Karoline Leavitt Refuses to Rule Out Arrest of Supreme Court Judges

The Trump administration is open to arresting Supreme Court judges, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told it on Monday morning.

“You guys arrested a Milwaukee County Circuit judge for allegedly helping illegal immigrants get away,” Fox News’s Peter Doocy asked Leavitt. “As you guys look at other judges, would you ever arrest somebody higher up on the judicial food chain, like a federal judge or even a Supreme Court justice?”

“That’s a hypothetical question, again I defer you to the Department of Justice for individuals that they are looking at or individual cases. But let’s be clear about what this judge did: She obstructed federal law enforcement who were looking for an illegal alien in her courthouse. She showed that illegal alien the door to evade law enforcement officials. That is a clear-cut case of obstruction,” Leavitt replied.

“And so anyone who is breaking the law or obstructing federal law enforcement officials from doing their jobs is putting theirselvses at risk of being prosecuted, absolutely.”

The Department of Justice on Friday arrested Milwaukee Judge Hannah Dugan, on charges of obstruction after she allegedly “intentionally misdirected federal agents away” from Eduardo Flores Ruiz, an undocumented immigrant. He was later arrested outside the courthouse.

The Trump administration is showing open and direct hostility toward the judicial branch, identifying any judge who dares to defy them as an “activist judge.” The arrest of Judge Dugan, the numerous court orders ignored by the administration, the eight immigration judges who have now been fired or put on leave, and now, Leavitt’s alarming answer are all clear indications that Trump has no plans to reel back his abuse of executive power.

A sprawling network of Signal group chats involving hundreds of top business executives, Silicon Valley leaders, and journalists, as well as legal and economic analysts, has massively reshaped national politics since the pandemic—in large part thanks to the platform’s disappearing-message function.

“Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens,” Substack author Noah Smith wrote.

Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of the tech venture capitalist firm a16z and onetime co-author of Mosaic, an early internet web browser, spends “half his life on 100” of these sorts of group chats at a time, one anonymous participant hyperbolized to Semafor’s Ben Smith.*

In a blog post announcing Erik Torenberg as one of a16z’s general partners, Andreessen described the private spaces as having produced a national “vibe shift.” That’s because powerful individuals are less afraid to share what they really think in the closed-circuit digital rooms, according to several sources that spoke with Semafor.

“People during 2020 felt that there was a monoculture on social media, and if they didn’t agree with something, group chats became a safe space to debate that, share that, build consensus, feel that you’re not alone,” Torenberg told the publication.

Andreessen agreed—telling Torenberg on a recent podcast that they’re having “all the private conversations because they weren’t allowed to have the public conversations,” blaming the public silence on a general air of censorship on major social platforms.

But some of those conversations have straggled away from friendly discourse and into the realm of political influence. Amid the network lies a vast web of right-wing chatrooms bent on keeping Donald Trump in power and vanquishing political dissent from the left.

“A lot of these technologists hoped that the centrist path was a viable one, because it would permit them in theory to change the culture without having to expose themselves to the risk of becoming partisans,” conservative culture warrior Christopher Rufo told Semafor. “By 2021, the smartest people in tech understood that these people were a dead end—so the group chats exploded and reformulated on more explicitly political lines.”

Rufo—who has risen to popularity on the right for inventing a fiction that the left has taken over America—had seen the opportunity within the Signal spaces to influence those in power all along.

“I looked at these chats as a good investment of my time to radicalize tech elites who I thought were the most likely and high-impact new coalition partners for the right,” Rufo said.

With time, dissenters were branded as upstarts suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome (sometimes shorthanded to TDS), spawning what are effectively echo chambers: smaller and tighter group chats that have nixed alternative perspectives.

“This group has become worthless since the loudest voices have TDS,” David Sacks wrote of the popular group chat Chatham House, informing Torenberg that he should “create a new one with just smart people.” Sacks left shortly after sending that message.

That spawned the exit of another three notable figures: Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire, bitcoin billionaire Tyler Winklevoss, and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.

* This article previously mischaracterized Mosaic.

Donald Trump can’t help speculating about serving a third term as president—even as he claims, “It’s not something that I’m looking to do. And I think it would be a very hard thing to do.”

The president made the comments to The Atlantic in a new interview published Monday, laughing about the idea. He said, “That would be a big shattering, wouldn’t it? Well, maybe I’m just trying to shatter.”

In a startling sign, the Trump Organization has started selling “Trump 2028” hats for $50 each, and the president said last month that he was “not joking” about running for a third term. Such a move would violate the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution, and would require a two-thirds majority vote in Congress and a three-fourths majority of state governments to change.

Even with that lofty path, Trump has talked about other plans for staying in office beyond 2028, including having JD Vance as the top of a presidential ticket with Trump as the vice president. Trump’s comments on that idea in March were not reassuring.

“Well, that’s one. But there are others too. There are others,” Trump said, refusing to elaborate on whatever plans and schemes he has to stay in office.

Even if he doesn’t have the majorities needed to make the constitutional changes, Trump does have his die-hard allies—Representative Andy Ogles filed legislation in January, only days into Trump’s second term, to amend the Twenty-Second Amendment. One of his top lawyers, Boris Epshteyn, has been floating the unfounded claim that Trump could run again in 2028 since at least October 2023.

There’s also the fact that Trump’s allies in the conservative movement, including on the Supreme Court, could support his attempts to stay in office beyond 2028. As with any half-baked or outrageous Trump statement, it’s only far-fetched until Trump tries to put it into action. The question is how strong resistance would be if and when the time comes.

President Trump woke up early and angry Monday morning after multiple polls showed he has the lowest first-100-days approval rating of any president in the last 80 years.

“Great Pollster John McLaughlin, one of the most highly respected in the industry, has just stated that The Failing New York Times Poll, and the ABC/Washington Post Poll, about a person named DONALD J. TRUMP, ME, are FAKE POLLS FROM FAKE NEWS ORGANIZATIONS,” the president posted on Truth Social at 5:24 a.m. “The New York Times has only 37% Trump 2024 voters, and the ABC/Washington Post Poll has only 34% Trump Voters, unheard of numbers unless looking for a negative result, which they are. These people should be investigated for ELECTION FRAUD, and add in the FoxNews Pollster while you’re at it.”

“They are Negative Criminals who apologize to their subscribers and readers after I WIN ELECTIONS BIG, much bigger than their polls showed I would win, loose a lot of credibility, and then go on cheating and lying for the next cycle, only worse. They suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome, and there is nothing that anyone, or anything, can do about it. THEY ARE SICK, almost only write negative stories about me no matter how well I am doing (99.9% at the Border, BEST NUMBER EVER!), AND ARE TRULY THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”

Only 39 percent of respondents to the ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll approved of how Trump was doing generally, a six-point drop from just two months ago. Fifty-five percent outright disapprove.

Respondents disapprove of Trump even more on the more specific issues. Seventy-two percent think it’s very or somewhat likely that his economic policies will cause a recession soon. Seventy-three percent said the economy is in “bad shape,” while 53 percent said it’s gotten worse since Trump took office—and 41 percent said their own finances have been hurt. Seventy-one percent think his tariffs are making inflation worse, 65 percent think Trump is actively ignoring federal court orders, and 64 percent think he’s going too far with his executive powers.

The New York Times poll was similarly bleak. Sixty-six percent of respondents thought “chaotic” accurately described Trump’s first 100 days. Fifty-four percent think Trump is exceeding his executive powers, and 50 percent already think he’s made the economy worse.

“We don’t have a Free and Fair ‘Press’ in this Country anymore. We have a Press that writes BAD STORIES, and CHEATS, BIG, ON POLLS,” Trump posted, just minutes after his first rant. “IT IS COMPROMISED AND CORRUPT. SAD!”

These polls indicate that voters think Trump has gone too far on essentially every key issue. And while the president is obviously very sensitive to negative press like this, it remains to be seen if it will actually cause him to change any of his positions. His posts above suggest that they won’t. Trump is operating outside the realm of anyone’s approval right now, much less the public’s. Whether he’ll be moved by these deeply negative results remains to be seen.

Donald Trump’s outlandish claim that he’d struck 200 trade deals was a complete fiction, according to members of his own Cabinet.

During an appearance on ABC News’s This Week Sunday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent admitted the president’s statement that he’d “made 200 deals” during the first 13 days of his 90-day pause on his “reciprocal tariff” policy wasn’t referring to actual deals.

“Is there actually any deal at this point?” asked host Martha Raddatz.

“I believe that he is referring to subdeals within the negotiations we’re doing,” Bessent said.

“But those aren’t actual deals,” Raddatz noted.

“Martha, if there are 180 countries, there are 18 important trading partners—let’s put China to the side because that’s a special negoation—there’s 17 important trading partners, and we have a process in place over the next 90 days to negotiate with them. Some of those are moving along very well, especially with the Asian countries,” Bessent said.

Bessent’s response appears to be an attempt to move the goalposts on closing those deals, with only 17 deals being markedly different from trade adviser Peter Navarro’s prediction that Trump would make 90 trade deals in 90 days. Bessent has desperately tried to pull Trump back from the brink of a trade war, attempting to recast the president’s destructive “America First” trade policy as non-isolationist.

Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins also undercut the president’s claim of 200 trade deals, during an appearance on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday.

“We have 100 countries that are knocking on the door,” Rollins said. “I believe, I’m not in the room, I’m not negotiating the trade deals, but my understanding is we should have several this week that are coming forward that are very, very close.”

During a sweeping interview with Time magazine to mark his first 100 days in office, Trump said he would announce the supposed 200 trade deals in the “next three to four weeks,” but he seemed confused about whether the deals were actually done.