As March got underway, CBS News’ “60 Minutes” ran a segment on federal judges who have ruled against the Trump administration, only to face a wave of threats from the president’s followers. Retired federal Judge John Jones, a George W. Bush appointee, told the program, “If we’re not careful, we’re going to get a judge killed. It’s just that stark.”
He was hardly the only one with these concerns. In mid-March, Politico reported on a trio of federal judges who “offered a blistering assessment of the Trump administration’s attacks on the judiciary, with one comparing them to the behavior of authoritarian regimes.” The jurists added that the president’s condemnations of jurists are responsible for fueling threats to their safety.
Two days later, after a federal judge threw out a baseless criminal case against Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, Trump called Judge James Boasberg, the chief federal judge for the District of Columbia, “a Wacky, Nasty, Crooked, and totally Out of Control Judge.”
Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts soon after warned that personal condemnations of federal judges is dangerous and “it’s got to stop.”
The president is aware of the concerns. He just doesn’t seem to care.
“The judges are really hurting this country,” Trump said last week at his White House Cabinet meeting. “Justice Roberts doesn’t like when I say it, but the judges are really hurting this country. And frankly, the justices, the Supreme Court has really hurt our country, too.”
A day earlier, he suggested, in reference to the court’s ruling on tariffs, that Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch “sicken” him “because they are bad for our country.”
The president kept the offensive going on Tuesday at a White House event, when he suggested justices who rule in ways he doesn’t like are guilty of either “stupidity” or being “disloyal.”
A day earlier, Trump published an item to his social media platform that concluded, “Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!”
He’s not just whining. The president last week also called on Congress to approve a crime bill that “cracks down on rogue judges.”
“We got rogue judges that are criminals,” Trump said. “They are criminals, what they do to our country. The decisions that they hand down and hurt our country.”
It might seem like ancient history, but in the run-up to Election Day 2024, Trump invested a fair amount of time in condemning those who criticize judges — as if his own rhetorical record didn’t exist. Such criticisms, the Republican said in August, are “probably illegal.” Two weeks later, he went a little further, adding that judicial criticism should be “illegal.”
If that wasn’t quite enough, Trump — who’d spent years publicly chastising judges — went so far as to declare, “These people should be put in jail the way they talk about our judges.”
Soon after, Trump won the election, and — wouldn’t you know it — he seems to have decided condemnations of judges and justices aren’t so bad after all.
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