How
Many Court Cases Can Trump Lose in a Single Week?
From
tariffs and immigration to the National Guard, federal judges are rejecting
Trump’s ridiculous cover stories.
September
4, 2025
Is Donald
Trump tired yet of all the losing? During the past week alone,
federal judges across the country have rejected some of the most important and
far-reaching of Trump’s initiatives—from his efforts to reshape the global
economy with tariffs and mobilize the military to act as police in American
cities to his refusal to spend billions of dollars in congressionally
appropriated funds. The President continues to cite nonexistent emergencies to
justify his executive overreach and judges continue to call him out on it, issuing
stern rebukes in the tradition of Judge Beryl Howell, who, during a case this
spring about the firings of civil servants, observed that “an American
President is not a king—not even an ‘elected’ one.”
I’m not sure that this week’s epic
losing streak has received the attention that it deserves, no doubt in part
because America had other things to worry about, such as whether Trump was
actually alive, despite all the internet rumors. It speaks to the present
moment that the President is not only very much still with us but has already
started fund-raising off the social-media frenzy surrounding his supposed death
over Labor Day weekend. (“These rumors are just another desperate attack from
the failing left who can’t stand that we’re WINNING and bigly!” the e-mail
pitch that arrived in my inbox on Thursday morning said.) But what does it say
about the state of things that disputing rumors of his death turns out to be a
welcome distraction from underlying political realities for Trump?
In fact, the President enters the
first fall of his second term in office with historically low approval
ratings—the only President with worse marks at this point was Trump himself, in
his first term—and a radically disruptive agenda whose fate has yet to be
determined. I am well aware that this is not currently the dominant narrative
about Trump 2.0, which, whether you like it or hate it, has generally been
covered as a sweeping and surprisingly successful attack on pillars of the
American establishment in and out of government. But, depending on how the next
few months play out, it could be. And that’s the point: What’s clear from
Trump’s first seven months back in power is that he has embarked on a
breathtaking effort to reshape the American Presidency. What’s far from
apparent yet is whether and to what extent he will succeed.
The latest string of defeats began
last Friday, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that
Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs imposing double-digit duties on key
trading partners such as Canada, China, and the European Union were illegal.
Over the holiday weekend, a federal district judge intervened to stop migrant
children from being deported to Guatemala while some of them were already
loaded on planes. On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit
reinstated a Federal Trade Commissioner, saying that Trump did not have the
power that he claimed to fire her. Also that day, another federal judge ruled
that, in sending hundreds of National Guard personnel to Los Angeles amid
protests of Trump’s immigration crackdown, the President had violated a
nineteenth-century law prohibiting the use of troops for domestic
law-enforcement purposes. On Wednesday, yet another judge, in Boston, rejected
billions of dollars in cuts to research funding for Harvard University, part of
a broad war on liberal academia that Trump has made an unlikely centerpiece of
his second term. And late on Wednesday night, a federal judge in Washington
blocked billions of dollars in Trump-ordered cuts to foreign aid, saying that
he was usurping Congress’s power of the purse in refusing to spend the money.
This, I should add, is an incomplete list. If nothing else, it shows the
extraordinary scope and scale of the battles that Trump has chosen to
pursue—suggesting not so much a strategic view of the Presidency as an
everything-everywhere-all-at-once vision of unchecked Presidential power.
Important caveats apply, of course,
most notably that all these rebuffs to Trump can and may well be overturned on
appeal; September’s losing streak could soon enough become next spring’s
winning streak, especially with a Trumpified Supreme Court, which, in the first
few months after Trump’s return, failed to check many of Trump’s initial
excesses, almost certainly emboldening him to push further and faster in
applying his favored constitutional theory, what one
might call the “I can do anything I want to do” doctrine. Already this week,
Trump has appealed the tariff ruling to the Supreme Court, asking for an
expedited review in a case that will test not only the legality of his favorite
economic tool but his broad assertions of emergency authority to override
constitutional constraints. In the foreign-aid case, U.S. District Judge Amir Ali made clear
that his word would hardly be the last on the matter, anticipating “definitive
higher court guidance” given the “immense legal and practical importance”
surrounding the question of whether a President can simply decide to flout
Congress’s appropriations bills.
There’s also the matter of the damage
that Trump has already wrought, even if he were to ultimately lose some or even
all of these cases—unspent aid that could have saved lives, families divided by
harsh immigration policies, companies whose supply chains have been broken or
disrupted by a single man’s peremptory demands. So let’s stipulate that winning
by losing might be a fine outcome as far as Trump is concerned; when smashing
stuff is the goal, the more that’s smashed, the better, whether the judges ultimately
agree or not.
Still, I wouldn’t dismiss these rulings so quickly. For
starters, they show that there remain pockets of robust opposition to Trump at
a time when many are wondering what happened to America’s
collective spine. This is a constraint on Trump in and of itself. Every adverse
court ruling that he has to appeal takes time and effort and mental bandwidth.
Trump himself, channelling his mentor Roy Cohn, has long understood that the courts
are politics by other means. When he bemoaned the ruling against him in the
tariffs case to reporters on Wednesday, he sounded not like an all-powerful
winner convinced that he will prevail so much as an unhappy loser complaining
that the appeals-court ruling, if upheld, “would destroy America.”
It’s been a great relief during these
disruptive past few months to find that the federal judiciary harbors so many
individual jurists who are willing to use plain English to skewer the lies and
unmask the cover stories that have been used to justify Trump’s various power
grabs. U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer, in his fifty-two-page ruling in the Los
Angeles National Guard case, stated clearly that, despite Trump’s claims that he had to send in
troops to “quell a rebellion . . . there was no rebellion.” He
went on to warn that Trump’s plans were to create “a national police force with
the President as its chief.” In the Harvard case, U.S. District Judge Allison
Burroughs determined that the Trump Administration
had engaged in “retaliation, unconstitutional conditions, and unconstitutional
coercion.” She added that it was “difficult to conclude anything other than
that Defendants used anti-semitism as a smokescreen for a targeted,
ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier universities.”
Their opinions might be overturned,
but they are important nonetheless. On Thursday, using language similar to that
in Breyer’s ruling, the District of Columbia filed suit against the Trump
Administration for sending in the National Guard to fight
crime in the capital, citing an emergency that the city says does not exist.
I know that the courts alone cannot
save us from Trump’s would-be authoritarianism. If anything, I’ve long been
struck by the faith that so many of the President’s critics have in the power
of the judiciary to curb his excesses, when history is so clear about the power
of a demagogue to bulldoze his way past even the most eloquent legal rulings.
But I also know that America’s tradition of the rule of law is what makes it
different from Vladimir Putin’s Russia or Xi Jinping’s China, where the law is
whatever the boss says it is. John Roberts, thank you for your attention to
this matter. ♦
