even fill that vision with a content it may not have originally had for the very simple sense that Trump doesn't have a whole lot of content.
00:35:46.300It's not that he was more well-meaning.
00:35:49.120He just didn't mean anything by it or different people were giving him different wordings.
00:35:55.220And yeah, I think that different parts of the coalition are going to try to hang different
00:40:27.140He did issue this order I mentioned declaring the end of birthright citizenship.
00:40:30.360but he didn't link them together at all. He did not say, I'm ending birthright citizenship because
00:40:35.460there is an invasion. And his Justice Department has not been raising that argument in court so
00:40:40.220far. So I think that you're not conspiratorial, Moira. You might just be a little bit smarter
00:40:45.180than the people who are writing these orders who have not yet figured out how to patch together
00:40:50.560the various sort of legal conspiracy theories that would provide intellectual scaffolding
00:40:55.100for the end of birthright citizenship. Smarter than a Trump administration lawyer. My God.
00:40:59.520On your tombstone, it'll say that. I mean, it would be very, very funny to claim that people who hold H-1B visas are outside of the jurisdiction of the United States when they hold H-1B visas on the jurisdiction of the United States.
00:41:19.780Like their literal status is tied up with the thing you claim they're not subject to. That's amazing.
00:41:24.400Yeah. I mean, it doesn't make any sense. Right. And undocumented immigrants, too. We can arrest them. We can detain them. Like, of course, they're subject to American jurisdiction. They are not like diplomats. They are very different.
00:41:32.880With so many of these things, it seems unclear whether or not they're retroactive.