Trump's First 100 Days: Daily Pushback Against Lawlessness
Federal judges have at least temporarily blocked Trump's illegality at a rate of more than once a day
Everyone has a take about the first 100 days of Donald Trump’s second term.
We want to flag a statistic.
According to the New York Times, federal judges have issued at least 123 rulings at least temporarily blocking his administration’s initiatives by their last count. That’s daily pushback against daily lawlessness. That pushback has been effective, but we’ll return to that in a moment.
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The second-most popular topic last week on the app 5 Calls was Trump’s defiance of the courts and the Constitution, an issue that drove at least 14,705 calls to elected officials.
What that statistic means
In order to issue a temporary restraining order, judges need to find, among other things, likelihood of success on the merits in showing alleged violations of the law and/or Constitution. That’s an average of nearly one-and-a-quarter judicial findings of likely lawbreaking and/or unconstitutionality every day.
Those rulings are coming from judges appointed by presidents from both parties: Trump appointees, George W. Bush appointees, Ronald Reagan appointees, Bill Clinton appointees, Barack Obama appointees, and Joe Biden appointees. They’ve come in the form of 9-0 rulings from the Supreme Court, 3-0 rulings from federal appeals courts, and district judge rulings in states across the country.
The latest Trump conspiracy theory is that judges across the country, including his own appointees and others nominated to the bench by presidents across the political spectrum, all decided for unexplained reasons to rule against him out of personal animus. The simpler explanation is that various judges, with no coordination whatsoever, separately came to the conclusion that the Trump administration habitually violates laws and the Constitution — and are using those considerable powers to defend the Constitution that they are sworn to uphold.
In the words of at least four federal judges, they are doing this out of a pattern of Trumpian “lawnessness.”
Pushback against Trump administration lawlessness has been unrelenting. So are we.
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The overlooked success stories
There’s no sugarcoating it. Many of the Trump administration’s actions have caused lasting damage to U.S. government agencies, international standing, the economy, and civil rights. And it remains unclear how much courts can repair that, rather than mitigate it.
Yet, even the most sober and clear-eyed court watchers have noticed something undeniable: pushback is working.
Take Supreme Court scholar Steve Vladeck. He’s the author of the book “The Shadow Docket,” exposing the court’s increasing reliance on unsigned and unexplained orders, and he pointed out the impact the litigation is making.
“Yes, there are visible cases where the government does not seem to be moving quickly enough to provide what the courts have ordered,” Vladeck told me during a recent Substack Live. “I wonder if maybe we also should be telling more of the success stories. More of the stories about the cases where plaintiffs have won; the government is complying, and they're not even appealing. Where the lawsuit actually has done exactly what it was supposed to do.”
That’s true. Lawsuits have spared immigrants in New York, Texas, and Colorado prisons from one-way tickets to an El Salvador prison. Trump’s Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were forced to restore websites that went dark in the anti-diversity crackdown. Entire government agencies like USAID and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, though damaged, have been rescued from oblivion.
Legitimacy is leverage
There are several examples of the Trump administration playing cat-and-mouse with court orders, in incidents that justifiably received massive media attention, but the underreported story of Trump’s second term is that his administration usually tries to convince judges that they are in compliance.
They don’t do that out of respect for a co-equal branch of government and our constitutional order, which Trump constantly tries to discredit. They do it because it’s in the Trump administration’s best interest.
Vladeck laid out some of the practical concerns: “The federal government relies upon the federal courts all the time,” including in run-of-the-mill criminal cases. Then, there’s also the question of legitimacy.
U.S. Circuit Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson, a lifelong conservative jurist, warned the Trump administration why their war against the judiciary will backfire, in a profound ruling in the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
“Now the branches come too close to grinding irrevocably against one another in a conflict that promises to diminish both. This is a losing proposition all around. The Judiciary will lose much from the constant intimations of its illegitimacy, to which by dent of custom and detachment we can only sparingly reply. The Executive will lose much from a public perception of its lawlessness and all of its attendant contagions. The Executive may succeed for a time in weakening the courts, but over time history will script the tragic gap between what was and all that might have been, and law in time will sign its epitaph.”
The public still has leverage, even with Trump’s attacks on the rule of law. Civic engagement, from protest to congressional phone calls, has put pressure on officials, and public opinion has been shifting. Litigation has been overwhelmingly successful.
The first 100 days have shown that lawless actions can, and must, be opposed relentlessly.
Update: We have corrected a typo in the story’s statistic. The New York Times reported that there were at least 123 orders temporarily blocking the Trump administrations actions as of April 28, not 128.