Photo: Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images
One of the major partisan disconnects in American political discourse right now involves the extraordinary mandate Team Trump believes it harvested from its narrow 2024 victory. To be clear, every new administration believes it has a mandate to fulfill its campaign pledges. And when a new administration enjoys a governing trifecta that makes congressional enactment of big fat legislative packages on party-line votes possible, it tends to think big.
But what’s new in 2025 is a White House that claims the right not only to bully Democrats, but to bully federal judges, who after all represent a coequal branch of government established by the Constitution, and have the power to nullify legislative and executive actions alike. By “bully” I don’t just mean the ever-present possibility that the president and his minions will openly and self-consciously defy a judicial order and trigger a constitutional crisis. More generally and unmistakably, the administration has sought to intimidate judges (and encourage its vast troll army of supporters to join in the fun) by arguing that the 2024 election verdict should give Trump extraordinary leeway to push aside inconvenient laws, judicial precedents and even that pesky document the Constitution itself. We heard this pitch most recently from Vice President J.D. Vance, as The Hill reported:
In a conversation about immigration enforcement with The New York Times’s “Interesting Times” podcast, Vance said two principles core to the nation could slide into “real conflict” unless district courts “exercise a little bit more discretion” or the Supreme Court intervenes.
The first is that courts interpret the law, he said. The second is that the American people “decide how they’re governed.”
“That’s the fundamental small-d democratic principle that’s at the heart of the American project,” Vance said. “I think that you are seeing, and I know this is inflammatory, but I think you are seeing an effort by the courts to quite literally overturn the will of the American people.”
Vance was more specifically talking about the administration’s effort to convince the Supreme Court to restrict the power of district court judges to issue nationwide injunctions (which, of course, SCOTUS and the Courts of Appeal can put aside as they wish) that temporarily halt such high MAGA priorities as ICE snatch-and-grab raids or DOGE death rays aimed at federal employees. But the more general implication of Vance’s comments is that a big brawling representative of The American People like Donald Trump deserves maximum deference from the judiciary just because he does:
You cannot have a country where the American people keep on electing immigration enforcement and the courts tell the American people they’re not allowed to have what they voted for…. That’s where we are right now.
Yes, some people voted for Trump because they were concerned about “immigration enforcement,” but far more were concerned about inflation (which he doesn’t seem interested in addressing at all), and probably still more went through a lesser-of-two-evils calculation of the two major-party options and cast votes for Trump without meaning to endorse everything he said he wanted to do. But that’s not the only problem: Team Trump’s whole “American carnage” analysis of the country as being on the brink of collapse on multiple fronts is being translated into demands that every single obstacle to his agenda must be brushed aside so he can, as he often says, “save the country.”
This attitude is especially dangerous because most laws and precedents restricting presidential power recognize exceptions based on rare emergency conditions, especially in times of war. The Trump administration claims that everything is an emergency — most notably, when it began deporting undocumented immigrants utilizing the Alien Enemies Act on the fatuous grounds that high levels of immigration represented an invasion of the country. Similarly, presidential policy maven Stephen Miller has talked about suspending the writ of habeas corpus, a remarkably dangerous idea, on the same grounds.
Repeated again and again, the idea that judges should bend the law to suit Trump because he, unlike his predecessors, uniquely embodies the Popular Will (even though an actual majority of voters did not vote for him last year), is pernicious and worse yet, validates the already-powerful authoritarian tendencies of the president, his advisors, and his fans in conservative media and MAGA social media. Unsurprisingly, Trump himself insists on not just exaggerating but inventing a 2024 “landslide” of world-historical importance. This illusion should have zero credibility in any federal courtroom.
