One of the major partisan disconnects in American political discourse right now involves the extraordinary mandate Team Trump believes it harvested from its narrow 2024 victory. To be clear, every new administration believes it has a mandate to fulfill its campaign pledges. And when a new administration enjoys a governing trifecta that makes congressional enactment of big fat legislative packages on party-line votes possible, it tends to think big.

But what’s new in 2025 is a White House that claims the right not only to bully Democrats but to bully federal judges, who, after all, represent a co-equal branch of government established by the Constitution and have the power to nullify legislative and executive actions alike. By “bully” I don’t just mean the ever-present possibility that the president and his minions will openly and self-consciously defy a judicial order and trigger a constitutional crisis. More generally and unmistakably, the administration has sought to intimidate judges (and encourage its vast troll army of supporters to join in the fun) by arguing that the 2024 election verdict should give Trump extraordinary leeway to push aside inconvenient laws, judicial precedents, and even that pesky document........

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