January 3rd has a habit of being a rough day for Latin American strongmen. In 1990, Manuel Noriega walked out of the Vatican embassy in Panama City after ten days of nonstop rock music and surrendered to U.S. forces. In 2026, on the same date, helicopters hit Caracas and Nicolás Maduro ended up aboard the USS *Iwo Jima*.

This week on *The Roger Retrospective*, we follow Maduro into a Manhattan courtroom—beige prison clothes, new torture charges, and a pending fight over whether a sitting head of state can be tried in a foreign court at all. To make sense of it, we look at four different doors into the courtroom: Noriega (the template), Saddam Hussein (the one we handed back), Juan Orlando Hernández (the clean extradition that ended in a pardon), and Maduro (the sequel).

Along the way: head-of-state immunity, the strange Ker-Frisbie rule that U.S. courts mostly don’t care how you got there, the power of non-recognition, and the uncomfortable question of what happens when the rule we wrote gets used by someone else. Same night, same helicopters—three different words for what happened.

A president gets to nominate a Supreme Court justice. The Senate confirms them. And then something remarkable happens: the justice never has to answer to that president again.

Donald Trump has publicly expressed frustration with Supreme Court justices he appointed after they ruled against positions he supported. But presidential disappointment with “their” justices is hardly new.

More than a century ago, Theodore Roosevelt was furious when his own appointee, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., went against him in one of the great trust-busting battles of the Progressive Era. Dwight Eisenhower would later regret two of the most consequential appointments of his presidency. Richard Nixon discovered that even a Court reshaped by Republican presidents could ultimately help bring down a Republican president.

In this episode of The Roger Retrospective, we travel from Teddy Roosevelt to Eisenhower, Nixon and Trump to explore one of the ingenious—and occasionally infuriating—features of the American constitutional system: presidents choose Supreme Court justices, but once those justices put on the robe, the president loses control.

And that may be exactly what the Founders intended.

Today’s world, through the lens of history.

Inflation isn't just a number. Eventually, it can become a way of life.

In Episode 18 of The Roger Retrospective, we go back to the Great Inflation of the 1970s — when Americans waited in gas lines, wore “Whip Inflation Now” buttons, rushed into gold, assumed old mortgages because new ones carried double-digit rates, and watched supermarket prices seemingly change before their eyes.

The deeper story isn't simply about Paul Volcker raising interest rates to nearly 20%. It's about how America gradually learned to expect inflation — and how extraordinarily painful it became to change those expectations.

From Lyndon Johnson and William McChesney Martin to Nixon and Arthur Burns, the oil shocks of 1973 and 1979, and finally Volcker's dramatic Saturday-night policy shift, we trace how a series of understandable decisions helped turn rising prices into something embedded in American psychology.

And with energy prices again putting pressure on inflation today, the question from 1979 suddenly feels relevant again:

How much pain should a country accept today to prevent potentially greater pain tomorrow?

🎙️ Episode 18 of The Roger Retrospective.

Today’s world, through the lens of history.