Left-Wing Judges Try to Stymie Trump

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Ostensibly, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance won an overwhelming victory, and you can define that in a variety of ways. Not just a plurality, but I think it would be called a referendum on America.

After all, they were the first ticket on the Republican side to have won the popular vote in 20 years. They won an overwhelming majority in the Electoral College. They retain control of the House of Representatives. They won the Senate. There’s a 6-3, supposedly, conservative majority on the Supreme Court. They won all of the swing states.

So, they came into office with this momentum from the American people that was expressed through a national election. And yet, they are now stymied.

Almost all of their initiatives are facing two types of opposition. The first is, in a pre-planned way, liberal organizations, lavishly funded by what they themselves might want to call oligarchs, have funded massive lawsuits against the Trump administration, stopping executive orders.

Remember, this idea that executive orders were a rapid and effective way for a president to rule didn’t come from Donald Trump. It came from former President Barack Obama. He recalibrated the use of executive orders when he lost the majority in Congress and he said, “I have a pen and I have a phone. And I’m gonna act accordingly.” And he did so.

But what we’re seeing now is that these liberal organizations are targeting left-wing judges.

Judge Ana Reyes in Washington—who was described as a Biden appointee, as the first Latina, LGBTQ—she just ruled to stop the Pentagon’s new policy, not having or forbidding transgendered people in combat units.

Judge Jesse Furman, another lower district judge, he just put out a stay not too long ago rescinding the deportation of Mahmoud Khalil.

And Judge James Boasberg stopped the deportation of this very dangerous Tren de Aragua gang of South American criminals who came here illegally.

Now, what was the argument that the Trump administration was using that incurred the wrath of liberal activists? All they wanted to do was say, “We don’t know the effect of transgendered people in combat units. This is a new phenomenon. For now, we’re gonna put a stay on it.” That was the Department of Defense and the Trump administration.

We don’t know how these people from South America and these gangs got here. But we do know they came illegally. And they are residing illegally. And they’re in very dangerous gangs and many of them have committed crimes. So, if it was—if they broke the law to come here, we want to enforce the law to have them go back.

Khalil, I think, as we’ve seen news accounts start to recalibrate the idea that he was just a neutral, semi-partisan, not very active supporter of Hamas, is not true. He was the official spokesman for the Apartheid Divest at Columbia University/Barnard College. He supported the massacres on Oct. 7. He was a big supporter and adherent of Hamas, which is a terrorist-designated organization.

And so, what we’re seeing is liberal groups trying to keep people who are supporting the terrorist Hamas or supporting these gangs inside the United States.

This is very analogous—cherry-picking left-wing judges is very analogous to what we watched all during the 2022-24 lawfare period.

You remember Judge Arthur Engoron, Judge Juan Merchan, and Judge Lewis Kaplan—he was the judge in the E. Jean Carroll case. And we had the Alvin Bragg judge and the Letitia James. They were all—like these judges, they had two things in common: They were left-wing activist judges, appointed by either former President Joe Biden, Obama, or former President Bill Clinton. And they had minor to major conflicts of interest where people in their family were big, either had worked for a prior Democratic administration or themselves were activists.

And what did they do? They tried to put Donald Trump in jail.

That same lawfare has now been transmogrified and put into a more concerted effort to stop everything that Donald Trump is trying to do. And what he’s trying to do, remember, is not radical. It’s just simply to enforce immigration law. It’s just simply to bring back the country to the middle.

Will this succeed? I don’t think so. I think the district courts will over—the appellate courts will overturn it, if not, then the Supreme Court. But they know that. The point is, they want to delay, delay, delay.

Donald Trump is already a lame-duck president. He only has four years left. And he has got less than two years before the midterm elections. Their plan is to drag all of these executive orders, which are backed by a vote of the people who elected Donald Trump, is to drag them through the courts and stop him. Create a sense of chaos. Make the Republicans, in general, and Donald Trump, in particular, overreact. And then, cause chaos, controversy, constitutional crisis. And eat up these precious four years.

As of now, it’s succeeding, but time will tell and we’ll weigh in next time.

We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of The Daily Signal.

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