Your Trump 2.0 Questions, Answered [TEASER]

What do you do if ICE comes to your door? How will Trump enforce his anti-trans orders? Are there risks to podcasting in the age of Trump? You asked some really dark questions, and we have answers. If you're not a 5-4 Premium member, you're not hearing every episode, including this one with helpful tips on how to survive Trump 2.0! To hear this and other Premium-only episodes, access to our Slack community, and more, join at fivefourpod.com/support http://fivefourpod.com/support.] 5-4 is presented by Prologue Projects. This episode was produced by Dustin DeSoto. Leon Neyfakh and Andrew Parsons provide editorial support. Our researcher is Jonathan DeBruin, and our website was designed by Peter Murphy. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY, and our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Follow the show at @fivefourpod on most platforms. On BlueSky, find Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social, Michael @fleerultra.bsky.social, and Rhiannon @aywarhiannon.bsky.social. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information. Our Sponsors: * Check out Mint Mobile and use my code mintmobile.com/fivefour for a great deal: https://www.mintmobile.com * Check out Quince and use my code FIVEFOUR for a great deal: https://www.quince.com Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Speaker 00

  Hey, everyone. This is Leon from Prologue Projects. On this subscriber-only episode of Five to Four, Peter, Rhiannon, and Michael are taking your questions. As the second Trump administration continues to wreak havoc, the White House and its allies are testing the limits of their power by ignoring existing laws and pretending the Constitution is just a set of suggestions. Peter, Rhi, and Michael can't save you, but they can tell you what would happen if the Supreme Court overturned same-sex marriage, and what to do if ICE agents show up at your workplace, and how to protect yourself against the paralyzing effects of panic and despair. This is Five to Four, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and everything else sucks.

• 0:51Peter Shamshiri?

  Welcome to Five to Four, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have frozen our civil liberties, like Donald Trump freezing the federal budget.

• 1:00Michael Liroff?

  Mmm.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  Eek!

• 1:02Peter Shamshiri?

  I'm Peter. I'm here with Michael. Hey, everybody. And Rhiannon.

• 1:05Speaker 03

  Imagine, hi, everybody. Imagine if Michael was the one that just said, "Eek!"

• 1:11Speaker 03

  It's that scary, folks.

• 1:14Peter Shamshiri?

  It is that scary. Yeah, things are not good. No.

• 1:17Speaker 03

  No, we should get into it.

• 1:19Peter Shamshiri?

  We should. First of all, I would like to complain. I've been woken up at the crack of dawn by my co-hosts to record a podcast at 10 a.m.

• 1:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was about to say, tell them what the crack of dawn is, Peter. Say it.

• 1:32Peter Shamshiri?

  It's 8 a.m. over here. When you record at 10, you have to get up at 9. It's...

• 1:39Peter Shamshiri?

  It's insane.

• 1:42Peter Shamshiri?

  All right, so we're doing a mailbag episode, and we got a couple of questions about this. And because it's so pressing, we do want to give a quick overview of the situation. It's very much in flux. We're recording several days in advance, so things will have changed. But Donald Trump has taken several steps to sort of secure his grip over the federal bureaucracy. And many of those steps are questionable in their constitutionality, by which I mean, anyone who's not a psychopath would recognize these steps as unconstitutional.

• 2:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:15Peter Shamshiri?

  Because they extend beyond the president's powers over the federal budget. So, Michael, I'll let you take the lead here, because you're the politics guy.

• 2:27Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. You're the literate guy even on the podcast.

• 2:30Peter Shamshiri?

  Michael will have read the NBC News articles that have come out about this, whereas Rhiannon and I will have not.

• 2:36Michael Liroff?

  Yeah, so this, I mean, I don't even know where to start.

• 2:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:40Michael Liroff?

  I do think like, it's worth saying explicitly, like, in fourth grade, you learn that, you know, Congress has the power of the purse. And what the president is saying here, what Donald Trump is saying here is, no, they don't. I do. I get to decide what we spend money on, which turns Congress, you know, almost to like, an advisory function. It is, like, goes to the heart of the separation of powers. So it's pretty wild. It's a pretty wild power grab. It's also one that I think goes to show how disconnected the MAGA movement is

• 3:23Michael Liroff?

  and the conservative legal movement is, that they all hate the government, you know, capital T, capital G, the government, and think everybody else hates the government. And a lot of people do, in part because they don't know what the government does. They don't, they don't understand the way it intersects with their lives. And when you freeze federal spending like this, it hits every corner of society. Like, it's meals on wheels, it's legal aid, it's Medicaid. You know, my wife's a mental health professional and works at a clinic for, you know, low income people. All her patients, many of them are.

• 4:06Peter Shamshiri?

  Hey, folks, if you want to hear the rest of this episode, you're going to have to subscribe. This episode is one of our premium Patreon-only episodes. Membership starts at just five bucks a month. So if you want to hear the rest, join us at patreon.com/54pod. That's five four pod, all spelled out. Members get a bunch of stuff. Not only do you get access to the premium episodes, but access to subscriber-only events, discounts on merch. And at the $10 a month level, you get bigger discounts on merch and membership in the incredibly rowdy five to four Slack. So again, that's patreon.com/54pod, five four pod, all spelled out. Become a member today.