The Memo: Trump, allies ramp up attacks on courts

Monday brought another legal setback for President Trump and his administration — and there is every indication it will add more fuel to the fire of MAGA grievances against the judiciary.

The issue was federal spending and the new president’s desire to freeze huge swathes of it.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell complained that the administration had, in effect, ignored an earlier order from him to unfreeze grants and other tranches of funds.

The initial order, made at the end of January, had held that the Trump administration could not “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” funding right away.

In Monday’s ruling, McConnell hit Trump and his allies for trying to flout his authority with “sweeping” funding pauses that he said “violate the plain text” of his previous order. He insisted that the administration must restore the funding right away.

O’Connell’s ruling is one detail on a much bigger canvas.

The courts have emerged as the path of most resistance to Trump’s aggressive agenda. And the result has been unsuppressed fury from the president and his allies.

On Sunday, en route to the Super Bowl, Trump took aim at judges who had slowed his moves, such as U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer, who curbed access to the Treasury Department’s payment system for the quasi-department Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk.

Trump, using similar phrasing to his infamous speech on the Ellipse before the Capitol Riot of Jan. 6, 2021, contended that if the judiciary stopped what Trump characterized as a search for fraud and waste, it would mean “we don’t have a country anymore.”

The president also contended that “no judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision” and insisted that doing so was “a disgrace.”

Previously, Musk himself had responded to a critical post about Engelmayer’s ruling from conservative commentator Glenn Beck by alleging that this was a case of “a corrupt judge protecting corruption.” Musk added that Engelmayer should immediately be impeached.

Impeachment is currently the only way to remove a judge, a situation that also meets with Musk’s displeasure. In a separate social media post, he proposed that “the worst 1 percent of appointed judges, as determined by elected bodies, be fired every year. This will weed out the most corrupt and least competent.”

Vice President Vance has also joined the pile-on against purported judicial overreach — or, as critics would see it, helped the president “work the refs” in pursuit of his agenda.

In a social media post on Sunday morning, Vance wrote that “if a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal.”

“Judges,” Vance concluded, “aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

His argument left an obvious loose end — the question of what constitutes legitimate, or illegitimate, use of executive power.

This is a question on which the courts rule with great frequency. Indeed, during former President Biden’s tenure in the White House, it was a power that Republicans encouraged the courts to use repeatedly.

Last November, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton sent out a press release celebrating the filing of his 100th lawsuit against “the Biden-Harris administration,” a legal blizzard that Paxton’s office characterized as “demonstrating the extent of the federal government’s abuses of power under the current leadership.”

In any event, the anger from the Trump side right now is especially pointed because of how many initiatives the courts have paused.

Trump’s attempt to do away with the idea of birthright citizenship, the proposed buyout of federal workers, the funding issue adjudicated by Engelmayer and the hollowing out of USAID have all been halted — though perhaps only briefly — by the courts.

The New York Times reported Sunday that “more than 40 lawsuits” had been filed in recent days by state attorneys general and others seeking to put the brakes on Trump’s agenda.

Meanwhile, Democrats and other Trump critics have sought to shore up the courts against Team Trump’s verbal assaults.

Pete Buttigieg, who served as Transportation secretary under Biden, wrote on social media that “even the greatest country, if it loses the rule of law, will not have much left.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) welcomed the ruling constraining DOGE from access to the Treasury Department systems by writing Sunday that she was “proud” of the Democratic attorneys general “for stepping up and defending Americans’ rights.”

Warren added, “We are not powerless.”

In fact, one of the reasons there is such a pitched battle over the courts is because much of the rest of the opposition to the president is in disarray.

Democrats are in the minority in both the House and the Senate and are still reeling from former Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss in last November’s election. Party leaders are further disoriented by shifts to the right among key blocs, including young and nonwhite voters, and at odds over how to move forward.

Progressive activists, at least so far, have been unable to replicate the energy — or the crowds — that they brought out into the streets as Trump began his first term in 2017.

And there are broader cultural shifts that also leave liberals uneasy, including the number of tech titans who are making nice with Trump, a sense that some media outlets are being pressured by their owners to go easy on the president and a growing corporate wariness about appearing overly “woke.”

For the moment, it looks as if the courts are the last ditch for the Trump resistance.

And that also explains why the president and his most fervent supporters are so eager to bring them to heel.

The Memo is a reported column by Niall Stanage.