President Trump wants this fight to reach the Supreme Court. Then he wants them to say he and Musk can abolish government agencies established by Congress and ignore judges who try to stop him.
Seattle judge blocks Trump’s birthright citizenship executive order
A Seattle judge ruled President Trump’s birthright citizenship order is “blatantly unconstitutional” after Democrats from four states sued him.
To hear President Donald Trump and his unhinged hatchet man Elon Musk tell it, the Department of Government Efficiency is hard at work, successfully rooting out waste, fraud and corruption in federal agencies.
To hear federal judges tell it – DOGE has repeatedly violated the U.S. Constitution and other federal laws and regulations that govern how employees can be fired from their jobs and how their agencies can be dismantled.
Trump and Musk rattle off plenty of claims about DOGE but turn hostile when asked for specifics. The judges go a different route, establishing long legal paper trails with orders and rulings that clearly spell out the law and their logic.
That leaves Trump and Musk looking like grifters in a frenetic con job designed to bewilder us with unprecedented dismemberment of our government. A prime tactic in that grift – melt down in tantrums each time a judge stymies the action.
Fired federal employees are being ordered back onto the payroll. Discriminatory exclusions for transgender members of the military have been put on hold. Canceled contracts are being restored.
DOGE keeps losing in court, so Trump keeps lying about judges
In just the past week, judges have blocked DOGE from what was derided as a “fishing expedition” to rummage through personal information about taxpayers in the Social Security database, stopped what was called the “likely unconstitutional” firings of U.S. Agency for International Development employees, and questioned whether Musk’s leadership of DOGE is unconstitutional.
Trump, long known for explosive outbursts against judges who don’t rule as he likes, popped off again Thursday in a social media post, decrying “Radical Left Judges” blocking DOGE and other administration efforts.
One problem there – judicial data collected and tracked by Adam Bonica, an associate professor of political science at Stanford University, completely debunks that. Using “judicial ideology” measures he helped develop, Bonica found that 76% of the judges who have ruled against Trump were liberals, while 88% were centrists and 50% were conservative.
“The Trump administration portrays judicial opposition as purely partisan, but the data reveals a starkly different reality: judges from across the ideological spectrum are ruling against administration policies at remarkable rates,” Bonica wrote in a post Thursday on his website, On Data and Democracy. “This cross-ideological judicial resistance suggests deeper institutional concerns about executive overreach rather than mere partisan motivations.”
Let’s be honest. Trump and Musk don’t care about our laws.
Trump and Musk couldn’t care less about the constitutional requirement for coequal branches of government, with the president, Congress and the judiciary sharing the power to keep each other in check.
With the losses piling up, Musk is now donating to Republican members of Congress open to impeaching judges for just doing their jobs after spending $288 million last year to help Trump with the presidency.
As of March 15, at least 46 judicial rulings have gone against Trump since he took office and sicced DOGE on the government, according to a tracker regularly updated by The New York Times.
Trump tries to have it both ways, wailing about judges while bragging that “DOGE has been an incredible success.”
DOGE’s website has become a running joke, with post after post claiming massive cuts that are quickly scrutinized and then debunked.
Musk’s gang of interns, some now raking in six-figure government salaries to report to an unelected billionaire bureaucrat, just delete the debunked posts and throw up new, just as shady, claims.
Trump thinks Supreme Court will be safe space for his lawlessness
Trump looks to be working from a short-term and long-term plan here.
First, he wants these low-level court challenges to reach the U.S. Supreme Court, where the 6-3 hard-right conservative majority last year issued him a free pass on alleged criminal behavior. Trump always wants more. Now he wants the Supreme Court to say he can abolish government agencies established by Congress and ignore judges who try to stop him.
Second, Trump wants to permanently distort the culture of American public service, to make working for the government an unsustainable economic option, discouraging would-be federal applicants.
New polling shows that’s not so popular. A Fox News poll found that 65% of the people surveyed March 14-17 are extremely or very concerned that DOGE operates with “not enough thought or planning.” Those surveyed are not so impressed with Musk, with 58% disapproving of his DOGE work while 40% approve.
Blueprint, a polling firm aligned with the Democratic Party, found that 54% disapprove of Musk’s performance while 38% approve.
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, who dealt Trump his immunity free pass last year, felt compelled last week to rebuke the president for demanding the impeachment of a federal judge who ordered a stop to a slapdash deportation plan that sent Venezuelans to a prison in El Salvador.
Trump didn’t care for that, lashing out Thursday in a social media post that demanded that Roberts “fix this toxic and unprecedented situation” – which is how an American president sees a coequal branch of government dutifully doing its work.
He wants this fight to reach the Supreme Court. And, as always, this is not just about winning for Trump. He wants to twist and contort the American government so that, going forward, it just looks too scary to dare fight him at all.
Follow USA TODAY columnist Chris Brennan on X, formerly known as Twitter: @ByChrisBrennan