Trump Attacks on the Judiciary Justify Saying “Coup”

Democracy is the alternative to violence. That’s not a threat; it’s a harsh reality. A central purpose for erecting a working democracy is that it provides remedies to injustice that would otherwise trigger often defensible rationales for violence. Even in an imperfect system, so long as the law “bends toward justice,” people will generally keep faith with the institution and choose to vote, protest, write, call, and litigate rather than resort to violence in response to harm. In this light, Trump’s attacks on the judiciary in recent days cross a dangerous threshold toward what many are reasonably calling a coup d’etat.

For instance, both J.D. Vance and Stephen Miller posted social media comments alleging that a federal judge in the District Court for the Southern District of New York lacked the authority to order DOGE employees to cease accessing Treasury Department information and further ordered that any information already downloaded be deleted. Here’s an exchange between Stephen Miller and Pete Buttigieg that should scare the hell out of people:

Miller went to law school, so he knows damn well that federal judges are not elected, and he also knows the line in the Constitution, right there in Article III, which says, “The judicial power shall extend to…all controversies to which the United States shall be a party.” This means that when a plaintiff brings an action against any part of the U.S. government, they shall do so in federal court. It doesn’t say that every plaintiff will be correct on the facts or the law; it only says federal court is the right venue. The Constitution does not enumerate the Rules of Civil Procedure or the many statues that guide judicial conduct.

In this instance, New York Attorney General Letitia James, along with eighteen other state AGs, filed suit in response to DOGE’s access to U.S. Treasury information, and the judge did what judges do all the time. Where a plaintiff shows “likely success on the merits,” the court may provide injunctive relief, often ordering defendants to cease the allegedly unlawful conduct while also ordering the defendant to submit a response within a given time. From there, the case might go to oral arguments and work its way through the appeals process, but the courts are the ultimate arbiters of what the law says. And since the average middle-school kid should know this, it’s a safe bet that Miller and Vance know it, too.

With Trump 1.0, we would expect more personal attacks against AG James, including overt racism and sexism. We would also expect personal attacks against the judge, and even now, I’m sure he has received threats from MAGA dopes who really did fail high school civics. But the Trump 2.0 pivot to attacking the judiciary itself—i.e., not alleging political bias, but alleging that the court lacks Constitutional authority—is why the word coup is not hyperbole.

In context, Miller’s second response in the exchange above is the most chilling because it’s both right and wrong at the same time. The President is charged with executing the law, which leads to the existential question of what happens when Trump et al. simply ignore the courts? The lies about the judiciary posted by Miller, Vance, et al. are meant to bolster public support for Trump doing whatever the hell he wants and unless that sentiment shifts rapidly, the Congress we have won’t impeach and remove the guy from office. So, that’s the ball game, right?

Of course, the underlying lie supporting the lies about the judiciary is that DOGE is uncovering and eliminating “waste and corruption” in various agencies throughout the government. But in addition to the fact that the White House is circumventing the legal process by which such things are done, it should be obvious to any reasonable person that an honest and thorough process of reducing waste in the federal government could never be accomplished in a couple of weeks. The average small business would take longer to audit its expenses than it apparently took Musk to proclaim all the bugs he identified in some of the largest institutions on Earth. So, why are people, including small business owners, so gullible? Good question.

My fellow Democrats will be inclined to blame the SCOTUS ruling on presidential immunity for fostering these events, but as discussed in a post written at that time, I disagree. First, the immunity question can only be applied in cases brought against former presidents, not sitting presidents. Had Trump lost the election, the government likely would have overcome the immunity threshold in several of the charges against Trump, and he likely would have been convicted. But we will never know, and those questions are beyond moot now.

Now, we have a sitting president who firmly believes he can do whatever he wants regardless of what the law says, and the only constitutional remedy available is impeachment, which ain’t gonna happen. The immunity opinion, applying to former presidents, says nothing, one way or another, about a sitting president with the will and means to circumvent the law. The whole point of the lies sown by Miller and Vance is that it doesn’t matter what any court says about anything.

As discussed in the post about the immunity decision, the American framers did not design a prophylactic remedy for the people democratically choosing to destroy the institutions of democracy. While it is beyond question that an alarming number of Americans who support Trump are eager for destruction, I suspect that most are not. I see the occasional Trump hat or T-shirt in my local grocery store or bagel shop, but I don’t think any of those people are members of the Proud Boys or the New Apostolic Reformation eager for civil war.

I assume these neighbors want prosperity and domestic tranquility as much as I do. It’s just that they either don’t know, or have forgotten, the basic checks-and-balances principle on which the United States was founded. As such, their sources of information—their feeds—are telling them that words like coup and similar descriptions of Trump 2.0 are just liberal hyperbole. And this brings us back to the first sentence of this post—that democracy is the alternative to violence.

It is simply a law of nature that when people no longer have a path to remedy injustice through a democratic system, they will respond with violence—and the phenomenon of Luigi Mangione is foreboding in this regard. While I may feel ambivalent about the death of a man (Thompson) who reportedly caused pain and suffering for profit, I maintain that there is a moral gulf between that ambivalence and joining a mob that canonizes and celebrates his killer as a hero.

Thanks to the psychological effects of social media, that moral gulf has been narrowed for millions of people, and just as Kyle Rittenhouse animated so much self-righteous and violent rhetoric on the Right, Mangione symbolizes latent violence on the Left. Both will erupt if Trump 2.0 erases the core institutions of democracy, and no matter what the preppers might imagine, nobody wins that war except perhaps your new tech-lords. Whatever that nation would be, it sure as hell won’t be the United States.