Trump keeps being overruled by judges. And his temper tantrums won't stop that

The Guardian

2 days ago

It's hard to keep track of all the temper tantrums that Donald Trump has had because he's so ticked off that one judge after another has ruled against his flood of illegal actions. In seeking to put their fingers in the dike to stop the US president's lawlessness, federal judges have issued a startling high number of rulings, more than 185, to block or temporarily pause moves by the Trump administration.
Livid about all this, White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has railed against 'judicial activism', while Trump adviser Stephen Miller carps about a 'judicial coup'. As for Trump, the grievance-is-me president has gone into full conniption-mode, moaning about anti-Trump rulings and denouncing 'USA-hating judges'. On Truth Social, he said: 'How is it possible for [judges] to have potentially done such damage to the United States of America? Is it purely a hatred of 'TRUMP'? What other reason could it be?'
Trump is acting like the 10-year-old bully who pummeled a dozen classmates in the schoolyard, but when his teacher called him out for his thuggishness, he burst into tears and screamed: 'This is so unfair! Why are you picking on me?'
A word of advice to Trump: you should realize that dozens of judges keep ruling against you because you have flouted the law more than any previous president and because you and your flunkies keep misinterpreting and stretching the nation's laws far beyond their meaning.
Take Trump's Liberation Day tariffs, when he announced steep, across-the-board tariffs against 57 countries. On that day, Trump became the first president to use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act of 1977 to impose tariffs. To Trump's dismay, three judges on the US court of international trade unanimously ruled that he had overstepped his authority and gone far beyond what that 1977 law allows presidents to do. The trade court wrote that the constitution gives Congress, not the president, power over tariff policy and that the 1977 law didn't give Trump 'unbounded' authority to impose tariffs.
After that 28 May ruling, Trump's latest tantrum began.
Then, there's his chest-thumping, cold-hearted rush to expel as many immigrants as possible. To accomplish that, Trump became the first president to invoke the 227-year-old Alien Enemies Act in peacetime. twisting that law's language to declare that several dozen gang members from Venezuela constitute a war-like invasion force, similar to an enemy army, who could therefore be deported without due process. But several sane, sober judges told Trump that he is full of it. There's no war-like invasion here.
And then there's Trump's effort to stomp on several prestigious law firms that have done things or hired people he doesn't like. Trump became the first president to essentially put a gun to various law firms' heads to try to make them submit to him. He sought to undermine those firms' business with astonishingly vengeful executive orders that not only said that their lawyers couldn't enter federal buildings and would lose their security clearances, but that their corporate clients might lose their federal contracts. And then there was the unspoken threat that Trump would block corporate deals that those firms' lawyers were working on. This is poisonous stuff, punishing law firms for doing what our legal system has long called on firms to do: represent clients, even unpopular ones (even ones Trump doesn't like).
Here, Trump was engaging in a shakedown, in effect saying: 'That's a nice law firm you have. It's a shame if something happens to it. (So you'd be smart to submit to my demands.)' Again, several judges told Trump he's full of it, that the law firms hadn't done anything wrong to warrant such illegal shakedown efforts.
There are cases galore in which judges found that Trump acted illegally. Judges have provisionally blocked his push to bar international students from attending Harvard and ordered the release of several immigrant graduate students his administration arrested. Judges have ruled against Trump's dismantling of the Department of Education, his freezing up to $3tn in funding for the states and his firing thousands of federal civil servants.
Hating to see judges rule against his boss, Stephen Miller absurdly asserted: 'We are living under a judicial tyranny,' while Leavitt carped that judges have 'usurp[ed] the authority of President Trump to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him'. (What mandate? Trump didn't even receive 50% of the vote, beating Kamala Harris by a mere 1.5 percentage points. Nor did Americans vote for Trump's tariff chaos or his all-out war against universities.)
What we've heard from Trump (and mouthpieces Leavitt and Miller) is dangerous stuff. Trump is essentially rejecting the idea of judicial review. Like many authoritarian rulers, he hates having judges weigh whether his actions have violated the law. Trump forgets that under the constitution, judges (not the president) are the umpires who rule whether the president or Congress is following or flouting the law. As Ty Cobb, a former lawyer for Trump, said: 'Trump's attack on the judges is an attempt to undo the separation of powers. It's an attempt to take what is three coequal branches and make it one dominant branch.'
Trump's attacks against the judiciary are dangerous in another way – they have literally endangered judges' safety. In the five months before 1 March, 80 judges received threats, but after Trump's tirades against judges began to crescendo in February, the number of threats soared: more than 160 judges received threats in the six weeks after 1 March. On Memorial Day, Trump loosed another rant, calling judges who ruled against him 'monsters who want our country to go to hell'.
With these diatribes, Trump is seeking to delegitimize the judiciary and turn the public against judges, just as his unrelenting attacks against the news media have helped cause many people to lose faith in the media, no matter that many news organizations are as accurate and fair-minded as ever (and far more truthful than Trump).
Trump's war against the judiciary has taken another form – his administration has evaded, skirted and ignored numerous judicial orders – stonewalling a judge's request for information in an immigration case, failing to comply with the US supreme court's call to 'facilitate' the return of a wrongly deported immigrant, dragging its feet in restoring funding that had been illegally frozen.
After the trade court's ruling, Leavitt griped that judges issued more 'injunctions in one full month of office, in February, than Joe Biden had in three years'. Leavitt is blind to the obvious reason for this – Trump, in churning out more than 150 executive orders, a record number – has far too often violated the law and the constitution with abandon, while Biden was far more scrupulous in complying with the law.
Trump and cronies should recognize that there's a very simple way to get judges to stop overruling his actions. All Trump has to do is stop taking all these illegal, vindictive actions and stop issuing all these destructive, lawless executive orders. What's more, considering that Trump once tweeted: 'He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,' he needs to stop acting like a modern-day king or Napoleon who is above the law.
Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author, focusing on labour and the workplace, as well as economic and legal issues