It's Trump vs. the Courts, and It Won't End Well for Trump

[Zorro]

President Trump has wasted no time in his second term in declaring war on the nation’s federal judiciary, the country’s legal profession and the rule of law. He has provoked a constitutional crisis with his stunning frontal assault on the third branch of government and the American system of justice. The casualty could well be the constitutional democracy Americans fought for in the Revolutionary War against the British monarchy 250 years ago.

Mr. Trump has yearned for this war against the federal judiciary and the rule of law since his first term in office. He promised to exact retribution against America’s justice system for what he has long mistakenly believed is the federal government’s partisan “weaponization” against him.

It’s no secret that he reserves special fury for the justice system because it oversaw his entirely legitimate prosecution for what the government charged were the crimes of attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election and purloining classified documents from the White House, secreting them at Mar-a-Lago and obstructing the government’s efforts to reclaim them. He escaped the prosecutions by winning a second term, stopping them in their tracks.

But unless Mr. Trump immediately turns an about-face and beats a fast retreat, not only will he plunge the nation deeper into constitutional crisis, which he appears fully willing to do, he will also find himself increasingly hobbled even before his already vanishing political honeymoon is over.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/23/opinion/trump-judge-venezuela-deportation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.6E4.E2K8.dxQqz6CaYGg1&smid=url-share

[bucolic_frolic]

1. It won't end well. It never ends badly. It never ends.

Consequences vacuum. What are the consequences for immunity? Does immunity render impeachment sterile? As if it ever had any bipartisan bite to it. We get these articles every week. Nothing ever happens.

[Irish_Dem]

2. It won't end well for someone, either Trump or the US.

Maybe both. We don't yet know how this will end.

[Ocelot II]

3. Do Musk and the other oligarchs understand that the only thing protecting them

and their wealth is the US legal system? If Trump tears it down, as he seems to be trying to do, what's to stop him from simply confiscating the wealth of the billionaires on some "national emergency" pretext and then turning it over to himself or his businesses? In the Youngstown v. Sawyer case in 1952, where Truman tried to nationalize the steel mills to prevent a strike during the Korean War, SCOTUS said a president couldn't do that, but that was then, and a different SCOTUS. It's what Putin has done in Russia - he allows the oligarchs to remain wealthy, but only as long as they toe the line and stay away from windows. Business people and corporations collaborated and complied with Hitler and many became wealthy, but we know how that whole mess ended, and some of those corporate leaders ended up defendants at Nuremberg. Without the legal system Trump could decide that he, not Musk, should be the richest man in the world and take whatever steps he needed to make that happen. So maybe all these rich assholes should try a little harder to push back on Trump as he tries to destroy the courts.