The following is a lightly edited transcript of the April 2 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Donald Trump seems to sense that his power is ebbing. He raged over birthright citizenship after his arguments on it fell flat in the Supreme Court. He buffoonishly moved the goalposts on Iran to compensate for his war failures. He sustained many new losses in court, and his polling just took another huge dive. The through line to all this is as follows. Trump is trying to maximize presidential power like no one in recent memory. Yet on one front after another, he’s discovering that his powers have limits. One of the best out there at explaining how presidential power really works is Corey Brettschneider, author of several books on the topic. So we’re talking to him about all this today. Corey, good to have you on.Corey Brettschneider: Pleasure, Greg. Always.Sargent: So let’s start here. Trump has suddenly suffered a string of losses in court. A judge temporarily blocked his ballroom. Another judge ruled against Trump’s executive order ending federal funding for NPR and PBS. Still another rejected his claim of presidential immunity over January 6th, allowing a lawsuit by police officers to continue. Corey, it seems like the connecting line in all this is that Trump claimed all these excessive powers and has been told no. Is that more or less what happened? And what’s your take on all this?Brettschneider: I think it remains to be seen what the Supreme Court is going to do, or what higher courts will do in these cases. But certainly for now, it does look like he’s being stopped—and he’s not being stopped by accident. These aren’t just one-off cases. He has, as you said in your introduction, really threatened democracy itself and been doing nothing less than assaulting the other branches, usurping—for instance—Congress’s spending power, its power to make laws by ignoring so much of what it’s done, ignoring prior court rulings and precedents in his executive orders. I know we’ll get to that soon. But what’s happening, I think, is that lower courts have had enough, and you’re starting to see—as much as he’s brought a large assault on the Constitution—judges appointed by various presidents, various parties of those presidents, finally pushing back.Sargent: I think another connecting thread here is that the lower courts are really stepping up. This is a really important thing that they’re doing. They’re doing a ton of really important fact-finding, which is illuminating a lot of difficult issues for people, which I find super helpful and very heartening to see. But they’re also slowing him down in a really visible way, aren’t they?Brettschneider: Yes, I think the lower courts in many ways have been the heroes of the moment. On the shadow docket, the Supreme Court of the United States hasn’t been as good. I will talk soon about their hearing today about birthright citizenship, but they’ve really enabled a lot of this. I’ve been calling it on The Oath and the Office podcast a “self-coup.” We think of military coups as happening from the outside and as violent takeovers. But in Latin American countries, we’ve often observed chief executives, presidents, destroying the other branches and assuming a kind of dictatorial power. And that is, I think, what characterizes this assault on democracy by this president.Now there is something slowing it down—although it hasn’t for the most part been the Supreme Court; it’s been lower courts and it’s been citizens. And I think those two things feed each other. What the lower courts do is they provide information to people like you and me—we’re able to get that information out there. And then when we see “No Kings,” it’s not in response to nothing; it’s in response to things that Trump has done that we learn about in part because the lower courts have taken a stand against him. So I think in the same way that citizens have been the heroes of the moment, it’s also been these lower court district court judges.Sargent: Yeah, I think you’re making a profound point there and I want to close on it later. Another potential loss for Trump is looming right now on his effort to end birthright citizenship. He showed up at the Supreme Court on Wednesday to watch all this, but the conservative justices seem to reject many of his arguments. Corey, can you briefly recap what happened at the court?Brettschneider: I was really heartened. I’ve been very disappointed in the Supreme Court, as I said, in the shadow docket—using its emergency orders to not even write opinions and to just allow so much of the assault on democracy to continue. And today my mood is lifted, because I saw conservative justices like Gorsuch really rip into the government’s position. And I can’t say enough: this is not a two-sides issue.