The “apparent decline in our civil liberties and the unusual and extraordinary accretion of executive power that we’ve seen since Donald Trump was inaugurated” were considered with a mixture of gloom and optimism alongside denunciations of the conservative majority on the United States Supreme Court and a spirited call for citizen action to defend democracy at “Guardrails on Democracy,” the first Hamptons Institute discussion of the 2025 season, on Monday at Guild Hall in East Hampton.
The discussion featured Norman Eisen, the founder and executive chairman of the Democracy Defenders Fund, Susan Corke, executive director of Democracy Defenders Action and the Democracy Defenders Fund, and Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The observation of the decline in civil liberties and the accumulation of executive power was provided by James Zirin, a former federal prosecutor and the author of “Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits,” who served as moderator. “Much of what he has done with his 143 executive orders is comically illegal,” Mr. Zirin said of the president. “A lot of what he’s done is just bad policy and violates presidential norms.”
The strains of authoritarianism are familiar, Mr. Eisen said, “but this is a new variety in the modern era.” Of the 143 executive orders to which Mr. Zirin referred, “many of them are a connect-the-dots of an authoritarian nightmare that bears more resemblance to the worst tragedies of the 20th century than it does to the American idea,” he said.
But another number — 194 — gives reason for hope. This, he said, is the number of times “that those illegal and unconstitutional and autocratic and wrong, bad, evil actions have been stopped by the federal courts.” The two numbers “tell a tale of assault on civil liberties, but also of powerful pushback.”
When Mr. Trump was inaugurated in January, “we knew . . . that we were facing the onset of authoritarianism,” Ms. Corke said. “Defending the rule of law is the critical first pillar, and authoritarians know that, which is why they immediately, with his shock-and-awe campaign, tried to overwhelm the system. We fought back.” But “the courts alone cannot save us,” she said, the court of public opinion “is also incredibly important, and that is the other side of the equation for us.”
Her organizations are also working to protect elections, she said. “We are protecting media and civil society. We are countering corruption, and we are also needing to build back a path to show that democracy works.”
Calling himself an optimist but also “a clear-eyed pragmatist,” Mr. Romero agreed that “lawyers are not going to save us. It’s going to be the public response that is increasingly growing in this moment.” It is “incredibly heartening” that “ordinary people are engaging,” he said. “These town halls that people are turning up to . . . the kind of advocacy that’s being done in local communities.”
The A.C.L.U. offered “Know Your Rights” training to prepare people to “show up safely and confidently” to the nationwide “No Kings” rallies on June 14. “It’s all in Spanish,” Mr. Romero said. “It is the fourth most visited page of our website. A Spanish language Know Your Rights page where people are downloading and sharing that information so that people know what to do when the police or the [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] turn up.”
Mr. Trump’s executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship, enshrined in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, “is really trampling on hallowed ground,” Mr. Romero said. “Birthright citizenship is how we fixed America’s original sin, chattel slavery. . . . It is as hallowed a part of our country’s history as anything we have. It is also the way in which this great nation of immigrants made sure that we are all equal under the law. . . . If you start putting rules about what was your parents’ citizenship, you’re going to create second-class citizens among your people.”
On June 27, the Supreme Court, by a 6-to-3 vote, sided with the Trump administration, pausing rulings by three federal judges that blocked the executive order ending birthright citizenship. Mr. Zirin called the court’s conservative majority “politicians in robes” and “enablers of the Trump agenda.” Those judges, he said, “look like six North Korean generals telling Kim Jong-un, ‘You’re a winner.’ “
He said that Supreme Court of the United Kingdom judges he has spoken with are “just appalled by the politicization of our Supreme Court. The pretense that our Supreme Court is a disinterested, impartial tribunal free of politics that decides cases on the basis of law and precedent, I mean, it’s just a canard.”
Mr. Eisen called for its reform. “There’s no rule that you have to have nine people on the court. . . . We could comfortably add five people to the court. Congress needs to be bold enough to undertake those judiciary reforms.”
“This Congress? ” Mr. Zirin asked.
“A Congress,” Mr. Eisen replied. “This Congress is not long for this world, Jim. . . . I refuse, I refuse to let Donald Trump take away hope from us. Yes, it’s a steep path, and the Supreme Court made the legal path steeper. Well, we’ll just run twice as hard. And that’s what we’re doing.” If the American people are determined to keep their democracy, he said, “the Supreme Court, the Roberts MAGA majority, will not be able to stop them. . . . I’m optimistic that the American people and the American idea are bigger than these six partisans.”
Ms. Corke urged the audience to join their local chapter of Indivisible and to participate in demonstrations against the administration. “Another trend that’s been heartening to me: Just this year, we’ve started to get thousands and thousands of people giving $10, $15, $20, signing up, asking what they can do. . . . It’s not partisan anymore. It’s not Republican versus Democrat. It’s right versus wrong. It’s humane versus cruelty.”
What the Trump administration is trying to do, she said, “is bring us back in time to the pre-civil rights movement.” But “when we fight back, we can win. History has shown us that. We have seen it in the mobilization of the protests, with No Kings, that when we fight back, the people have a lot of power.”
While the courts play a very important role, “ultimately, it’s going to be up to the American people,” Mr. Eisen agreed. “Donald Trump cannot sufficiently dismantle this experiment.” Voter turnout in gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia this year, the midterm elections in 2026, and the presidential election in 2028 can assure that, he said. “Susan and I know from our international work: Far more entrenched autocratic regimes than the six-month-old Trump administration have been peacefully and lawfully evicted by voters expressing their will.”
“It’s about throwing sand in the gears of that machinery,” Mr. Romero said. “Grind them down, make them play Whac-A-Mole.”
“We just have to keep putting that litigation sand in the gears,” Mr. Eisen agreed, “keep doing our thing, and hope that the American people, our ultimate guardrail, come through for us.”
