This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

Early in Donald Trump’s second term, as the president was asserting a level of nearly autocratic power — which his predecessors certainly did not think they possessed — I published an essay called “Don’t Believe Him.”

In that essay, I argued that Trump was asserting all this power because he was actually weak. He was moving so fast because everywhere else in the government, he was likely to be stopped — in Congress and in the courts. And so it was very important not to treat what Trump was doing as fixed, as something that could not be undone. Because it was only in assuming he had that power that he would really have it. Otherwise, he was going to get mired down in the same inertia and checks and balances that had mired down all his predecessors.

For a while, that bet looked sort of right. Trump was getting stopped in the courts. They were ruling against him overwhelmingly, over and over again. These were the early months of the administration — we were still then waiting for the Supreme Court to weigh in.

But in the last few months, the Supreme Court has weighed in. And it has weighed in overwhelmingly for Donald Trump and the powers he seeks.

I guess the good news here is that maybe we’re not going to have the constitutional showdown many feared. But the bad news is that it’s because Trump is getting what he wants.