The Trump administration is rushing to tear apart as much as it can as opponents of its wholesale destruction of the United States government organize to stop them.
The Trump White House and its MAGA supporters appear to be trying to cement their power to control the government by undermining the rule of law and the judges who are defending it. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt yesterday called Judge Boasberg a “Democrat activist,” although he was originally appointed by President George W. Bush, and badly misrepresented Boasberg’s order. She also attacked Boasberg’s wife for her political donations.
In Talking Points Memo this morning, David Kurtz recorded how MAGA supporters Elon Musk and Laura Loomer have attacked Boasberg’s daughter, and in Rolling Stone, Andrew Perez and Asawin Suebsaeng noted that that the Attorney General of the United States, Pam Bondi, accused Boasberg of “attempting to meddle in national security,” adding: “This one federal judge thinks he can control foreign policy for the entire country, and he cannot.”
Last month, Vice President J.D. Vance wrote that “[j]udges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” trying to obscure that it is the role of courts to determine whether or not the power the executive is claiming is, in fact, legitimate. On the Fox News Channel, “border czar” Tom Homan said: “I don’t care what the judges think.”
Kurtz noted that Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, has promised hearings on the many injunctions against the Trump administration. Kurtz also noted that angry Trump supporters have called in bomb threats against judges who have stood against Trump’s excesses, including Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, and have sent anonymous pizza deliveries to the homes of judges and their relatives as a way to demonstrate that “we know where you live.”
Perez and Suebsaeng reported that the White House’s strategy is to “move fast” before courts can stop them. In the end, one source close to the president told them that the president’s ultimate power over judges comes from the fact that they do not command an army, while he does. “Are they going to come and arrest him?” the advisor asked, apparently confident that the answer is no.
The attack of Trump and his MAGA supporters on the courts and the rule of law has illustrated how quickly the United States is sliding from democracy to authoritarianism. “Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” Harvard political scientist Steven Levitsky told Amanda Taub of the New York Times. Along with his colleague Daniel Ziblatt, Levitsky wrote How Democracies Die. “We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” Levitsky said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.”
President Donald Trump’s attempt to undermine the courts, and thus the country’s legal system, appears to have kicked the alarm about the dismantling of the U.S. government into a new phase. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times ran op-eds today from law professors detailing the lawlessness of the Trump administration and warning that the courts will not be able to stop Trump and his administration from their authoritarian takeover of the government.
In the New York Times, Georgetown University professor of law Stephen Vladeck has faith that the courts will try to rein Trump in, while in the Washington Post, Harvard Law School professor Ryan Doerfler and Yale University professor of law and history Samuel Moyn are less convinced that the judges Trump himself appointed will stand against him, but all three of them warn that stopping Trump will require the people to demand “far more aggressive oversight from members of Congress,” as Vladeck puts it. Doerfler and Moyn wrote that “real resistance must take place in Congress, at government workplaces, and in the streets.”
That the courts are in the position of trying to stop a president who is ignoring the Constitution reflects that Republicans in Congress appear to have taken off the table impeachment, the political remedy the Constitution’s framers put into our system for such a crisis.