Tag: law
Donald Trump

Chin Up! We're Doing Better Than Expected -- Or At Least Trump Is Doing Worse

It’s wonderful to see isn’t it? A snake in the grass slithering up to bite the ass of the person who had beckoned it forth?

That is the spectacle we have been treated to for these weeks and months since January 20, as one executive order signed by Trump after another has fallen to the considerations of judges who, one, can read the law, and two, require that assertions made in the executive orders, and those made by Trump’s DOJ lawyers in court, must be backed up by evidence and that pesky bane of every authoritarian, reason.

Lawsuits have been filed and Trump’s hastily written executive orders have been subjected to scrutiny by legal minds sharper than those which backed up Trump’s Sharpie. Most recently, the ordinarily somnolent Court of International Trade, in a 3-0 ruling, blocked almost all of Trump’s tariffs, which he had imposed using powers he asserted under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), a 1977 law which allows a president to regulate international commerce after declaring a “national emergency” due to an “unusual and extraordinary threat ... to the national security, foreign policy, or economy of the United States" originating from outside the borders of the country. The court found that retaliating for tariffs imposed by other countries, or otherwise addressing trade imbalances, does not constitute such a threat and thus does not justify the declaration of national emergency necessary for the assertion of powers under the IEEPA.

The Trump administration quickly appealed, and a court of appeals issued a stay of the trade court’s injunction rejecting or limiting Trump’s tariffs, at least until the case can be heard and a ruling can be issued on the merits. In the meantime, a district court issued a similar ruling blocking Trump’s tariffs in response to a lawsuit filed by a toy company that had been hugely and negatively affected by Trump’s tariffs on trade with China. That ruling has also been temporarily stayed on appeal.

Trump reacted to the trade court ruling by attacking the Federalist Society and its leader, Leonard Leo, on whom he had relied for advice on judicial appointments during his first administration. In a rage-filled post on Truth Social, Trump called Leo “a sleazebag” and “a bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America,” his catchall criticism for anyone he feels has wronged him in some way.

Trump’s assertion of power using executive orders has run counter to a Supreme Court decision that he and his arch-conservative legal allies had long sought. The decision, in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, overturned the so-called “major questions doctrine” which dated back to 1984 and required courts to defer to federal agencies when interpreting complicated and ambiguous laws. The trade court cited the Loper decision in its ruling slamming Trump’s tariffs. Trump reacted with fury, writing, “The horrific decision stated that I would have to get the approval of Congress for these Tariffs.”

Well, yes, that is what the sting of the Loper decision feels like when it bites you in the ass.

We are witnessing a delicious moment best summed up by what we might call the hippie-era “what goes around, comes around” doctrine. That occurs when the thing that you wished for starts to affect you in ways that you had not contemplated, perhaps because your contemplation of what you wanted was inadequate in its consideration of what effect it might have in the future.

Multiple lawsuits and federal court rulings have kicked much of Trump’s executive order agenda to the curb. A federal court blocked Trump’s attempt to do away with birthright citizenship, which is written into the text of the Constitution. A federal judge in Boston ruled that Trump cannot stop Harvard from accepting foreign-born students. More lawsuits filed by Harvard seek to overturn Trump’s orders to strip Harvard of federal funds and grants. Legal experts say those lawsuits are likely to be successful because the reasoning behind Trump’s moves against Harvard is so blatantly punitive.

Other judges have overturned Trump’s attempts to bar several major law firms from entering federal government buildings, holding top secret security clearances, or representing companies doing business with the federal government, again because Trump’s orders have been nakedly punitive.

Other judges have ordered the return of people deported under false pretenses. The Supreme Court itself handed down an emergency ruling that the Trump administration must afford undocumented immigrants the same due process rights granted to everyone under the Constitution.

The news website Axios summed up the “flood” of rulings against Trump this way: “The headlines are constant: Judge blocks X; Judge freezes Y; Court allows Z to continue.

On Friday, Trump bid farewell to his erstwhile ally, Elon Musk, at the end of his time as a so-called “temporary federal employee” overseeing his DOGE worm-burrowing into federal agencies seeking to eliminate or undermine them, as he did with USAID and the Department of Education. But even in those two cases, federal judges have reversed some of the DOGE moves and reinstated funding and in some cases order the rehiring of employees who had been summarily fired without cause in violation of federal regulations.

The effect of DOGE and Musk has been, by their own measure, lame. Musk announced on the campaign trail and after he was appointed to head DOGE that he would reduce the federal deficit by $2 trillion. Then it was $1 trillion, then $200 billion, and Musk had stopped talking about the federal deficit and started claiming “savings” from the discovery by DOGE of “waste, fraud, and abuse,” which in Washington D.C. could be uncovered by a street sweeper with a broom and dustpan.

In the end, Musk claimed that he had “saved” $175 billion. Robert Hubbell yesterday called that figure a “mirage,” citing “A study by the Budget Lab at Yale estimates that cuts to the IRS will result in $350 billion in reduced tax collections over the next ten years—an amount that is double the alleged ‘savings’ by DOGE.”

Much if not most of what Musk and Trump attempted to do with DOGE has been overturned by federal courts, which have found certain of their moves unconstitutional and others to have violated previous Supreme Court decisions such as the Loper decision. In the meantime, the New York Times headlined on the front page of the Sunday paper a major investigative story on Musk’s drug use during the campaign and afterwards while he was working as a temporary government employee.

Musk was described as having used Ketamine, Ecstasy, psychedelic mushrooms, the stimulant Adderall, and the sleeping medication Ambien. The Times reported that Musk, like all federal employees, was supposed to have been drug-tested periodically during his employment. He was said to have been forewarned of the drug tests so that he could pass them.

So, Donald Trump has relied on a drug-addled madman with Nazi sympathies to undertake his reform of the government he is charged with overseeing. And now Musk has turned on him, criticizing Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” and its lifting of the debt ceiling.

When Trump rolled out his plethora of executive orders, signing the first bunch before an adoring MAGA crowd at a sports facility in Washington on inauguration eve, I first thought, Oh-oh. They’re serious this time.

I should have known. The lawyers Trump used to write the executive orders were not from the big law firms he would soon move to eliminate from working on federal government cases, because those firms had long refused to do legal work for him. According to Adam Bonica, a professor of political science at Stanford, Trump lost a stunning 96 percent of the cases filed against him in federal court during May. During April, he lost 76 percent. During March, the number was 74 percent. The judges ruling against the Trump administration were appointed by both political parties, with those appointed by Democrats outnumbering Republican judges by only 8 percent.

The Washington Post reported today that Trump’s FBI is in “chaos” due to the mismanagement of Director Kash Patel. Over at the Department of Defense, the top aides to Secretary Pete Hegseth are said to be at each other’s throats.

Here is my estimation of where we are on the first day of June, 2025. Things could be a whole lot worse, and they’re showing signs of getting better, as Trump continues to attack the judges he appointed to the bench and former allies like Elon Musk are now off the White House leash and his Adderall-fueled tongue is bound to start wagging.

Chin up. We’ve got a long way to go, but Trump and the fools he appointed to his cabinet are living up to every expectation we should have had about them.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist, and screenwriter. He has covered Watergate, the Stonewall riots, and wars in Lebanon, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels. He writes every day at luciantruscott.substack.com and you can follow him on Bluesky @lktiv.bsky.social and on Facebook at Lucian K. Truscott IV. Please consider subscribing to his Substack.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

Pam Bondi

Bondi's Injustice Department Is Abnormal, Authoritarian And Mean

Veterans of the Department of Justice, including me, did our best to sound the alarm bell as the Trump/Bondi regime made clear its plans to do away with the professional norms that have guided prosecutorial behavior for generations.

It was a tricky argument. For the vast majority of people who haven’t served in the department or internalized its virtually hallowed set of operating principles, the panicked cry that “the norms are falling” could be hard to appreciate. It sounds abstract and lawyerly.

But now we are seeing the ground-level results of that demolition, driven by Pam Bondi, Alina Habba, and others. It is enabling the pursuit of cases against political opponents that no DOJ in at least the last 50 years would have touched, while masking the irregularity and unfairness from the American people.


1. The McIver Charges

Take the recent charges against Congresswoman LaMonica McIver (D-NJ). The incident in question took place on May 9, but the real story begins earlier, on March 27, when newly appointed interim U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey Alina Habba proclaimed: "We could turn New Jersey red... hopefully, while I'm there, I can help that cause."

For a U.S. Attorney to openly declare her goal of using her office to shift political power is staggering. It’s the precise opposite of her sworn duty to pursue justice without fear or favor—like a doctor swearing to "first do harm."

That statement alone would disqualify her in any prior administration, or at minimum prompt a severe rebuke from the deputy attorney general. Here, it’s simply business as usual in a department whose leader, Attorney General Bondi, has redefined DOJ's mission as serving Trump rather than the Constitution and the law.

Habba (reminiscent of Ed Martin Jr., Trump’s initial choice for D.C. U.S. Attorney) has zero prosecutorial experience, which stands her in poor stead for exercising professional judgment in her new role. Moreover, she has a woeful record of unethical behavior as a lawyer, particularly in her representations of Trump. In the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial, the judge repeatedly reprimanded her for improper conduct, at one point warning her, “You are on the verge of spending some time in the lockup.” She was sanctioned nearly $1,000,000 by a federal judge in Florida for filing a baseless lawsuit against Hillary Clinton. The judge called it “completely frivolous, both factually and legally, and… brought in bad faith for an improper purpose.”

Now to the incident in question. The alleged "assault" McIver committed involved her interfering with federal officers attempting to arrest the mayor of Newark for trespassing. The charges against the mayor were later dropped, and DOJ issued a statement about doing it “for the sake of moving forward” that fooled no one. In reality, Habba had overreached and probably blundered as well: the attorneys for the mayor were about to bring a motion saying that the trespass actually didn't occur on federal land.

Moreover, the arrest was tawdry and nasty: agents handcuffed the mayor and detained him for four hours. In any professional DOJ, he would have received a summons. He posed no flight risk. This was not about law enforcement—it was about humiliating a Democratic official.

The case against McIver appears dubious. Her lawyer, former U.S. Attorney Paul Fishman, called the charge "spectacularly inappropriate." Available evidence suggests the ICE agents lost control during the mayor’s arrest, leading to a general scrum. Afterward, McIver was given a facility tour with the agents—an odd treatment for someone supposedly posing a threat.

There's also a likely legal claim, if and when the case goes to trial, that her conduct doesn't qualify as "forcibly" within the meaning of the assault statute. The Third Circuit (which sits above the District of New Jersey) has held that the law “requires an ability to inflict harm, not merely interference with the performance of a duty… Section 111 is not meant to sweep in all harassment of Government officials.”

Finally, there’s the glaring irony of the prosecution of a congresswoman for pretty mild physical contact with a customs official by the same administration that trivialized far graver physical assaults on federal officers on January 6 by genuine thugs whom they later lionized as heroes.

My best guess is that if this case goes to trial—which I think it will, unless Habba backs down first—McIver will not be convicted, and Habba will be left with a lot of egg on her face.

But the possible bad legal fit is far from the gravest problem with the charges. Let’s stipulate the possibility that McIver is guilty of a technical violation of the assault statute. The critical question for purposes of the case, and for all prosecutions of public officials, is whether charges are warranted, i.e., whether they are comparable to cases typically brought against members of Congress, so that the Department is treating like cases alike.

The Department has a tried-and-true way to figure that out, or at least it did until the Bondi administration came to town. The Department manual specified that any prosecution against a member of Congress had to be approved by the Public Integrity Section of the Criminal Division.

There's a very good reason for that. Prosecutions of political officials are inherently fraught and tempestuous within the local community. The U.S. Attorney, too, is a high-profile official, and the risk that the public, or a good chunk of it, will see such a prosecution as politically driven is high. That's why you need real pros who have a full understanding of the Department's prosecution of political officials to make the final call. The Public Integrity Section ensures professionalism and nonpartisanship.

But under Bondi, the section has been decimated, and the requirement for its signoff erased.

The consequence is an erosion of justice no matter the facts on the ground. What may sound like a technicality is actually a critical safeguard—of justice in the individual case and public confidence in the system as a whole. Remove it, and even legitimate prosecutions lose credibility. It becomes very difficult to rebut the suggestion that Habba has gone after McIver in order to help her bosses' political agenda of "turning New Jersey red."

2. The Cuomo Investigation

A similar set of problems afflicts the investigation of Andrew Cuomo, which became public on Tuesday. We can begin at the top: the interim U.S. Attorney overseeing the investigation is Jeanine Pirro. Pirro ran unsuccessfully against Cuomo for attorney general. She has called him a liar, a political bully, a classic serial predator, and a man with “blood on his hands” for nursing home deaths at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

There is no way that Pirro should be within a country mile of any investigation of a person for whom she has a demonstrable and long-term animus. DOJ ethics guidelines, were they being enforced, would preclude involvement where there is an “appearance of impropriety that could undermine the integrity or impartiality of the investigation."

The alleged perjury at the heart of the investigation arose from Cuomo’s 2020 closed-door congressional testimony regarding his role in a New York State Health Department report on nursing home deaths. The referral came in October 2024. Legal experts across the spectrum thought a prosecution was too difficult and unlikely, and indeed DOJ declined to act on it. But Rep. James Comer (R-KY), a rabid partisan and chair of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee, resubmitted the referral last month. Now the case has been revived, with Pirro at the helm.

Cuomo's attorneys say they were blindsided by the revelation, suggesting the DOJ leaked the investigation. This comes on the heels of the DOJ dropping serious charges against Mayor Eric Adams—Cuomo’s main rival in the upcoming New York City mayoral primary. It looks to all the world that the Administration is not just putting a thumb on the scale; it is jumping on it.

That primary is June 24, putting us well within DOJ’s "60-day rule," which instructs the Department to avoid overt investigative steps that could affect the outcome within 60 days of an election. One more norm bites the dust.

Again, none of this proves that Cuomo is innocent or that the investigation is inherently improper. But precisely because the subject is high-profile and politically fraught, DOJ's own rules demand—or at least they used to demand—regularity and integrity. What’s left without them is the strong inference that the Administration is weaponizing justice for down-and-dirty political motives.

3. The Broader Issue

The problems with the evisceration of norms infect virtually all of DOJ practices. Consider the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, mysteriously deported. The administration insists he was a dangerous individual deported by mistake but not unjustly—a no-harm, no-foul scenario.

But, of course, that is not how due process works. As the Supreme Court has made clear, removal from the country requires proper notice and an opportunity to be heard. The President cannot act unilaterally and retroactively assert that the process was fair.

Without those minimum procedural safeguards, the justice of any deportation is unknowable. The American people are left with a sickening conviction that our leaders are perpetrating horrific injustices.

A similar dynamic goes for the politically charged prosecutions. The DOJ’s actions in the McIver and Cuomo cases signal not just prosecutorial overreach, but contempt for the norms that guarantee fairness and accountability.

This is the real cost of the Trump/Bondi/Habba/Pirro regime. The abandonment of longstanding norms gives rise to grievous harms inflicted on real people.

The demolition of DOJ norms may once have seemed academic. But we now can see what the Administration was aiming at in taking a buzzsaw to longstanding DOJ norms. It was replacing impartial justice and constitutional rule with one man’s agenda of power-mongering and vengeance. And that’s about as concrete and pernicious as government power gets.

Reprinted with permission from Substack.

Donald Trump

New Polls Show Voters Rapidly Turning On Trump Over Economy

Less than 100 days into his new term, President Donald Trump and his Republican Party are hemorrhaging public support as his policies thrash the economy, threaten Americans’ Social Security and Medicaid, and blow up the rule of law.

Trump's approval rating is now well underwater, with 54 percent of registered voters disapproving of the job he’s doing as president, compared with just 42 percent approving, according to Civiqs’ tracker. Voters seem to be deeply repelled by his handling of the economy, inflation, and even immigration—an issue he's usually held an advantage on.

This is terrible news for Republicans both for critical upcoming gubernatorial elections in New Jersey and Virginia in November, and for the rest of the GOP in the 2026 midterms.

For example, a Morning Consult poll released Tuesday morning found that for the first time since 2021, more voters trust Democrats on the economy than they do Republicans, by a 46 to 43 percent margin.

"That three-percentage-point edge for Democrats—their largest since April 2021—underlines a stark unraveling for the GOP, which had come off the 2024 election with a double-digit advantage on the matter," Morning Consult wrote.

The evaporation of Republicans’ edge on economic issues comes as they defend the tariffs Trump has levied on nearly every country in the world. Those tariffs are threatening to explode inflation, sink the country into a recession, and cost thousands of Americans their livelihoods.

Even worse for Republicans is that Morning Consult found congressional Democrats are now viewed more favorably than congressional Republicans.

"For the first time since just before the 2024 election, the average voter is more likely to hold positive than negative views about Democrats in Congress (47 to 46 percent). It leaves them more popular than Republicans in Congress, whose favorability ratings are now 10 points underwater," Morning Consult reported.

A new poll conducted by YouGov for the University of Massachusetts at Amherst also finds similarly poor results for the GOP. In it, voters overwhelmingly disapprove of Trump's handling of inflation (33 percent approve, 62 percent disapprove), trade (36 percent approve, 58 percent disapprove), jobs (38 percent approve, 53 percent disapprove), and foreign affairs (36 percent approve, 53 percent disapprove). The poll also finds just 50 percent approve of his handling of immigration—often his strongest issue in polling—while 46 percent disapprove.

Meanwhile, a Quinnipiac University poll from last week found Trump underwater on immigration, with 45 percent approving of his handling of it and 50 percent disapproving.

“Despite what you’ve probably heard, Trump’s immigration agenda isn’t actually popular,” G. Elliottt Morris, a reporter who led the now-defunct news outlet 538, wrote in a post on X. “While Americans tend to approve of ‘the way he is handling immigration’ in abstract, they are very negative on the details.”

For example, voters strongly disapprove of Trump’s policy of deporting undocumented immigrants without criminal records, Morris found. They also strongly oppose sending such immigrants to foreign prisons.

Trump is refusing to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, an immigrant from El Salvador that Trump sent to that prison known as CECOT, despite an order from the Supreme Court to do so.

“The media narrative is that ‘Trump is popular on immigration.’ But as we can see, that is not really true,” Morris wrote in a blog post. “On the specifics of his policy, and especially on the on-the-ground implementation, Americans are mostly opposed to what his administration is doing. (And the data above should probably be considered an overestimate, since the polls I've used are old and conducted before the Abrego Garcia news.)”

Ultimately, Trump is not immune to political gravity. And if voters have already soured on his agenda less than 100 days into his term, things could get even uglier for Trump and his party if he doesn’t reverse course.

Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.

How Will Chief Justice Roberts Tame The Monster He Created?

How Will Chief Justice Roberts Tame The Monster He Created?

The Constitution does not have a clause which states specifically, “either we have laws and follow them, or we don’t.” The closest the Constitution comes is in Article II, Section 3, where it is mandated that “the president shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” This clause is violated each day when Donald Trump awakens and opens his eyes. He committed the offense of insider trading last week, when two hours before he relaxed his onerous tariffs, he posted on Truth Social that it was “a good time to buy!” signaling to his friends that stocks would be recovering from the dive they took when he imposed the tariffs in the first place.

Trump is running a lawless presidency right out in the open and announcing that fact practically every day because he has been given permission by the Supreme Court to ignore not only norms and traditions observed by previous presidents, but the law itself.

Today, a law-abiding (if undocumented) migrant is the victim of Trump’s blatantly illegal behavior. The most frightening thing about the first three months of Trump’s second term is not knowing where we stand. Unless and until Chief Justice John Roberts decides to step up and draw some lines, there are no limits on Donald Trump. Even if that happens, it remains to be seen whether Trump will deign to adhere to judicially imposed limits. He is already in violation of two district court orders and one order by the Supreme Court itself.

We are learning a grim lesson: Democracies don’t necessarily die in darkness but in the sunlight of outright defiance of the law by a president charged with its enforcement.

Reprinted with permission from Lucian Truscott Newsletter.

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