A federal judge ruled Thursday to block parts of Donald Trump’s executive order last month attempting to overhaul elections and voting processes. 

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted a preliminary injunction to halt several of the order’s initiatives, including requiring proof of citizenship on voter registration forms and requiring people on public assistance to have their citizenship checked before they can register to vote. 

Late last month, Democratic Party–affiliated organizations, as well as several other nonprofit groups, filed two lawsuits seeking to halt the executive order, calling it unconstitutional. Kollar-Kotelly, a Clinton appointee, left other parts of the order intact, such as narrowing mail ballot deadlines.

Trump claimed in the order that the U.S. “fails to enforce basic and necessary election protections,” unlike other countries. 

“Many American elections now feature mass voting by mail, with many officials accepting ballots without postmarks or those received well after Election Day,” the order states. 

The ruling temporarily puts a roadblock against one right-wing attempt to disenfranchise voters. But another attack on voting rights, the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or SAVE Act, also seeks to require proof of citizenship to register to vote.

Unlike Trump’s order, though, the SAVE Act goes even further in potentially making it harder for some married women to vote, as it would require the name on a registration form to match that on proof of citizenship documents, such as birth certificates. That bill has already passed the Republican-controlled House, aided by four Democratic votes.  

Republicans have long attacked the legitimacy of any election in which they have not performed well, led by Trump. In the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, Trump attacked the electoral process as “rigged,” pushing lies that “noncitizen voters” would skew the results. These claims seemed to miraculously disappear after Trump won, but conservatives are determined to right this imagined travesty. 

This story has been updated.

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller gave an outrageous ultimatum during a rant attacking U.S. federal judges for upholding the rule of law in the face of Donald Trump’s mass deportations.

During an appearance on Fox News’s Hannity Wednesday, Miller railed against federal judges who told Trump that he couldn’t suspend due process in order to deport undocumented immigrants who the government alleged are members of foreign gangs.

“This is the choice facing every American: Either we all side, and get behind President Trump to remove these terrorists from our communities, or we let a rogue, radical left judiciary shut down the machinery of our national security apparatus,” Miller ranted.

Of course, the supposedly “rogue” judiciary is one that acts as a system of checks and balances on the executive branch, and the purported “radical left” lean simply refers to the courts’ independence from Trump’s abhorrent immigration agenda. Miller likes to pretend that he doesn’t understand what due process is, putting him at odds with the courts charged with upholding that, and other rights.

The Supreme Court has ordered the U.S. government to comply with a federal court order to “facilitate” the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a man deported to a notorious prison in El Salvador due to an admitted “administrative error.” On Wednesday, a federal judge ordered the return of another immigrant whose deportation to El Salvador violated a previous court settlement.

Earlier this week, Miller argued that birthright citizenship also presented a threat to national security, claiming that it had been “used by foreign governments to conduct espionage against the United States.” He provided no evidence for this claim but used it to defend Trump’s executive order upending the right outlined in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Supreme Court is expected to weigh the president’s bid to curtail birthright citizenship in May.

Elon Musk is becoming an increasingly unpopular figure in Trumpworld.

The world’s richest man got into a screaming match last week with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent during a dispute about the Internal Revenue Service, several witnesses told Axios.

“It was two billionaire, middle-aged men thinking it was WWE in the hall of the West Wing,” one source said of the argument, which took place last Thursday. “They were not physical in the Oval, but the president saw it, and then they carried it down the hall, and that’s when they did it again.”

Another source described the row as “quite a scene.”

“It was loud. And I mean, loud,” the second source told Axios.

At one point, things got so bad that an aide had to step between the two men to separate them. Two sources who overheard the argument said that Bessent shouted, “Fuck you.”

Musk shot back, “Say it louder.”

Musk and Bessent’s relationship has been tense at best. The Tesla CEO lobbied hard to land Howard Lutnick as the Treasury chief, but Trump chose the mild-mannered Bessent to lead the agency instead. The men have also disagreed recently over who would run the IRS (Bessent ultimately prevailed in that fight).

But even the quiet, behind-the-scenes numbers guy “has his limits” and can “roar,” per one Bessent ally that spoke with Axios.

“Scott can’t stand” Musk, the source told Axios. “That goes pretty deep and pretty far back. But he’s acting like a grown-up about it.”

News of the clash came mere weeks after reports boiled out of the White House that several senior Trump officials practically hated the tech billionaire, finding him abrasive, unfunny, and........

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