Checks, Balances And Separation Of Powers

This half-hour, we continue our ongoing effort to understand in real time, the upheavals taking place within our US government, as well as the blitz of attacks on the rule of law – and that includes attacks on judges, lawyers, academics, students, and virtually anyone else who is critical of the Trump Administration’s policies and actions.

Today, we’ll be particularly focused on recent Supreme Court decisions that have paved the way for Trump to dismantle the Department of Education and numerous government agencies. The decisions also Limit the public’s ability to challenge government overreach and have led to swift deportations to countries in which detainees have no prior connection. We’ll also follow-up on the critically important case on First Amendment and academic freedom, American Association of University Professors v, Rubio, which is in trial right now in Boston.

Guest - Stephen Rohde is a legal scholar, writer, lecturer and political activist, who practiced civil rights and civil liberties law for over 50 years. He’s past chair of the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and past national chair of Bend the Arc, a Jewish Partnership for Justice. He’s also a co-founder and chair of Interfaith Communities United for Justice and Peace, and a Special Advisor on Free Speech and the First Amendment for the Muslim Public Affairs Council. He hosts the podcast, Speaking Freely.

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The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime

As V.I. Lenin observed, “There are times in history when nothing happens for decades and other times when decades happen within days” He should know. He was the leader of the Russian revolution which overthrew the feudal Tsar and changed the history of the 20th century. We are living in a time when history is unfolding very rapidly. Trump and his coterie of the upper 1/10 of 1 percent aligned with the mostly lower middle class MAGA movement have taken huge steps upending and overturning the kind of democracy, however, limited by race and class, that we have lived with since gaining independence from England 250 years ago.

We are experiencing the transition to a new absolutist executive. Trump and the ideologues who have shaped his MAGA movement is a president who acts on the premise that whatever he does is lawful. He claimed full power to close down departments like the Department of Education, impound congressionally authorized spending, deport people without due process, while ignoring the courts. This is what he calls “a unitary executive.”

The classic definition of fascism is that it is one of the political forms that capitalism may assume in its monopoly imperial phase. It has a material foundation in a tenuous alliance between sectors of the extremely rich monopoly capitalists and a mobilized lower middle class. The key to fascist rule is the privatization of large parts of the government on behalf of the monopoly class. This ideology now in ensconced in the White House.

The right wing is opposed to environmental governance, they don’t believe in climate change. They are against open borders, universal healthcare and green energy. Those who advocate for these beneficial movements are called “cultural Marxists.” They refer in a derogatory way to all contemporary progressive political causes. They call it woke. They use the term as it means to belittle all social justice struggles against racism and inequality, Its most common usage is as a racist dog whistle.

These fascists want to secure their rule by getting control of the entire cultural apparatus of society, a process that the Nazis, the German fascists of their time,called “bringing it into line.” The current attack on universities is the most recent example.

Guest – John Bellamy Foster is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Oregon. He is a prominent scholar on ecology and the author of many books, including “Trump in the White House: Tragedy and Farce”. Professor Foster is the editor of the venerable socialist magazine “Monthly Review“ and the author of the article The MAGA Ideology and the Trump Regime in its recent May 2025 issue.