Courts give great deference to presidents on matters of national security. But the ruling against Donald Trump’s White House press ban shows that such deference only goes so far.

Explaining his rationale for issuing a temporary restraining order in favor of reporters from MS NOW, CNN and Politico, U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly wrote that he was “skeptical” that the government’s asserted national security interest was “the actual motivation for, or is even advanced by, the revocation of” journalists’ White House press passes.

It’s a straightforward observation from the jurist, who was appointed to the bench by Trump in his first term. But it is nonetheless remarkable to see in the black-and-white of a judicial opinion, given how much power presidents have in national security matters. Against that backdrop, that a judge is confident in publishing his disbelief of the government’s position, even in a temporary ruling, shows how weak that position is.

Kelly noted that courts are “highly deferential” to the executive branch when national security is invoked. “Still, on this record, [government] Defendants offer little to back up their asserted national security interest to justify revocation of [journalist] Plaintiffs’ hard passes,” the judge wrote. He recounted that when Trump announced that he was banning the reporters from the White House, the president wasn’t focused on national security but rather “on the alleged lack of truthfulness and negativity of Plaintiffs’ reporting.”

The judge added that the administration’s after-the-fact justifications for the ban were “ambiguous about the true purpose of the revocations: while Defendants’ letters to Plaintiffs mention national security concerns, they purport to identify reporting that ‘threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods,’ leaving open the possibility that all the stories fall into the later bucket, rather than the former.”

Another reason Kelly declined to credit the security claim is that the government couldn’t adequately explain how banning the reporters from the White House would “in fact protect national security” or how “national security will be endangered if the Court orders their passes reinstated while this litigation proceeds.”

Trump himself has signaled that he knew he would lose even before Kelly ruled — not because of the legal weakness of his position but because he believed that losing before this particular judge was a foregone conclusion, after Kelly backed journalist Jim Acosta in a similar case during Trump’s first term.

“They have drawn a great Judge, for them,” Trump wrote of the news organizations in a Truth Social post on Monday. “In other words, almost without question and, as usual, we’ll go for appeal because Fake News people and publications that only write negatively, and who violate our National Security by writing false and defamatory stories with unknown ‘sources,’ shouldn’t be allowed access to the most important Office anywhere in the World,” the president wrote.

In his opinion explaining why he issued the two-week temporary restraining order, Kelly noted that such orders are generally unappealable. But even if the case reaches the Supreme Court, the justices may have a difficult time ruling for Trump on national security grounds, despite the prior deference they have given him.

The latest step in the litigation is that the plaintiff news organizations have already accused the government of failing to comply with Kelly’s order by barring them from the White House on Thursday morning. “Defendants have already repeatedly violated the Court’s Order. Plaintiffs respectfully request that the Court set a hearing by videoconference or teleconference as soon as possible this morning,” they said in a notice to the judge. He ordered the administration to respond by 12:30 p.m. ET on Thursday.

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