To Trump, America’s judges are either minions or traitors

Trump has never respected the federal courts’ constitutional role as a check on presidential lawbreaking and abuse of power. When judges or Supreme Court justices do their job, upholding the law and Constitution in ways that interfere with Trump doing whatever he wants, the president and his henchmen go on the attack.  

Trump and Trump officials have denounced judges who rule against him as “rogue,” “corrupt,” “deranged,” “Radical Left Lunatic,” “monsters” who are carrying out an “insurrection” against the president. Trump has lashed out against “USA hating judges who suffer from an ideology that is sick, and very dangerous for our country.” 

Keep in mind that our current Supreme Court majority, with three justices nominated by Trump in his first term, has gone out of its way to give him the benefit of the doubt. They fulfilled his campaign promise to create a court that would overturn Roe v. Wade. They have misused the court’s “shadow docket” to overturn lower court rulings and allow destructive and legally dubious policies to wreak havoc. They have bent the law on his behalf with legal double standards. They even wove out of thin air a cloak of immunity for him when he breaks it.  

And yet all that is not enough for a president who demands 100 percent loyalty from his underlings and expects the same from “his” judges.  

Last year when Trump-nominated Justice Amy Coney Barrett did not rule as the administration wanted, MAGA judicial activists denounced her viciously, saying she had “her head up her ass” and calling her “an ungrateful, backstabbing POS.” When Barrett and Trump nominee Neil Gorsuch joined a ruling against Trump’s illegal imposition of tariffs, Trump called them “an embarrassment to their families” and charged that they had been “swayed by foreign interests.”  

Trump’s rhetoric has coincided with a rise in threats and harassment directed against federal judges and their families since the beginning of his current term. News outlets have documented frightening levels of violent threats against judges. Just last week Chief Justice John Roberts warned that hostile personal attacks, as opposed to legal criticism, “can actually be quite dangerous.”  

Trump’s demands that the federal courts do his bidding and efforts to intimidate judges threaten Americans’ rights, freedoms and legal protections. They’re also a threat to the fundamental constitutional principle of judicial independence. After one federal judge ruled against Trump’s desire to deploy National Guard troops in Portland, Oregon, Trump complained, “I appointed the judge and he goes like that — I wasn’t well served.” 

It should go without saying that the federal courts aren’t meant to “serve” the president but rather the cause of justice. As Judge Esther Salas, whose son was murdered by a disgruntled lawyer, noted in December, Trump’s comments “suggest that judges owe loyalty to a political leader, not to all Americans.”    

But this month, Trump again made it clear that he thinks the courts should function as one more weapon in his authoritarian political arsenal.

He unleashed a social media rant against Supreme Court justices who were nominated by Republican presidents but have sometimes ruled against him, which he called a sign of “disrespect” for the presidents who elevated them. He used scare quotes to mock the idea of justices being “honest” and “independent” rather than acting as partisan loyalists. He even slammed the court for not helping him stay in power after losing in 2020, a humiliation he refuses to acknowledge with his obsessive false claim that the election “has been conclusively proven to be stolen.” 

Trump’s dissatisfaction with judges who do not see themselves as enforcers of his will is showing up in the kind of people he is putting on the bench. People who have no business serving as federal judges, like political enforcer Emil Bove, confirmed by Senate Republicans to the Third Circuit, one of the appeals courts that is just beneath the Supreme Court in our legal system. Justin Smith — nominated to the Eighth Circuit — was, like Bove, one of Trump’s personal defense lawyers. Then there’s the fact that Trump’s second-term nominees refuse to acknowledge that he lost the 2020 election. They won’t even call the events of Jan. 6 an attack on the Capitol. 

Trump-nominated judges are already leaving American families, workers, consumers and communities weaker and less protected from corporate wrongdoing and the whims of an authoritarian ruler. Allowing Trump to spend the next three years filling the courts with people whose loyalty to him trumps their duty to Americans would be a disaster.  

Trump has told us how he views the courts. We should believe him. For the good of our country, the Senate should stop confirming Trump judges to lifetime positions on the federal bench. If senators aren’t willing to stand up to Trump on behalf of the American people, voters should replace them with senators who will.  

Svante Myrick is president of People For the American Way.

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