Listener supported, WNYC Studios.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. The persistent question that runs through

everything Donald Trump is doing, deporting legal residents, shipping people off to a Salvadoran

prison in the middle of the night, demolishing government agencies, and on and on. The question is,

can he really do that? Federal courts

across the country are weighing that question in a huge number of lawsuits. Will judges ratify

Trump's view of his own power as effectively limitless? And if they do not, will Donald Trump

bother to listen?

Now, his defenders in the Republican Party will argue that Trump is just pushing at the limits of his power, as many presidents do.

But ultimately, he'll obey court orders.

So far, the Trump administration doesn't show a lot of evidence of respecting the authority of courts.

Ruth Marcus is the author of Supreme Ambition, a book about Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Marcus was a columnist for the Washington Post until last month.

She resigned after an executive killed a piece that she wrote that was critical of the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos. In fact,

Ruth Marcus ended up publishing that column in our pages, in The New Yorker, and she's continued

covering Trump in the courts for us. I spoke with Ruth Marcus last week. Now, Ruth, we just recently

published a piece by you, and it said that Trump's legal strategy

had been backfiring.

That was just a while ago.

Are you still right?

Well, TBD.

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