In the summer of 2020, as demonstrators gathered in Washington, D.C., to protest against the murder of George Floyd, President Donald Trump directed the National Guard and officers from various federal law-enforcement agencies to patrol the streets of the nation’s capital.
A clear pattern has emerged in the extended back-and-forth over the legality of many Trump-administration actions. Donald Trump or a member of his Cabinet takes a certain step—say, firing an official protected from such removal, or destroying a government agency established by Congress, or seeking to ship a group of immigrants off to a country where they may be tortured or killed. Then, a lawsuit is quickly filed seeking to block the administration.
Since early February, when Vice President J. D. Vance posted on X that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” the United States has been inching nearer and nearer to the moment when the White House directly defies an order of the court. So far, that moment doesn’t appear to have arrived—in part because the Trump administration can’t quite commit to its own authoritarian posturing.
Updated at 8:44 p.m. ET on April 9, 2025
Over the course of one afternoon and evening last month, the Department of Homeland Security loaded three planes with migrants, most of them Venezuelan men whom the Trump administration had determined, on the basis of little to no evidence, to be members of the gang Tren de Aragua. The planes departed Texas and flew across the Gulf of Mexico toward Central America, even as a judge in Washington, D.C., was holding a hearing on whether the U.S.
Less than a month into the second Trump administration, the White House began publicly toying with the idea of defying court orders. In the weeks since then, it’s continued to flirt with the suggestion, not ignoring a judge outright but pushing the boundaries of compliance by searching for loopholes in judicial demands and skirting orders for officials to testify.
Donald Trump wasted little time after the election in claiming an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” and floating a series of extreme proposals with varying degrees of legal dubiousness. The president-elect has already winkingly suggested that he might stay in office for an unconstitutional third term, indicated that he intends to end the Constitution’s guarantee of birthright citizenship, and said that he plans to deport U.S. citizens.
Matt Gaetz’s nomination to serve as attorney general lasted just more than a week. For Donald Trump to have selected him in the first place was shocking, not only because of Gaetz’s total lack of law-enforcement experience but also because, until recently, he had been under investigation for sex trafficking by the same department that he was now being tapped to lead.
What will happen if Donald Trump secures a second term as president? Polling remains close—and though a Democratic victory seems far more likely than it did before the Biden-Harris swap, it’s hardly assured. Should Trump pull out a win in November, voters might imagine that they know what to expect: more chaos, more grievance, more all-caps rants on social media. But a second Trump term would be much more dangerous than the first.
When the Supreme Court agreed to take up the question of whether Donald Trump is shielded from prosecution over his role in January 6, two core questions were at stake. First was the substantive matter of whether the Court would find that presidential immunity protected a former chief executive from some measure of criminal accountability for engineering an insurrection.
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One evening in March 2018, I joined some friends at a bar in Washington, D.C., to watch a live broadcast of Anderson Cooper’s interview with the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels on 60 Minutes.
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Updated at 6 pm ET on March 4, 2024.
The United States is in a moment of democratic crisis, and the Supreme Court has no idea what to do.
Today, the Court held in Trump v. Anderson that Colorado cannot disqualify Donald Trump from the state’s primary ballot as an insurrectionist, a decision that functionally dooms the existing efforts to bar Trump from the presidency under Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Two things seemed clear after the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Trump v. Anderson, the case concerning whether Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment bars Donald Trump from the presidency as an insurrectionist. First, most of the justices want to rule in Trump’s favor. Second, they’re struggling to figure out how to do so.
For months now, it has been apparent that Donald Trump might well become the first former president of the United States to be indicted. Now the once unthinkable has taken place. A grand jury in Manhattan has handed up an indictment of Donald Trump over his alleged coordination of hush-money payments in advance of the 2016 election. The indictment itself remains under seal.It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. For one thing, it wasn’t supposed to happen today.
Like the monster miraculously resuscitated to terrorize the heroes in a horror-movie sequel, Donald Trump is back.No, I’m not talking about his November 15 announcement of his third campaign for president of the United States. Instead I have in mind something far more important: Twitter.
The iron law of scandals involving Donald Trump is that they will always be stupid, and there will always be more of them. Trump scandals—the Russia investigation; Trump’s first impeachment, over his efforts to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the insurrection on January 6—have something else in common: All these catastrophes result from Trump’s refusal to divorce the office of the presidency and the good of the country from his personal desires.
The iron law of scandals involving Donald Trump is that they will always be stupid, and there will always be more of them. Trump scandals—the Russia investigation; Trump’s first impeachment, over his efforts to blackmail Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky; the insurrection on January 6—have something else in common: All these catastrophes result from Trump’s refusal to divorce the office of the presidency and the good of the country from his personal desires.
During its astonishing Tuesday hearing about Donald Trump’s actions on the day of January 6, the House select committee investigating the insurrection made clear that the integrity of its work is under threat. “The same people who drove the former president’s pressure campaign to overturn the election are now trying to cover up the truth about January 6,” warned committee chair Bennie Thompson.
It was almost a year ago that rioters forced their way into the United States Capitol, smashing windows, threatening the lives of Vice President Mike Pence and members of Congress, and aiming to overturn the results of a democratic election in order to keep Donald Trump in power. In the intervening months, the Justice Department has filed charges against more than 680 people out of the “approximately 2000” whom the FBI estimates were involved in the attack.
The indictment unsealed on Thursday in New York does not charge Donald Trump personally. It addresses only a small slice of alleged wrongdoing by the organization named after him and which, for most of his life, he ran. It doesn’t speak to any of the numerous instances of misconduct and potential criminality that took place during Trump’s presidency, nor should it be understood as a referendum on that misconduct. But it offers the first glimmer of accountability, all the same.
The indictment unsealed on Thursday in New York does not charge Donald Trump personally. It addresses only a small slice of alleged wrongdoing by the organization named after him and which, for most of his life, he ran. It doesn’t speak to any of the numerous instances of misconduct and potential criminality that took place during Trump’s presidency, nor should it be understood as a referendum on that misconduct. But it offers the first glimmer of accountability, all the same.
When President Joe Biden announced in the weeks before his inauguration that he was committed to reestablishing an independent Justice Department, he didn’t say that it was going to be easy.
Until the day that a violent mob stormed the Capitol building, it seemed possible that Donald Trump would be able to shuffle into postpresidential life without facing any real consequences. President-elect Joe Biden had indicated his anxiety over a potential prosecution of the former president. Commentators muttered about the political divisiveness of pursuing Trump after he left office.
Donald Trump will not serve a second term. The litigation launched by his campaign and the Republican Party to overturn the election results has no chance of preventing Joe Biden from swearing the oath of office on January 20—as Trump himself seemed to haltingly recognize last week after his administration finally allowed the presidential transition to begin.
Updated at 3:50 p.m. ET on October 4, 2020.Barely a week after the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, before the late justice had even been buried, President Donald Trump hosted a Rose Garden ceremony to formally announce his nomination of Amy Coney Barrett to fill the open seat on the Supreme Court. A week later, it appears that the inauspicious ceremony may have been at the center of the coronavirus outbreak now plaguing the White House and the Senate.
So you want to corrupt the Justice Department.It’s a worthy project for the power-hungry politician. These are polarized times. Left alone, the department could get weaponized against you, particularly if—and only you know whether this is true—there are skeletons in your closet. The department has a lot of people with guns and subpoena power, a lot of investigative muscle, and it can lock up your friends—and even you—if you’re not careful.
The Supreme Court knows how to go out with a bang. On Thursday, the justices closed the (virtual) courthouse doors for the summer after finally releasing two long-awaited rulings on President Trump’s efforts to block the release of his financial information to prosecutors and Congress.
The big question is why.Why would the president fire a federal prosecutor just five months before an election, with no indication of wrongdoing on the prosecutor’s part, in a manner sure to ignite controversy?Three days into the scandal around the abrupt dismissal of the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Geoffrey Berman, we still have no answers.
Last week began with one of the ugliest—and potentially most dangerous—spectacles of Donald Trump’s presidency: the nation’s leader, having declared himself “your president of law and order,” striding across a park violently cleared of peaceful protesters by police firing chemical irritants.Within a week, however, the Trump administration’s response to the nationwide protests over the killing of George Floyd had devolved into a bleak farce.