The White House ramped up its fury at federal judges Thursday after the latest move by a three-judge panel this week to block Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs infuriated officials up and down the administration.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt came to the briefing room podium already breathless as she vowed that the Trump administration would take Wednesday’s ruling “to the Supreme Court,” delivering a minutes-long, impassioned screed about the unprecedented rate at which Donald Trump’s second presidency has been rebuffed by the Judicial Branch.
The press secretary went on to note that in February, Trump’s first full month in office, he was blocked from taking executive action more times than his predecessor was “in three years”.
But her comments bely an obvious counter-argument: that the Trump administration’s unprecedented usage and scope of executive actions is itself to blame for its sky-high rate of failure at the district court level.
And it’s not as if district court judges are alone on an island in this regard. Despite having appointed three of the nine sitting Supreme Court justices, Trump has already seen defeat after defeat at the nation’s highest court less than six months into his second term.
Most recently, the Supreme Court blocked his administration from using the Alien Enemies Act to deport migrants, potentially the clearest example of how the second Trump administration has relied on unconventional to outright brazenly defiant legal tactics to defend the actions of the president and his team in court.
A federal district court also halted Trump’s outright ban on student visas for international students seeking to go to Harvard, the nation’s oldest institution of higher learning, as the White House wages a one-sided ideological war on the school.
Still, administration officials are waging war on the judiciary, labeling even conservative judges as “activist” if they rule against Trump.
“There is a troubling and dangerous trend of unelected judges inserting themselves into the presidential decision making process,” Leavitt said from the podium in her opening remarks Thursday.
“America cannot function if President Trump, or any other president, for that matter, has their sensitive diplomatic or trade negotiations railroaded by activist judges.
“These judges are threatening to undermine the credibility of the United States on the world stage,” Leavitt accused, going on to say America’s jurists “brazenly abuse their judicial power to usurp the authority of President Trump.”
She insisted that the court system risked turning America into a non-functioning country if judges continue to refuse to let the president have his way.
News broke hours after Leavitt’s briefing of a federal appeals court panel temporarily staying the lower court’s ruling against Trump on tariffs. But at a press conference later in the afternoon, tensions were still high.
White House trade adviser Peter Navarro lashed out at a reporter for The Independent, Andrew Feinberg, for asking about the frequency with which the administration attacks judges as “activists” when the president or his officials disagree with their rulings.
“Who is this guy?” the hair-trigger Navarro railed, evading the question in the process.
Leavitt’s comments also conveniently ignore the fact that the Trump administration has been resisting repeated orders by judges, including those from the Supreme Court, to “facilitate” the return of a man whom the Justice Department’s own attorneys have admitted was deported in violation of a judge’s order prohibiting him from being sent to his home country.
Top administration officials have challenged the order of the lower court, arguing that judges do not have the power to dictate American foreign policy under the Constitution and arguing that the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, is no longer legally the administration’s burden.
Stephen Miller, architect of the administration’s mass deportation plans, also argued on Thursday that the U.S. was facing a “judicial coup” and warned that “it is the end of democracy” if courts to not stop halting individual orders issued by the Trump administration.
It is the end of democracy if not reversed. https://t.co/lmyOLCCnm9
— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) May 29, 2025
By the end of April, Trump had already set a record for the number of executive orders issued by his administration, which at current count sits at 157. No U.S. president has ever issued executive actions at such a rate, the previous record-holder being Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Leavitt’s comparison to Biden is also bizarre, given that Trump’s second-term predecessor took nearly his entire presidency to reach the same number of orders issued by Trump in just four months.
The reality seems to be very simple: Trump and his team, understanding the volatility and unreliability of the GOP’s twin razor-thin majorities in the House and Senate, have sought to largely carry out the president’s second-term agenda via executive fiat, with limited success.
“If you look at all the Supreme Court decisions, they are fed up with him,” constitutional law expert Norm Eisen told MSNBC last week.
“This 7-2 majority is not going to allow Donald Trump to run amok arresting judges and members of Congress.”
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