Before Project 2025: How the Right Built Trump’s Power Grab (with David Sirota)

Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship is only part of the story. The bigger danger is a decades-long effort to free the presidency from constitutional limits. Corey Brettschneider and John Fugelsang begin by breaking down Trump’s latest argument against birthright citizenship, why it misreads the Constitution, and what is really at stake in the legal fight. Then David Sirota joins to trace the deeper roots of Trump’s power grab: the conservative blueprints that helped lay the groundwork for Project 2025, the lessons of Nixon and Reagan, and the long campaign to expand executive power. In this episode: Trump’s attack on birthright citizenship why the constitutional case against it fails the antecedents of Project 2025 Nixon, Reagan, and the growth of presidential power why the No Kings protests matter what reforms could restore real limits on the presidency This episode is about more than one policy fight. It’s about how the presidency was reshaped, and whether American democracy can still impose meaningful limits on executive power.