President Trump and his allies are confronting the nation’s justice system with increasing intensity.
A Trump ally who has been accused of suggesting department officials consider ignoring court orders has been confirmed to one of the nation’s highest courts. The administration has clashed with Federal District Court judges over their power to appoint prosecutors. It has opened formal complaints against judges it has disagreed with, and it has even sued an entire federal bench in Maryland.
Trump frequently complains about the judges who rule against him, and in some instances, his administration has defied court orders outright.
The whirl of activity is hard to keep track of. The administration’s critics warn that it matters, because it could erode the ability of the judiciary to check a president’s power.
Crucially, though, one of the administration’s main weapons against the system is the system itself. Trump’s clashes with the courts must run through the courts — a fact that brings comfort to some legal experts, even as they warily watch Trump’s efforts to reshape the system.
“He’s ultimately asking judges to side with him. That is, to me, so much less scary than so many other things that he’s doing that I have attacked fiercely,” said Akhil Reed Amar, a professor at Yale Law School. “Because at the end of the day,” he added, referring to the chief justice of the United States, “these issues are going to be decided, according to this strategy, by John Roberts and not Donald Trump.”
Putting the outside critic inside
In 1937, with President Franklin Delano Roosevelt reeling from Supreme Court decisions that stopped parts of his New Deal from taking effect, he nominated a vocal critic of the court to join it: Senator Hugo Black of Alabama, who had backed Roosevelt’s ill-fated plan to pack the court.
He had decided to put an outside critic on the inside.
That, Amar told me, bears some similarity to Trump’s appointment of his former defense lawyer Emil Bove to a powerful federal appeals court. During his brief tenure as a Justice Department official, Bove was accused by a whistle-blower of having suggested that department lawyers might defy court orders. My colleague Devlin Barrett described Bove’s confirmation on Tuesday as “at least a tacit Senate endorsement of the president’s efforts to bend the justice system to his will.”
“You put harsh critics of the court in the judiciary itself,” Amar said. “When you succeed in that, I’m not sure that’s an assault on the system — that’s working within the system.”
Not everybody agrees.
Bove “has said publicly everything that Donald Trump has said about the judiciary, the rule of law and about America,” said J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and a conservative who has become a fierce critic of the administration’s attacks on the judiciary. “Bove’s appointment is the further corruption of the federal judiciary and the rule of law.”
Taking the courts to court
As the administration hits legal roadblocks in the efforts to carry out Trump’s agenda, officials at the Justice Department have turned to a tactic that both illustrates the limits of their power, and their desire to push those limits: They’ve taken the courts to court.
In June, my colleague Alan Feuer reported, lawyers for the Justice Department said a districtwide rule issued by a federal judge in Maryland, which delayed the government’s ability to expel immigrants seeking to challenge their removal, interfered with its immigration enforcement power. So they sued the entire bench.
In an amicus brief, Luttig described that lawsuit as “frivolous litigation” that was intended to “further harass, intimidate and threaten the federal courts because they have, under the Constitution, ruled against the president and his administration.”
My colleague Mattathias Schwartz, who covers the federal courts, pointed me to another example of a Trump-allied group taking courts to court, in which the America First Legal Foundation, a group co-founded by the powerful Trump aide Stephen Miller, is suing the organization that Chief Justice Roberts uses to help oversee the judiciary, arguing that it should be subject to freedom of information requests.
Then there are the Justice Department’s formal misconduct complaints against judges it has disagreed with, including Judge James E. Boasberg, whose ruling against Trump’s deportation plans was central to the whistle-blower complaint against Bove, and a judge who heard a challenge to Trump’s ban on transgender service members. (Such complaints are dealt with in appellate courts.)
Luttig describes those moves as Trump’s “war on the federal judiciary.” Saikrishna Prakash, a law professor at the University of Virginia who specializes in the separation of powers and who once clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas, sees them as part of a longer fight between the executive and judicial branches.
“Of course, these are attacks on the courts,” Prakash said. “But if you’re the executive branch, you think the court’s attacking you.”
BY THE NUMBERS
A polling paradox?
In recent weeks, President Trump has taken a series of actions that have irritated or even angered his base, and those feelings are seeping into the polls. But that doesn’t mean his supporters are breaking with him. Ruth Igielnik, the polling editor at The Times, throws light on a seeming contradiction.
President Trump has maintained a remarkably stable approval rating, despite a tumultuous few months. His numbers have remained particularly strong with Republicans, who continually give him approval ratings of around 90 percent.
But those numbers mask growing discontent.
Across surveys, a sizable share of voters say they disapprove of specific actions taken by Trump, even as they continue to approve of his overall job performance.
The concerns are particularly acute when it comes to prices and inflation.
Some 41 percent of those who approve of Trump’s job performance also think he has not gone far enough in reducing everyday prices, and 20 percent say Trump has not paid enough attention to the country’s most important problems, according to a CNN/SSRS poll this month.
In a Fox News poll, nearly 30 percent of Trump’s 2024 supporters disapproved of how he was handling inflation, and 21 percent said inflation had caused their family serious hardship.
Nearly 20 percent of voters who approved of Trump’s job performance disapproved of his signature domestic policy bill, according to a CNN/SSRS poll this month. And 11 percent expected the bill to hurt the economy.
And more than a third of Republicans — 36 percent — disapproved of how Trump had handled the files related to Jeffrey Epstein, while 40 percent approved, according to a poll from Quinnipiac University.
So why are Trump’s approval numbers with his base still so high, seemingly immune to this discontent?
Perhaps most important is the fact that voters who approve of Trump believe he is delivering the radical change he promised: 93 percent of Trump-approvers say his approach has been necessary to shake up things in Washington, according to the CNN poll.
And Trump’s handling of an array of issues has broadly pleased many of his supporters. Around 90 percent of them approve of how he is handling immigration, deportations, health care, trade, taxes and foreign policy.
ONE LAST THING
The power of Loomer
The Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official resigned under pressure yesterday after he found himself in the cross hairs of the right-wing influencer Laura Loomer. I asked my colleague Robert Draper, who recently profiled Loomer, to explain what this tells us about what she calls her “independent auditing.”
For Loomer, the F.D.A. official, Vinay Prasad, failed a basic loyalty test: Even as he had criticized vaccine manufacturers and Anthony Fauci, he had, in years past, repeatedly disparaged Trump and his followers.
Loomer has devoted considerable energy to looking into the backgrounds of officials who fall under the purview of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who she says is “running a shadow presidential campaign” from his office. Prasad fell into that category.
In an interview today, Loomer said that someone like Prasad — who had said on his podcast of Trump, “I hate him, too,” and ridiculed his followers as a “cult” — was not beyond redemption. After all, she said, “JD Vance compared Trump to Hitler.” But, she added, Vance “publicly apologized.”
“My biggest litmus test, besides loyalty,” Loomer said, “is whether you’re honest and have enough humility to demonstrate that you’re sorry.”
According to Loomer, Prasad didn’t come close to asking for forgiveness from Trump. “You’ve got to at least pretend like you’re sorry,” she said.
Robert Draper, Ruth Igielnik, Chris Cameron and Jacob Reber contributed to this newsletter.
Jess Bidgood is a managing correspondent for The Times and writes the On Politics newsletter, a guide to how President Trump is changing Washington, the country and its politics.
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