The Only “Judicial Coup” in This Country Is by Trump Against Judges

So Donald Trump got a temporary win Thursday when a federal appeals courts stayed the decision from the International Court of Trade, which ruled that his tariffs were illegal. Trump aides went on Fox News to crow about their big victory, but they may be back to eating crow soon: The stay was granted on an administrative basis only. In addition, a second federal court has also issued a ruling blocking the tariffs.

Meanwhile, the administration suffered another huge legal setback this week when a different federal judge ruled that Harvard University can keep admitting foreign students for the time being, overruling the administration’s efforts to derail the university. Naturally, the attack on Harvard is just phase one in Trump’s attempt to Orbánize, if I may put it that way, American higher education. It’s a nakedly ideological and authoritarian attack, for which the administration—while asking to see the coursework of every international student—is presenting to the courts no actual evidence of wrongdoing, and it will lose.

This is the week that TACO—or “Trump always chickens out” —became a thing. The phrase was coined in early May by a Financial Times writer. It has since spread to Wall Street, where traders mock him for always reliably backing down on his most extravagant trade war proposals. A White House reporter asked Trump about his new nickname. Little Donnie got very mad.

It’s funny. But it’s worth noting that he doesn’t always chicken out. Most of the time, he just loses.

The New York Times keeps a running tab of the number of court cases that have gone against the administration. As of May 29, the number of losses clocked in at 181. And in her Substack on Tuesday, Heather Cox Richardson cited research by the political scientist Adam Bonica of Stanford, who found that the administration suffered a 96 percent loss rate in the courts in May.

The administration is losing these cases for a simple reason: They’re breaking the damn law. They’re invoking old and obscure laws and insisting that they confer upon them the authority to do things they don’t have the authority to do. They’re trying to stretch other laws and regulations to suit their authoritarian purposes.

God knows they’ve done a lot of damage. But it’s also been heartening to see that, thanks to the courage and commitment of a lot of people who care about democracy and the law and are putting themselves on the line to defend them, they’re seeing that limits do exist in this country that should prevent them from imposing full-on fascism.

But all of this assumes that the Trumpies will obey the law. That is not an assumption we can make. This week we have Stephen Miller calling the trade court’s ruling a “judicial coup”—remember, it was delivered by a three-judge panel; two were Republican appointees, and one of those an appointee of Trump himself—and saying: “We are living under a judicial tyranny.” Likewise, we have tariff consigliere Peter Navarro saying, in essence, To hell with the law. “You can assume that even if we lose, we will do it another way,” Navarro told reporters Thursday.

With respect to the Harvard case, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that “if these judges want to be secretary of state or the president, they can run for office themselves.” And the Times reported that lawyers at the Department of Homeland Security “hinted that the Trump administration was pursuing other ways to bar international students from enrolling at the Ivy League university.”

In other words: They’re going to continue to break the law. Or maybe they’re going to have young graduates of Ave Maria law school scour the books and find weird 1846 statutes under which they can exercise their authority to deport people for writing newspaper op-eds. The day is going to come, perhaps soon, when Trump just says openly of a major court decision that the decision is illegitimate and he will not obey it. (They’ve flouted court decisions, as in the refusal to comply with the Supreme Court’s order on Kilmar Abrego Garcia, but they’ve generally done so without trying to provoke direct confrontation.)

None of this is an accident. Trump and Miller want this fight. As retired conservative federal Judge J. Michael Luttig told the Times: “This was a planned war that he had been planning since he lost the last election. From Day 1, the president, the vice president, and then eventually his entire Cabinet have been attacking the courts and the judiciary because they knew to a certainty that the courts would strike down his initiatives.”

In other words, these initiatives and the way the Trump administration is going about them—using the 1798 Alien Enemies Act as ostensible legal cover for obviously illegal deportations—are part of a larger plan. There’s a particular assault on immigrants, another particular assault on standing trade law and congressional (rather than executive) authority, another particular assault on higher education, and more. They’re all real, and they’re all frightening.

But they’re all just smaller parts of a broader assault on the rule of law itself. They’re pieces of a puzzle, and the puzzle, once filled in, will show a Republican-dominated legislative branch that has willingly conceded most of its authority, a judicial branch that has been stripped of its own, and a unitary executive—King Donald—with all the power in his hands.

Ah, you say, but Trump has always said he’d obey the Supreme Court. True. He has. And that means … what, exactly? Who’s gullible enough to take that seriously? All it means is that he’s at least smart enough to know that he has to say that for now.

So Stephen Miller is right, in a way. There is a judicial coup going on in this country. It’s just that it’s being waged by Trump, Miller, and their gang of rogues against the judges, not the other way around.

If the world still exists a hundred years from now or, even more improbably, a thousand, and people are still writing and reading something that vaguely resembles a “book,” some future Gibbon chronicling the descent into authoritarian corruption of the once-republican United States of America may very well sift through the archives of our era and decide that nothing sums up our decline and fall quite like the events of May 22, 2025.

Dawn broke with the House of Representatives passing the Trump budget bill, which takes from the poor to give to the rich more bluntly and blatantly than any bill in American history. The day ended with Donald Trump hosting the most corrupt dinner a president of the United States has ever held, solely for the purpose of enriching himself, and putting himself in hock to … well, his real employers—the citizens and voters of the United States—have no idea who they are, precisely.

That dinner is way beyond shocking. It’s the American equivalent of the art collection Hermann Goering stole from the homes of Jews during World War II in the way it symbolizes the sick corruption of this regime (and yeah, it’s a “regime,” not an “administration”). But from a small-d democratic perspective, it’s worse, precisely because the people who’ve enriched the president through his $Trump meme coin are mostly unknown to us.

We’ve learned a few names. They are not reassuring. The Wall Street Journal broke the story that one investor and dinner guest was the Chinese-born crypto tycoon Justin Sun, who, before this dinner, avoided even setting foot in the U.S. for fear of being arrested. His blockchain network company, says the Journal, is a “popular channel for crypto’s criminal fraternity to move funds.” (His people deny this.) The Biden Securities and Exchange Commission was suing Sun’s company; in February, the Trump administration dropped the lawsuit.

What sort of favor might Sun one day seek from the U.S. government? At least we know his identity. Otherwise, we have almost no idea who most of the 220 guests were. Were there Saudi potentates? Russian oligarchs? Employers of child laborers in some forlorn destination? Rich Qatari backers of Hamas?

Remember, a meme coin has no tangible value. It’s not an “investment” in any normal sense. Only two kinds of people would be drawn to the purchase of large shares of $Trump: people who simply adore the man—and people who want to have leverage over him.

It boggles the mind that this could be perpetrated by a sitting president of the United States. But it happened, and it will go unpunished, not only because Trump is so grubby and sleazy but because congressional Republicans are such cowards. If Kamala Harris were president and she did something that was fractionally as slimy as this—let’s say she just hosted a thank-you dinner for an undisclosed list of high-rolling donors—they’d be screaming impeachment. What Trump has done here is far worse, and with a few meek exceptions (“This gives me pause,” said the courageous Wyoming Senator Cynthia Lummis), they have nothing to say.

Lummis and her GOP Senate colleagues vow that they will have plenty to say about the small, ugly bill the House passed Thursday morning. And maybe they will. But what’s being said right now makes no sense.

Missouri’s Josh Hawley claims there will be no Medicaid cuts in the bill. He even said Thursday that Trump agrees with him on that. There are, nevertheless, $800-plus billion worth of Medicaid cuts in the House bill. You know, the one Trump pressured House Republicans to pass? Kentucky’s Rand Paul says adding $5 trillion to the debt isn’t very conservative. In theory, that’s true. But if Republicans want to cut taxes on rich people and take a cleaver to domestic spending—both things they yearn to do—then they’re going to add to the debt, and the deficit.

Republicans have been doing nothing but this for the last 45 years: cut taxes for the rich, punish people who rely on meager government programs like food stamps, and run the deficit and the debt to the sky. But they’ve never done it quite as nakedly as this bill does it. The House bill would add $3.8 trillion to the deficit by 2034. This will require the next Democratic president (assuming the existence of an election) to clean up an unprecedented Republican mess, which every Democratic president since Bill Clinton has had to do.

But even worse is the intentional skewing of benefits to the rich. It’s the usual GOP legerdemain: Yes, everybody gets a tax cut, but the tax cuts for the poor are peanuts, and they’re more than offset by the slashing of government programs on which poor people rely. And the rich are getting not just personal income tax relief. Republicans have thrown all kinds of things into the bill that help those at the top.

As TNR’s Grace Segers reported this week: “The [Congressional Budget Office]’s findings were echoed by researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business last Friday, whose budget model revealed that those in the lowest income quintile (annual income of $17,000 or less) would see their after-tax income cut by $1,035. Meanwhile, those in the top 0.1 percent of earners would take home an additional $389,280.”

This isn’t just dubious legislation. It’s antidemocratic decadence. These are the governing priorities of a ruling class that faces no democratic accountability.

There are other things in the bill too. The detention budget of Immigration and Customs Enforcement jumps from $3.4 billion to $45 billion. Heather Cox Richardson draws out the key historic connection: “This bill highlights a truism: In the United States, racism has always gone hand in hand with the concentration of wealth among the very richest people. By driving white fear of a darker-skinned other, elite southern enslavers convinced the poor white farmers who lost their land in the cotton boom of the 1850s to vote for politicians who insisted that the primary responsibility of the federal government was to protect human enslavement.”

Lots of material for our future Gibbon, for whom May 22 may well symbolize our demise. The only qualifier to add? Something worse is bound to happen soon.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

“Drain the swamp,” Donald Trump said many times—mostly in his first race in 2016, but also in 2020 and 2024. To a certain kind of low-information person who has been conditioned to believe that everybody in Washington is corrupt and in it for themselves, the message resonated well enough that, with the help of the right-wing echo chamber, the man who has spent his entire adult life cheating people and lying about it convinced enough voters that he would be the scimitar-wielding enemy of corruption.

MAGA America still believes this, because Trump has convinced those folks, through further blatant and obvious lies, that he was the victim of the most sinister persecution in American political history. All the work of the swamp.

Back on planet Earth, meanwhile, we saw many instances this week of the Trump swamp in action, and it’s far worse than anything we’ve ever seen before in this country. Of course every week of this presidency so far has been the equivalent of a fetid, mosquito-infested morass, but this week was different because some of his hench people had to go up to Capitol Hill and answer a few questions, and we saw on full wretched display the three ugly faces of MAGA-style swampiness.

But we must start with Trump himself and that Qatari 747, which he intends to use as Air Force One and then transfer it to his presidential library foundation upon leaving office. It’s not possible to overstate how corrupt this is. The $400 million figure you see quoted in the media is the market value of the luxury jumbo jet right now; that is, the size of the bribe. But it will cost a billion, maybe more, to reconfigure.

This was too blatant even for the likes of Ben Shapiro, but other liars reliably leapt to Trump’s defense. Wrote Ann Coulter: “I can’t wait for the press to find out about France’s so-called ‘gift’ of the Statue of Liberty, accepted in 1886 by then-President Grover Cleveland.”

Right. As if Cleveland put the statue in his backyard and started living in it. It was a gift to the United States, not to Cleveland. Coulter isn’t that stupid. She’s a lawyer. She’s just lying and provoking. What else is new, I guess, but it just shows the cynical depths these people will go to in order to keep the MAGA base in a state of rage.

Which brings us to Swamp Creature Pam Bondi, who approved the gift, calling it “legally permissible.” That’s total nonsense, made worse by the fact that the attorney general once lobbied for Qatar. But why should this surprise us? The New York Times reported Friday that Bondi dumped between $1 million and $5 million worth of shares in Trump’s media company on April 2, the day Trump announced his crazy tariffs (though it’s unknown whether she sold them before the announcement, which could indicate she acted on inside knowledge, or afterward).

Corruption is just one face of this swampdom. Tragicomic evasive incompetence is another. Exhibit A this week was Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Capitol Hill testimony, in which he dodged questions about his track record on vaccines and ended up saying, “I don’t want to seem like I’m being evasive, but I don’t think people should be taking medical advice from me.” Remember, this is the man who runs the federal agency that is the chief dispenser of policy and advice about public health.

Kennedy also showed he knew next to nothing about the agency he allegedly runs. Maryland Democratic Senator Angela Alsobrooks asked him about a program of Health and Human Services that is meant to fight sudden infant death syndrome. Where, she wondered, is this program housed?

He took two incorrect stabs at an answer. Finally, Alsobrooks had to tell him that it was part of the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Eunice Kennedy Shriver, founder of the Special Olympics and a philanthropist on intellectual disability issues with few peers in American history, was his aunt.

But the third and worst face of thuggish swampery is plain cruelty, and here, no one can come close to Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security secretary. She traipsed up to Capitol Hill this week, where Democratic Congressman Robert Garcia asked her some questions about Andry Hernández Romero, the gay man from Venezuela whom the Trump administration sent down to the notorious CECOT prison in El Salvador in early April. The administration asserts that Hernández Romero was a member of Tren de Agua but has advanced little evidence to support that charge. He has no criminal record, and the U.S. government determined that he had a credible claim that he needed asylum.

Garcia simply asked Noem to confirm that he hadn’t been killed:

“Would you commit to just letting his mother know, as a mother to mother, if Andry is alive?”

“Our asylum applications are different than the granting of asylum, and I don’t know the specifics of this individual case. This individual is in El Salvador, and the appeal would be best made to the president and to the government of El Salvador.”

Nice. And now she wants to have a reality TV show in which immigrants compete for U.S. citizenship. Not making this up.

These people aren’t draining any swamp. They are the swamp. I could go on. National Intelligence Director Tulsi Gabbard this week fired two veteran intelligence professionals because they wrote an assessment that was at odds with Trump’s rationale for deporting alleged Venezuelan gang members. And now she wants to put James Comey “behind bars” for a stupid Instagram post of a photo of seashells forming the numbers “8647,” which Bondi took to mean he was calling for Trump’s assassination. Comey later deleted the post and apologized, saying he “didn’t realize some folks associate those numbers with violence.”

Neither did I. I always thought “86” just means to eject or toss someone or thing, as in, “I 86’d that drunk barfly” or “I 86’d that tattered old coat.” Any other administration would have accepted Comey’s apology and let it go. But in Trumpland, Comey’s crime wasn’t a mere Instagram post. It’s that he is the enemy. And because he is the enemy, the regime is completely justified in dangling a prison term over his head. And so things go in authoritarian swamps, when the minions fear that Dear Leader has been offended.

Nicolle Wallace had Scott Galloway on her MSNBC show Thursday. She began by asking him what he makes of this moment in which we find ourselves. Galloway, a business professor and popular podcaster, could have zigged in any number of directions with that open-ended question, so I was interested to see the direction he settled on: “I think we essentially have become a kleptocracy that would make Putin blush. I mean, keep in mind that in the first three months, the Trump family has become $3 billion wealthier, so that’s a billion dollars a month.”

Stop and think about that. A presidency lasts, of course, 48 months (at most, we hope). Trump has been enriching himself at an unprecedented scale since day one of his second term—actually, since just before, given that he announced the $Trump meme coin a few days before swearing to protect and defend the Constitution.

And now, we know that he’s having a dinner at Mar-a-Lago in two weeks for his top $Trump investors, whose identities we may never know. How might these people influence his decisions? This whole arrangement is blatantly corrupt. And The New York Times had a terrific report this week about Don Jr. and Eric going around the world (Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia) making deals from which their father will profit.

I read these stories, as I’m sure you do, and I think to myself: How on earth is he getting away with this? It’s the right question, but we usually concentrate on the wrong answer.

For most people, they think first of the Democrats, because they’re the opposition, and by the traditions of our system they’re the ones who are supposed to stop this, or at least raise hell about it. Second, we might think about congressional Republicans, who, if they were actually upholding their own oaths to the Constitution, would be expressing alarm about this.

They both shoulder some blame, but neither of those is really the answer. Every time I ask myself how he gets away with this, I remember: Oh, right. It’s the right-wing media. Duh.

After the election, I wrote a column that went viral about how the right-wing media made Trump’s election possible. Fox News, most conspicuously, but also Newsmax, One America News Network, Sinclair, and the rest, along with the swarm of right-wing podcasters and TikTokers, created a media environment in which Trump could do no wrong and Kamala Harris no right.

Think back—I know you’ve repressed it—to that horror-clown-show Madison Square Garden rally Trump held the week before the election. It was, as the Times put it, a “carnival of grievances, misogyny, and racism.” A generation or two ago, that would have finished off his campaign. Last year? It made no difference. No—it helped. And it helped because a vast propaganda network—armed with press passes and First Amendment protections—spent a week gabbing about how cool and manly it was.

Newsflash: They’re still at it.

First of all, Fox News is basically the megaphone of the Trump administration. In Trump’s first 100 days in office, key administration officials, reports Media Matters for America, appeared on Fox 536 times. That, obviously, is 5.36 times per day; in other words, assuming that a cable news “day” runs from 6 a.m. to midnight, that’s one administration official about every three hours. I’ve seen occasional clips where the odd host challenges them on this point or that, but in essence, this is a propaganda parade.

I tried to do some googling to see how Fox is covering the meme coin scandal. Admitting that Google doesn’t catch everything, the answer seems to be that it’s not. On the network’s website, there was a bland January 18 article reporting that he’d launched it; an actually interesting January 22 piece summarizing a critical column by The Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell, who charged that it was an invitation to bribery; and finally, an April 24 report that the coin surged in value after Trump announced the upcoming dinner—“critics” were given two paragraphs, deep in the article. (Interesting side note: Predictably, other figures on the far right have aped Trump by launching their own coins, among them former Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio and “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley.)

But it’s not just Fox, and it’s not just on corruption. It’s all of them, and it’s on everything. You think any of them are mentioning Trump’s campaign promise to bring prices down on day one, or pointing out that all “persons” in the United States have a right to due process? Or criticizing his shambolic tariffs policies? I’m not saying there’s never criticism. There is. But the thrust of the coverage is protective and defensive: “Expert Failure & the Trump Boom” was the theme of one recent Laura Ingraham segment.

So sure, blame Democrats to some extent. A number of them are increasingly trying to bring attention to the corruption story, but there’s always more they could be doing. (By the way, new DNC Chair Ken Martin announced the creation one month ago of a new “People’s Cabinet” to push back hard against Trump. Anybody heard of it since?)

And of course, blame congressional Republicans. Their constitutional, ethical, and moral failures are beyond the pale, and they’re all cowards.

But neither of those groups is the reason Trump can throw a meme coin party and nothing happens; can send legal U.S. residents to brutal El Salvador prisons; can detain students for weeks because they wrote one pro-Palestinian op-ed; can shake down universities and law firms; can roil the markets with his idiotic about-faces on tariffs; can whine that bringing down prices is harder than he thought; can empower his largest donor, the richest man in the world, to take a meat-ax to the bureaucracy in a way that makes no sense to anyone, and so much more.

It’s all because Trump and his team operate within the protective cocoon of a media-disinformation environment that allows just enough criticism to retain “credibility” but essentially functions as a Ministry of Truth for the administration that would have shocked Orwell himself.

And just remember—a billion dollars a month.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Imagine that Joe Biden, just as he was assuming office, had started a new company with Hunter Biden and used his main social media account to recruit financial backers, then promised that the most generous among them would earn an invitation to a private dinner with him. Oh, and imagine that these investors were all kept secret from the public, so that we had no idea what kinds of possible conflicts of interest might arise.

Take a minute, close your eyes. Let yourself see Jim Jordan’s face go purple in apoplexy, hear the moral thunder spewing out of Jesse Watters’s mouth, feel the shock (which would be wholly justified) of the New York Times editorial board as it expressed disbelief that the man representing the purported values and standards of the United States of America before the world would begin to think it was remotely OK to do such a thing. The media would be able to speak of nothing else for days. Maybe weeks.

Yet this and more is what Donald Trump just did, and unless you follow the news quite closely, it’s possible you’ve not even heard about it. Or if you have, it was probably in passing, one of those second-tier, “this is kind of interesting” headlines. But it’s a lot more than that. As Democratic Senator Chris Murphy noted Wednesday: “This isn’t Trump just being Trump. The Trump coin scam is the most brazenly corrupt thing a President has ever done. Not close.”

Trump announced this week that the top 220 buyers of his $Trump (strump, as in strumpet) meme coin between now and mid-May will be invited to an exclusive dinner on May 22 (“a night to remember”) at his golf club outside Washington, D.C. The Washington Post and other outlets have reported that in the days since the announcement, “buyers have poured tens of millions of dollars” into the coin; further, that the holders of 27 crypto wallets have acquired at least 100,000 coins apiece, “stakes worth about a million dollars each.” Holders of crypto wallets are anonymous, if they want to be, so the identities of these people (or businesses or countries or sovereign wealth funds or whatever they might be) are unknown and will presumably remain so until the big dinner or, who knows, maybe for all time.

It’s also worth noting that Trump launched this meme coin just a few days before inauguration. Its value quickly shot up to around $75. It steadily declined through the first month of his presidency, and by early April, as Americans grew weary of a president who was tanking the economy, it had fallen to $7.14.

Mind you, a meme coin is a thing with no intrinsic value. It’s just some … thing that somebody decides to launch based on hype because they can get a bunch of suckers to invest in it. As Investopedia gingerly puts it: “Most meme coins are usually created without a use case other than being tradable and convertible.” It should come as no surprise that some meme coins are tied to right-wing politics. Elon Musk named his Department of Government Efficiency after his favorite meme coin, dogecoin (which, in turn, was indeed named after an actual internet meme in which doge is slang for a Shiba Inu dog).

So, to go back to my opening analogy—this isn’t even like Joe and Hunter Biden starting a company from the White House. A company is a real thing. It makes a product or provides a service. It files papers with the Securities and Exchange Commission. It pays taxes. It employs people. Assuming that it’s a good corporate citizen and that it exists at least in part to solve some problem or offer the public some innovation, it contributes to the general welfare.

Not so a meme coin. It’s just a hustle. It may make certain investors rich, but it does the world no good whatsoever.

So stop and think about this. First, Trump, preparing for the presidency, purportedly busy thinking about how many millions of people he’s going to deport and how he’s going to bring “Jina” to its knees and how he’s going to hand eastern Ukraine to Putin and how he’s going to cut Meals on Wheels, for Chrissakes, takes time out from all that to stop and think: Now, how can I profit from returning to the White House? So he launches, naturally, the griftiest Christmas present ever.

It starts out great. Then its value drops by 90 percent. So in April, while he’s illegally deporting legal U.S. residents to El Salvador and roiling the world’s financial markets, he stops and takes the time to think: Hey, what happened with my meme coin? I had better figure out a way to goose this grift. So he comes up with this dinner. As well as showing just how tawdry his mind is, how he just automatically and intrinsically thinks it’s his right to make a buck from the presidency, it’s unspeakably corrupt. (One small silver lining here is that after peaking Wednesday at almost $15, it’s now under $12.)

Who knows who these “investors” are? Will we ever know? Inevitably, on May 22, people will be invited to that dinner. Will we know the guest list? Will the list be sanitized? Will a few Russian oligarchs be among the top 220 but send surrogates to keep their identity hidden?

This doesn’t create the “appearance” of corruption or set up the “potential” for conflict of interest. It is corruption, and it’s a standing conflict of interest. Patently, and historically. Chris Murphy is right: This is the most corrupt thing any president has ever done, by a mile.

What are the others? Watergate? It was awful in different ways, but of course Trump is worse than Richard Nixon in all those ways too. Teapot Dome? Please—a tiny little rigged contract, and it didn’t even involve Warren Harding directly, just his interior secretary. Credit Mobilier? Run-of-the-mill bribes by a railroad company, again not involving President Grant directly, just his vice president.

And yes, I’ve been thinking this week of the Lincoln Bedroom scandal. In 1995–96, the Clintons invited a lot of people to spend a night in the famous chamber. Many of them made large donations to the Democratic Party. It was unseemly. But it wasn’t illegal. And it certainly didn’t line the Clintons’ personal pockets. But if you were around at the time, you remember as I do the swollen outrage of Republicans about how relentlessly corrupt the Clintons were.

Today? Crickets.

Finally: Before we leave this topic, I want you to go to GetTrumpMemes.com and just look at those illustrations of Trump. There’s a big one in the middle of him with his fist raised, echoing the image from his attempted assassination. Then off to the right, there’s Trump seated at the head of a dining table.

In both, he looks about 50. The artist has airbrushed a good quarter-century off his face, in terms of jowl fat and wrinkles and accumulated orange pancake. And in the dominant, middle image … what do we think Trump’s waist size is, about 46, 48? This Trump is about a 34. Maybe even a svelte 32. It’s hysterically funny. These are probably the most creepily totalitarian images of Trump I’ve ever seen, and yes, I understand, that’s a big statement. But even Stalin’s visual hagiographers didn’t try to make him look skinny.

I digress. Let’s keep our eyes on the real prize here. This May 22 dinner is a high crime and misdemeanor. A president of the United States can’t use the office to enrich himself in this way, from potentially anonymous donors for whom he might do favors. This is as textbook as corruption gets.

New York Times and Washington Post, put your best investigative reporters on this and place their stories on your front pages. MSNBC, hammer on this—you haven’t been. Democrats, talk about this every day, several times a day. Do not let Trump’s sewer standards jade us. Make sure the people know.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

As we approach the 100-day mark of Trump 2.0, we see, Lord knows, much to worry about. But one reassuring development has been that, by and large, the judicial branch has stood tough against the administration’s lawlessness. Federal judges James Boasberg and Paula Xinis are early heroes of the second Trump regime. I’m sure there are more who’ve escaped my notice.

I’m old enough to remember when the name J. Harvie Wilkinson III made me shake. He was elevated to the federal bench by Ronald Reagan, was affiliated with the Federalist Society, and he always, on lists of possible Supreme Court nominees, occupied one of the hard-right slots. But now Wilkinson too has become a voice of sanity, writing the three-judge ruling handed down Thursday night that rebuked the Trump administration in the Kilmar Abrego Garcia case.

The ruling is unequivocal and, as we shall see, went out of its way to alert Americans to the constitutional threat the administration poses. But it does something more important: It returns the spotlight to the Supreme Court, and specifically to Chief Justice John Roberts, pressuring them to stand up to this madness. And so, one of the key controversies roiling our democracy, from this case to others, is this: What will Roberts do?

We’ll return to that. But first, let’s review Wilkinson’s judgment. Here are the money quotes:

“It is difficult in some cases to get to the very heart of the matter. But in this case, it is not hard at all. The government is asserting the right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.… This should be shocking not only to judges, but to the intuitive sense of liberty that Americans far removed from the courthouse still hold dear.”

“The government asserts that Abrego Garcia is a terrorist and a member of MS-13. Perhaps, but perhaps not. Regardless, he is still entitled to due process. If the government is confident of its position, it should be assured that position will prevail” in court.

“Now the [executive and judicial] branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that diminishes both.”

Notice in that first quote the use of the word “residents.” Not citizens. This is a clear recognition that the language of the Fourteenth Amendment—specifically the due process clause—extends protections not to “citizens” but to “persons.” Abrego Garcia has constitutional rights. Period. His character and his immigration status are totally irrelevant.

The Wilkinson opinion will inevitably toss the matter back to the Supreme Court, which ruled on April 10 that the Trump administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States. The court’s order was pretty mealy-mouthed. The key sentence reads: “For its part, the Government should be prepared to share what it can concerning the steps it has taken and the prospect of further steps.”

Now the court will be compelled to take a stronger stand. Can the nation’s highest court possibly allow this situation to continue? The government of the United States admits Abrego Garcia was deported by mistake and then says it’s powerless to return him, that only El Salvador can do that; and El Salvador says it’s powerless to return him, that only the United States can. If the court’s six conservative justices have any shred of dignity and respect for the role they’re supposed to play in this democracy, they cannot let this stand. It’s a fundamental issue.

Other equally fundamental issues are headed the court’s way. It is weighing what to do about Trump’s ability to fire executive agency heads unilaterally. Just recently, the court blocked the reinstatement of two executive agency officials Trump had fired—but it did so only temporarily, while the court considers whether Trump had the authority to fire them. Still, that order was a temporary win for Trump—and was written by Roberts himself.

And just Thursday, we learned that the court will hear arguments on birthright citizenship on May 15. A decision will likely follow in June or July. This, again, would seem on the surface to be as open-and-shut as the Abrego Garcia matter, and for much the same reason: The Fourteenth Amendment says “persons,” and it states quite plainly in its very first sentence: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

We seem not to be confronted with legal questions. Those are settled. As U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman recently ruled, in deciding against a Trump administration motion, “No court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation.”

There remain only political questions, the chief one being: What feat of originalist–unitary executive legerdemain will the court’s conservatives perform to jam the square peg of Trump’s goals into the round holes of the United States Constitution?

Whether they will do so is up to Roberts. Once upon a quaint old time, the chief justice would cajole his colleagues into consensus on matters of historical import. Earl Warren made sure that the ruling on Brown v. Board was 9–0, because he wanted the country to see that the court was united on this great historical question of segregation versus integration. One doubts 9–0 is possible on these major cases today, with these two guys hanging around. But Roberts at least should have the power to steer a majority to uphold the ideas that words mean what they say and that this is not a nation of one-man rule. Roberts’s name will live in history, either alongside brave jurists like Boasberg and Xinis or in infamy, alongside Roger Taney and, well, Clarence Thomas.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

We don’t really learn anything new about Donald Trump anymore. He’s the same old liar and buffoon he’s been for 50 years. But sometimes we relearn the stuff we already knew in ways that are so shocking that we have to pause and take stock.

One of the old lessons we relearned this week has to do with Trump’s adolescent need for constant praise, and the abject willingness of his sycophants to provide it without his having to ask—even, or especially, when the reality screams for rebuke.

This is a crucial point that needs to be widely understood, and will be by those with a living memory of the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe. The operating principle of such regimes was this: The worse actual conditions were, the more fulsome the propaganda had to be. The crops yields were excellent, comrades! Our cars are far superior to the capitalists’! Prisons? What prisons?

Which brings us back to Trump’s America, which isn’t so different in key respects from Enver Hoxha’s Albania. Here we have a week when Trump’s bumbling, his stupidity, his willed ignorance of history, and his utter refusal to think through policy have never been more fully on display. With all this tariff flip-flopping, he very nearly launched a global economic crisis. As it is, he personally—no one else—cost investors, from large institutional ones to you and me, trillions of dollars. And the lower tariff rates he announced Wednesday as the bond market was about to explode are still the highest since the infamous Smoot-Hawley years.

It was a disaster in every way. And as such, it required an especially intense degree of obsequiousness.

Bill Ackman: “This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal.”

Karoline Leavitt (to White House reporters): “Many of you in the media clearly missed The Art of the Deal. You clearly failed to see what President Trump is doing here.”

And the winner of this week’s Stalin Prize, Stephen Miller: “You have been watching the greatest economic master strategy from an American President in history.”

For good measure, not exactly on the topic of the tariffs but nevertheless a Stalin Prize contender, we had Pam Bondi at a Cabinet meeting on Thursday: “President, we’ve had some great wins in the last few days. You know, you were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority.”

Wait, what? “President”? Not “Mr. President”? Why? Because it’s a little closer to “El Presidente”? For the record, Trump won a plurality, not a majority, and he got four million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020. But there’s more: In her next sentence, Bondi invoked “U.S. Americans.” I haven’t heard that one since Miss Teen South Carolina in 2007.

If these people are right that Trump was acting the whole time with great intention, then we must seriously consider the allegation that he was manipulating the market with his Wednesday morning social media post about now being “A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” If he knew that morning that he was going to announce a pause that afternoon—an announcement that he had to know would send the market skyrocketing—then there’s little question that his post constituted market manipulation. The best argument in Trump’s defense here is a pretty pitiful one: that he’s so incapable of thinking more than 15 minutes ahead that it’s hard to believe he knew in the morning what he was going to do in the afternoon.

Regardless, we’re in an unprecedentedly chilling era in American politics. Literally never in American history have presidential aides and supporters spoken quite like this, employing the kind of flattery one usually sees in totalitarian regimes (which are a couple ticks worse in general than authoritarian ones).

What does it tell us about the future? Trump is going to get worse. I think we can say that with confidence. Each week so far has been worse than the last, in terms of the assaults on democracy. His executive order this week concerning Miles Taylor and Chris Krebs is terrifying—perhaps the most frightening thing he’s done yet in his war on political enemies. Telling the Justice Department to investigate specific individual Americans because of their political activity arguably goes further in turning the state into an instrument of his personal will than anything else he’s done.

Bondi said we should rest assured that the Justice Department alone will make any prosecutorial decisions. But the mere fact that Justice is going to use resources to investigate these two men, who are guilty of nothing more than political advocacy Trump didn’t like, has terrifying implications for every U.S. American out there.

So, yes, things will get even worse. And as they do, the sycophancy will grow ever more insistent and unapologetic. That’s how it works. These attempts to win the Stalin Prize are so pathetic they’re almost funny—but each one of them is also another assault on democratic values and customs. We can’t forget this.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

You remember the Brady Bunch movies of the 1990s, whose ingenious conceit was that television’s archetypal late-1960s sitcom family was transported to the ’90s but still lived in their oblivious 1969 bubble of bell bottoms and groovy chicks and Davy Jones fandom? That’s how I’ve been thinking of Donald Trump this week, except that he’s living in an 1890s bubble that no one around him is willing to puncture but that everyone else in the world, probably including those now-famous penguins on that one island, knows is utterly insane.

There’s a lot to say about these tariffs and how destructive they are, and most of it has been said. My colleague Timothy Noah wrote about the stupidity of tariffs as policy and how Trump has already cost him personally thousands of dollars. But I want to focus on something different here. I want to focus on Trump’s understanding of history. It’s so shockingly dumb—yes, even for him—that it’s hard to believe that we have a president of the United States who is this ignorant.

Here’s what Trump said the other day, and he has said versions of it a number of times: “In the 1880s, they established a commission to decide what they were going to do with the vast sums of money they were collecting. We were collecting so much money so fast, we didn’t know what to do with it. Isn’t that a nice problem to have?”

OK. First of all. Nobody can tell what commission he’s talking about. President Chester Arthur empaneled a commission that recommended reducing tariffs by 20 to 25 percent, going hard against the conventional wisdom of the day. But Congress defied him, lowering tariffs by just an average of around 1.5 percent (and yes, that’s another thing—Congress is supposed to set tariffs, not the president, making this move, among other things, an impeachment-worthy “abuse of power,” a phrase invoked by The Wall Street Journal editorial board Thursday).

But more importantly, there’s this. Allow me to put this as Trump himself might on Truth Social: THE MAN IS AN IDIOT!!!

It is true that tariffs were the chief source of federal government revenue for most of the country’s history until the twentieth century. Tariffs and excise taxes, which are taxes on specific goods—gasoline, cigarettes, alcohol, certain amusement activities. And for a spell, a modest income tax, which President Lincoln imposed during the Civil War and that lasted through 1872. But broadly speaking, tariffs were the ball game.

Even so, they were always a political hot potato because there were powerful interests that supported them (steel, iron, and wool) and other powerful interests that opposed them (wheat, cotton, tobacco). Tariffs were at the center of some of the most heated debates of the nineteenth century.

But here’s the thing you need to know that the president of the United States does not: Tariffs supported most of what the federal government did in the 1800s because the federal government didn’t do much of anything. The government did about four things. It recruited and paid an army. It delivered mail. It ran some courts of law. And it collected duties and tariffs. That was about it. There was no need for much federal revenue.

Today, liberals and conservatives argue over what might constitute an optimal number for federal spending as a percentage of gross domestic product. Generally speaking, liberals want that number to be up around 25 percent, which indicates a robust welfare state. Conservatives prefer that it be down closer to 15 or so.

Here are some numbers from the St. Louis Fed, which go back to the Great Depression. During the New Deal, as Roosevelt was just constructing the first iteration of the American welfare state, federal spending as a percentage of GDP got up to around 10 percent. During World War II, when the government took over a number of industries, it shot up to around 40 percent. In the postwar era, it has indeed hovered around 20, indicating the liberal-conservative tug of war over federal spending. Interestingly, it rose a little under Ronald Reagan (military spending), and it reached its highest postwar point, 30.7 percent, under … Donald Trump, during the pandemic.

So that is where federal spending as a percentage of GDP has been for nearly a century—17 percent, 22 percent, 30 percent in a crisis. Want to take a guess as to what it was in 1900? Maybe 11 percent? Nine percent? Seven? Try 2.7 percent.

In other words—tariffs could cover the cost of what the federal government did because the federal government didn’t do anything!

Now, there will of course be those who say, “Well, good! We need to go back to that!” OK. Let’s go back to no Social Security. Let’s go back to no Medicare. Let’s go back to senior citizens having to fend for themselves and move in with their kids (if you’ve never seen Make Way for Tomorrow, please watch it this weekend). Let’s go back to no environmental regulation, no food inspection. Let’s just have no airline safety regulations. Flying would be so much more interesting that way! And finally, I say to those conservatives who think they want a 1900-style government, let’s go back to an army of 25,000 personnel.

So in sum, Trump is fantasizing about some America that no one, literally not a single American, wants to return to. Poverty was through the roof. Health care was abysmal. People had seizures from toothaches. Most people didn’t even use toilet paper yet (it wasn’t “splinter-free” until the 1930s!).

One more idiotic Trump quote, if I may: “Then in 1913, for reasons unknown to mankind, they established the income tax so that citizens, rather than foreign countries, would start paying the money necessary to run our government.”

What?! Well, here, we encounter a very interesting history that maybe 1 percent of Americans know. As I noted, Lincoln imposed an income tax, which disappeared in 1872. There was no income tax for 20 years. Then there was a big depression in 1893, and Congress imposed a tax on high-income people for two years. Then it went away again.

Come the twentieth century and the Progressive era, and the demand for the government to do things like inspect meat and enforce child labor laws, and liberals began pushing for an income tax. Conservatives, of course, were opposed.

So in 1909, progressives attached an income tax plank to—guess what? A tariff bill. Conservatives counterproposed that an income tax be the subject of a constitutional amendment, confident that they’d fixed the progressives’ wagon because there was no way three-quarters of the states would approve such jackbooted madness. Then they sat and watched slack-jawed as state after state approved it! In 1913, the Sixteenth Amendment took effect.

Is it Trump’s secret plan to do away with the income tax? Actually, it’s not secret at all. He has said it many times. He’s going to raise $6 trillion from tariffs and abolish the IRS.

OK. We’ll see. Even putting aside the downsides of tariffs (most obviously, higher prices), economists see nothing close to $6 trillion in revenue.

Trump is blowing more smoke out his you-know-what than a decade of California wildfires could produce. Read this, from CBS.com: “In a recent news conference, White House staff secretary Will Sharf estimated that Mr. Trump’s 25 percent tariff on vehicles and auto parts imported into the U.S. could raise ‘roughly $100 billion in new revenue.’ At the same news conference, Mr. Trump claimed moments later ‘anywhere from $600 billion to $1 trillion will be taken in over the relatively short-term period, meaning a year from now.’”

The aide says $100 billion. Trump casually ups it to a trillion. Billion, trillion; who knows. Well, even I know: A trillion is a thousand billions. That’s like the difference between 10 and 10,000. Pretty vast, in other words. But Trump knows that nobody really thinks about the difference between a billion and a trillion, so just say a trillion.

Finally, before I let you go: How much do tariffs bring in now? Around $80 billion. Sounds like a lot, and it is. But take a guess as to how much total revenue the federal government takes in, from (1) income taxes, which is half of all revenue, (2) payroll taxes, (3) excise taxes, and (4) corporate taxes.

It’s around $4.7 trillion. Know what percentage of $4.7 trillion $80 billion is? About 1.7 percent. That’s how much of our current federal revenue comes from tariffs.

Going from 1.7 percent to 100 percent sounds, um, like something that will cause vast, unknowable dislocations; and more to the point, like the fantasy of a stupid man who’s never read a book and has no effing idea what he’s talking about.

Or as Gary Cole’s Mike Brady might have put it: “Donald, when you’re trying to fool other people, you’re really only fooling yourself, and who’s the real fool then?”

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Madness everywhere. Just glance at the headlines leading The New York Times this morning:

A Disregard for Rules Trickles Down From Trump to His Aides
Trump Takes Government Secrecy Seriously. But Only When it Suits Him.
10,000 Federal Health Workers to Be Laid Off
President Trump Moves to Punish the Law Firm Where Robert Mueller Worked

There’s more, but you get the picture. The Washington Post adds a hot scoop: Internal White House document shows agencies preparing to cut between 8% and 50% of staff.

That’s a lot of mayhem, and it barely scratches the surface. The Social Security Administration is being destroyed. ICE is throwing people out of the country for what look to be obviously political reasons, notably a scientist at Harvard Medical School who was detained in Boston and told she’s being sent back to her native Russia. She protested Vladimir Putin’s Ukraine invasion and called for his impeachment. Wonder what’s in store for her.

Across human history, fascism has been imposed upon democracy mostly in one of two ways. First, by brute force—a military coup, that sort of thing. Second, a bit more stealthily, and legally—through legislation, executive decrees, and court decisions that hand more power to the leader.

Donald Trump is inventing a new way. Call it chaos fascism. Destroy the institutions of democracy until they’re so disfigured or dysfunctional that a majority no longer cares about them.

That’s exactly what’s happening with Social Security. The Washington Post reported this week that the SSA is breaking down: Its website “crashed four times in 10 days this month because the servers were overloaded, blocking millions of retirees and disabled Americans from logging in to their online accounts.” A Wall Street multimillionaire who probably doesn’t need his Social Security check and who has pledged that he will “100 percent work with DOGE” has already cut around 12 percent of the staff and doesn’t look like he’s stopping there.

In other words: Start by lying about the agency, with absurd and false claims about 140-year-olds cashing checks. Then wreck the agency so that its service becomes crap. Let public anger at it build. And in time, they can just dismantle it and privatize the greatest social insurance system ever devised by this government and put people’s financial fate in the hands of rich cronies. If that’s not chaos fascism, I don’t know what is.

Trump probably doesn’t have some secret plan. As we know, he doesn’t think far enough ahead. Elon Musk, however, probably does. It’s no accident he called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme.” That statement either (1) reflected his ignorance of how both Social Security and Ponzi schemes work or (2) was made in full knowledge of how both work—that is, he knew it was nonsense, but he said it anyway because his goal is to destroy Social Security.

This applies to just about everything Trump and Musk are doing.

It applies even to Signalgate. Trump has contempt for rules and procedures, and so he appoints unqualified stooges like Pete Hegseth to run the world’s largest military, who share that contempt—who think being tough means showing the world that they can do anything they want with no consequences. Again—ignore the law, trash the rules, establish that procedure is whatever you say it is. Chaos fascism.

And it will almost certainly go unpunished. Attorney General Pam Bondi said Thursday that the Justice Department wasn’t the least bit interested in looking into it. Some GOP lawmakers are making noises about the need for an investigation of some kind. But really—are the GOP’s leaders in Congress, Senator John Thune and Representative Mike Johnson, really likely to green-light an investigation? Seems pretty unlikely to me, unless it’s done with the secret, express goal of exonerating all involved.

Some senators say the Pentagon inspector general should conduct a probe. OK, we might get that. But remember that Trump has already fired 17 inspectors general, so who’d really care if he fired one more? Break the rules, and then ensure that there’s no accountability. Chaos fascism.

And if you want an image, just one image, that absolutely screams chaos fascism? Feast your eyes upon this photo of Department of Homeland Security Secretary and noted dog killer Kristi Noem at that notorious El Salvador prison this week, the prison where the Trump administration sent a couple hundred alleged Venezuelan gang members. They positioned her in front of prisoners behind bars, most of them bald and tattooed as if extras in a dystopian sci-fi movie, warning others that what happened to those Venezuelan men could happen to you. It’s a chilling photograph—to think that this is now the kind of image the United States wishes to project to the world.

And remember—those men are being held in that notorious prison in defiance of a federal court order. Wreck the rules. Chaos fascism.

Where in the world will we be six months or a year from now? What shape will Social Security be in? Veterans Affairs? What will be the impact of all these tariffs? Trump thinks he’ll force American companies to build factories here, and no doubt a few will, enough that Pravda (Fox News) can promote them as “proof” that the tariffs were a miracle. But most economists predict—well, chaos.

Trump will orchestrate no military coup. The Republican Congress will probably pass no laws that make Trump president for life. That would be too obvious. What they’ll do is make stealthier moves across the board that discredit and destroy our democratic institutions until he and his billionaire friends can strip them for parts. Chaos fascism is here to stay.

Think we’re not in a constitutional crisis yet? We’re not. We’re in several.

One involves Elon Musk and DOGE, barging their way into the United States Institute for Peace, created by Congress under Ronald Reagan, with DOGE staffers apparently ripping the organization’s logo off the wall. DOGE is not an arm of the government. It’s a quasi-private goon squad taking a machete across Washington, D.C., at the personal whims of two men. Any non–ideologically zealous court would toss its actions in five minutes—as indeed at least one already has, with respect to USAID.

There’s so much more. The revocation of birthright citizenship. The attempted federal spending freeze. The attempted firings of agency heads. The ordered removal of federal employees with civil service protections. That birthright citizenship order—contravening the plain text of the Constitution—was issued on Donald Trump’s very first day in office. Arguably, the constitutional crisis started right then and there. Since, three different judges have blocked the order.

But shocking as all that has been, nothing touches what Trump is trying to do to Judge James Boasberg over those three planes full of alleged Venezuelan gang members. The administration’s latest legal gambit, to invoke the state secrets privilege in an attempt not to have to disclose any information about the detainees or the flights, amounts to an effort by Trump to say that he can take any action against anyone he deems a danger to the state. That’s an attempt at dictatorship.

Let’s go back in time. First of all, what was the Alien Enemies Act, whose authority Trump invoked to detain the Venezuelans? It was part of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, passed by Congress under President John Adams. If you learned high school history the way I did, you were told that passage of that law was, to put it mildly, not one of America’s finer moments. Passed as the young United States stood on the brink of war with France, with various French nationals milling about our cities, it gave the president extraordinary emergency powers. The next president, Thomas Jefferson, allowed all aspects of the broader law to expire except for the Alien Enemies Act, which allows the president to declare certain unnaturalized persons “alien enemies.”

It’s been invoked only three times, all during wartime. It does include language referring to “any invasion or predatory incursion,” which is what Trump is claiming. But Georgetown law prof Steve Vladeck told NPR: “No one has tried to argue that that ‘invasion or predatory incursion’ language could be used in any context other than a conventional war.” That is, until last week.

Meanwhile, the state secrets privilege has its roots way back in Aaron Burr’s treason trial, when the government suppressed a letter from a colonel to President Jefferson on the grounds that the letter contained state secrets. The Supreme Court didn’t speak on this until 1953, in United States v. Reynolds, which saw the first formal recognition of the privilege: namely, that evidence in court proceedings could be excluded if the government says its disclosure would reveal state secrets. It was invoked a few times by George W. Bush after 9/11.

Now Trump wants to use it to bar federal Judge James Boasberg from seeing specific information about two Saturday night flights to El Salvador with the Venezuelans aboard (what time they took off, where they were when Boasberg issued his initial order, etc.). Attorney General Pam Bondi (remember how she was supposed to be so much better than Matt Gaetz?) and her deputies argued that Boasberg’s requests for this information constitute “grave usurpations of the President’s powers under the Alien Enemies Act and his inherent Article II powers.”

Simultaneously, of course, Trump is demanding that Congress impeach Boasberg, calling him a “radical left lunatic” and a “local, unknown” judge. He’s the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He was originally elevated to the federal bench by George W. Bush. John Roberts appointed him to a term on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. He once ruled against Hillary Clinton in a case involving her emails. And: He once ruled for Trump in a case involving his tax returns.

So now we can summarize Trump’s position here. He invoked an ancient (and often criticized) law during non-wartime, which no president has ever done. A federal judge said, Hey, wait a minute and ordered the action ended (that is, he ordered those airplanes turned around). Trump ignored that order; the planes flew on. Now Trump’s attorney general has invoked yet another obscure and controversial law in an effort to shut the judge up. And finally, Trump now demands that Congress impeach the judge because of his refusal to accept the laws of the land.

It wasn’t some lefty who said, of these breaches, that Trump “has declared war on the rule of law in America.” That was conservative retired Judge J. Michael Luttig.

Let us recognize the stakes: Today, it’s noncitizens who are the victims of Trump’s lawlessness. Maybe Trump will stop there. But if this gets to the Supreme Court and a majority there upholds Trump’s position, do we really think Trump won’t at least be sorely tempted to galumph his way through that open door? What will happen when a future roundup includes naturalized citizens? Or even birthright citizens, a category we know Trump wants to eliminate? And what happens when it simply becomes anyone who the president doesn’t like?

And if the House votes to impeach Boasberg, do we really think that won’t chill and intimidate other judges? We don’t have to wait for Trump to defy the Supreme Court to think it’s a constitutional crisis. We are in crises, plural, right now. And it’s only been two months.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.