We Are Totally Going to Crush the Democrats’ Puny Lawfare Offensive

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Everybody needs to calm down and take a deep breath – the DOGE revolution is not in danger because a bunch of obscure district court judges in blue jurisdictions have signed ridiculous temporary orders purporting to limit President Donald Trump’s ability to actually be president. Don’t listen to the black pill battalion. We’re not losing this fight. We’re going to win it. Listen to the vice president – JD Vance has gotten a lot of heat because he pointed out that this is a legal farce. As usual, he’s right. And, to the extent there is a constitutional crisis – which there isn’t – it was brought on by uppity jurists hoping to distract the administration from its mission by embroiling it in a separation of powers fight. Except that’s not going to happen. The President and JD Vance are not going to fall for it. What they will do is use the judiciary to police its own misbehaving members, and when it’s all done, these legal fights will solidify the administration’s ability to act decisively in the future.

There are a few things non-lawyers need to understand. The first is that this nonsense will not stand. There are many reasons why, but the most important reason is that these emergency temporary restraining orders (and the injunctions that will likely follow) are legally meritless. Once a serious court gets a look at them, they will end up on the ash heap of judicial history.

The next thing to understand is that after this fight, Donald Trump will be more secure in his ability to be president than he has ever been. This kind of nationwide injunction will go extinct like the dinosaurs, passenger pigeons, and alternative pronouns in government correspondence. Why? The most obvious reason is that the orders are legally ridiculous, but the other key reason is that Chief Justice John Roberts is fully aware of the danger to his institution that this phenomenon poses.

We’re going to win this fight. We just have to fight smart.

Let’s back up a little. Doesn’t it seem like these orders are crazy? Your gut is correct – they are crazy. They are also obnoxious, as they are the result of blatant judge shopping. Have you noticed that just about every one of these judges is an Obama or Biden appointee? That’s not an accident. They didn’t just get lucky in the judge lottery. It’s no coincidence that one of the judges is a big donor of Democrat freak Sheldon Whitehouse – he’s not black, so they might have met at Sheldon’s beach club. The leftists find a venue where they know they will have a sympathetic ear who doesn’t care about the law. Next, they file a nonsense pleading and get the handpicked judge to sign their proposed order – yes, lawyers often draft orders and give them to the judge to sign. Right at the threshold, these cases are the result of cynical gamesmanship. But it gets worse.

I was an active lawyer for 30 years, including in the federal courts. I’ve never gotten an emergency temporary restraining order. I don’t know anyone who’s gotten an emergency temporary restraining order. The rules for getting emergency temporary restraining orders are so onerous, and the judges so reluctant to grant them, that it’s an exception to the exceptions-level kind of thing. But it’s easy when you’re a Democrat suing Donald Trump! For litigants who are not suing Donald Trump, there is a whole list of things you have to show just to get a regular restraining order, much less one issued at 1 AM on a Saturday morning when the opposing party hasn’t even had the opportunity to respond. Among those showings is “irreparable harm.” In one order, the anti-Trump plaintiffs claimed that the “irreparable harm” was that they weren’t going to be able to read a government website about some DEI nonsense and, therefore, their patients were going to die. That’s simply crazy. Yet, the judge nodded and signed.

Another requirement is standing. You must have suffered or be about to suffer an injury that would allow you to sue. Many of the suing groups can’t show any kind of individualized injury. The judges don’t even care.

Nor do they care about the consequences of their usurpations of executive power. You have judges saying that cabinet officers can’t have computer access to what’s going on in their own department. Well, that seemed a little too insane, but the revised order said that the secretary can have access, but the secretary’s people cannot, as if the secretary is going to sit down at a terminal and personally do data entry and deletions for the entire department. This is craziness. The judicial branch cannot micromanage the executive branch. But that’s what these orders purport to do.

As a lawyer, watching this – much like watching a lot of the lawfare they have waged against Trump both in and out of office – is difficult because it’s utterly insane. You need to understand that the stuff you see happening with Trump and his administration never happens in non-Trump court cases. Not ever. Not even a little bit. And for normal people – that is, not-lawyers – this must look even worse. Just a few months ago, you elected Donald Trump to do all the things he’s doing, and now you have a bunch of handpicked pipsqueaks in robes ordering that he may be president, but he can’t do any presidenting.

So, the question is, how should Trump react to this stuff? Exactly how he has been – by playing it smart and playing the long game that will get victory over these tactics and solidify his position for the future. That requires the patience to use the legal process to work this through. We’re not going to fix it; we’re going to let Chief Justice John Roberts get his own house in order. It’s going to take time. It’s going to be annoying. But it will be successful, and we will be much better off when it’s over.

Conservatives, being the abused life partners of American politics, are always suspicious and on edge, and a lot of them were wondering why Trump just doesn’t tell these ridiculous robed rejects to go pound judicial sand. After all, as it has been famously observed, Chief Justice Roberts has no divisions.

The regime media, and the Democrats, to the limited extent they are different, absolutely freaked out when JD Vance stated the obvious – Donald Trump could just refuse to obey these orders. The courts can’t stop him through hard power; the fact is that the only power the courts have is the respect the other branches grant it, respect that is earned by observing norms and ruling fairly. The fact is that the ultimate power of one branch to simply refuse to accept the overreach of another branch is, itself, one of the checks and balances within our constitutional system.

Democrats, the regime media, and other dumb people will tell you that that’s not a thing. This week, they’re demanding total obedience to whatever any court says at any time instead of the opposite position they held before January 20, 2025. But even they agree that, at some point, the judiciary can overstep such that the executive is not obligated to obey. Imagine that some judge in East Dakota ruled that Pam Bondi was constitutionally obligated to charge Donald Trump with treason for talking to Vladimir Putin on the phone and ordered that a charge that he wrote be filed and then found Donald Trump guilty of it on an emergency basis at 3:30 in the morning on a Wednesday and that Trump must be taken into custody in the next 15 minutes. Sure, most of the lawyers on cable and social media would think this was cool, but they are idiots. Normal people and perhaps 20% to 30% of Democrats would agree that Donald Trump would not be required to honor that ruling and surrender at the local federal penitentiary. Everyone agrees that there’s some line where the executive branch shakes its head and says, “No, you can’t do that, judicial branch.” The question is whether we are there yet.

We’re not even close to being there yet. Donald Trump has not disobeyed these dumb orders, nor should he disobey them for now. While it’s frustrating for us to watch the Democrats try to keep DOGE from uncovering their massive fraud, this is the smart way to proceed. It’s smart to give the judiciary a chance to correct its own errors, and Chief Justice Roberts and the Supreme Court will do that. He’s an institutionalist. There is no way he will put his institution at risk of being sidelined by jumping on the hand grenade that is these ridiculous rulings.

Trump is smart to let the judiciary fix its own mistakes. Keep in mind that part of the reason the Democrats sought these orders is to provoke Trump to act precipitously and to disobey the courts, thereby creating the constitutional crisis they claim exists but really doesn’t. Instead, Donald Trump should read the orders narrowly and work around them where he can. His people should appeal all of them and let the system do its job. Eventually, these silly decrees will all get tossed out and there will be established precedent banning such antics in the future. SCOTUS has no desire to referee a couple of hundred stupid district court orders on micro-topics, like requiring the DOGE people to put new coversheets on all the TPS reports before they go out.

It’s going to take time and it’s going to be frustrating. For the enemy, that’s a feature and not a bug. We just have to be chill; it’s a Zen thing. But that doesn’t mean we have to do nothing. Administration leaders like JD Vance should continue to point out the obvious – that these antics are lame and that the executive branch holds all the cards. We should mock these ridiculous rulings, which will make normal people mad at the Democrats. Using his superpower of making his enemies take up the banner of the worst causes possible, Trump has the Democrats loudly siding with bureaucrats and corruption. Finally, the administration and its supporters should loudly publicize the unethical aspects of this campaign, like the connection between some of the judges and NGOs, as well as partisan anti-Trump comments by some of these judges that demonstrate partiality. When a judge rules, he puts his credibility on the line, and some of these judges don’t appear to have much. Let America see their bias in living color.

Mostly, we need to calm down and wait. They’re not going to stop us. These orders will fall. It won’t be tomorrow, but it will be soon enough. When it’s all over, Trump is going to be in an even stronger position because this weapon will be taken from the Democrat arsenal. And that’s a big problem for them because they really don’t have much else to throw at us.