No, I’m Not F—ing Inured to This!

When an authoritarian's minions deny the legitimacy of judges, it's not the same old Trump bullshit.

1.

At this point, we’re used to a lot of stupid shit.

The president reposts a conspiracy theory thatJoe Biden is a robot, and around twenty million people believe it. The same president insists that an obviously photoshopped image is not photoshopped, and we roll our eyes. His K-addled sidekick spreads lies about USAID, illegally shreds the agency mandated by Congress to exist, and causes the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people, and most Americans yawn.

But there’s one thing I am not inured to, and you shouldn’t be either: the torrent of incendiary lies about the rule of law.

Four months ago, I wrote that “We are currently in Phase One of a three-phase constitutional crisis: Trump and Musk are doing illegal stuff, and they’re getting sued.” Today, we are at Phase Two, “courts decide these cases, Trump loses, and eventually this goes to the Supreme Court.” This has happened. Over 180 judicial rulings have paused Trump’s actions, because so many of them are wildly unconstitutional. And some of these are now headed to the Court.

“Phase Three,” I wrote, is the real constitutional crisis. That’s when Trump tells the Supreme Court to go to hell — which Trump and his lackeys have already been saying in regard to lower courts, like this little gem:

2.

Let’s take this rhetoric seriously, and look at one example of how flat-out wrong, and un-American, this kind of rhetoric is in practice.

On May 29, the U.S. Court of International Trade, which has specific jurisdiction over tariffs, found most of Trump’s tariffs unconstitutional. In response, White House spokesperson Kush Desai, said, “It is not for unelected judges to decide how to properly address a national emergency.”

Wrong. It is exactly the job of unelected judges to do that. And the whole point in that case was whether there is a “national emergency” regarding trade in the first place. Which the judges unanimously held that there is not.

And since there is no such emergency, the power to levy tariffs remains with Congress, as specified in Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution.

Others in the White House were less nuanced, and more, well, fascistic.