This week’s Inside Scoop covers President Donald Trump‘s clash with the courts over his immigration policies and executive power. Jim Antle, the executive editor of the Washington Examiner magazine, brings the pages of the magazine to life with exclusive insight from the articles’ authors.
Antle analyzes the cover story by Daniel Ross Goodman, “Trump vs. the courts: Lessons from an unlikely source.” Trump has been criticizing the courts for hindering his efforts to deport allegedly dangerous people who have entered the country illegally.
“We have thousands of people, some murderers, some drug dealers, and some of the worst, most dangerous people on Earth,” Trump said in an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press. “We’d have to have a million or 2 million or 3 million trials. I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it.”
Trump could learn how to challenge the judiciary from an unlikely source: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Roosevelt struggled with the courts when he wanted to pass a series of bills to get the country out of the Great Depression. He tried to pack the courts to pass his New Deal. While court-packing did not work, Roosevelt was able to use his political popularity to battle the courts. The courts often defer to public opinion. While Roosevelt used his power to build up the administrative state, Trump can look toward Roosevelt’s strategy in order to tear the administrative state down.
Next, Antle is joined by Barnini Chakraborty, who wrote about California’s shift away from progressive policies and the effects in San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. Proposition 47, which decriminalized theft and drug possession, led to increased crime and worried people living in and visiting California. Residents became fed up and passed Proposition 36, which rolled back some of these policies, this year.
“I didn’t think I would see it so quickly,” Chakraborty said. “I went to San Francisco, San Jose, and Oakland. I was shocked at just how much change had occurred by rolling back just a few progressive policies.”
She saw cleaner streets, the return of retail stores, and more people comfortably walking outside. Chakraborty said she believes it will take time for California to return to being a popular tourist destination. Gov. Gavin Newsom‘s (D-CA) recent push to “take back the streets” and clear homeless encampments could show people that the Golden State is trying to take a step in the right direction and fix the quality-of-life problems. This more politically centrist-leaning approach comes just in time for the California governor to make a move for a 2028 presidential run.
Finally, Zachary Faria wrote that Hollywood doesn’t deserve a tariff bailout. Trump’s obsession with tariffs is partly driven by a desire to restore industries to American communities. It is cheaper to fly people around the world for productions than to shoot in Hollywood. Trump announced a 100% tariff on foreign films, hoping to bring those filmmaking jobs back to the United States. He sees it as a sort of Hollywood tariff bailout.
Faria argues that with Tinseltown cranking out biased content that creates box office flops, maybe Hollywood doesn’t deserve a bailout. At least not while it’s producing unapologetically left-leaning content nobody seems to want to watch.
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