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The Memo: Trump, allies ramp up attacks on courts

5 54
11.02.2025

Monday brought another legal setback for President Trump and his administration — and there is every indication it will add more fuel to the fire of MAGA grievances against the judiciary.

The issue was federal spending and the new president’s desire to freeze huge swathes of it.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell complained that the administration had, in effect, ignored an earlier order from him to unfreeze grants and other tranches of funds.

The initial order, made at the end of January, had held that the Trump administration could not “pause, freeze, impede, block, cancel, or terminate” funding right away.

In Monday’s ruling, McConnell hit Trump and his allies for trying to flout his authority with “sweeping” funding pauses that he said “violate the plain text” of his previous order. He insisted that the administration must restore the funding right away.

O’Connell’s ruling is one detail on a much bigger canvas.

The courts have emerged as the path of most resistance to Trump’s aggressive agenda. And the result has been unsuppressed fury from the president and his allies.

On Sunday, en route to the Super Bowl, Trump took aim at judges who had slowed his moves, such as U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer, who curbed access to the Treasury Department’s payment system for the quasi-department Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) led by Elon Musk.

Trump, using similar phrasing to his infamous speech on the Ellipse before the Capitol Riot of Jan. 6, 2021, contended that if the judiciary stopped what........

© The Hill