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President Donald Trump claims he will “always abide by the courts” but suggested that a series of judicial decisions blocking his executive actions and policy maneuvers had derailed his “momentum.”
“Well, I always abide by the courts, and then I’ll have to appeal it. But then what he’s done is he’s slowed down the momentum, and it gives crooked people more time to cover up the books,” Trump said from the Oval Office on Tuesday.
“So yeah, the answer is, I always abide by the courts, always abide by them, and we’ll appeal, but appeals take a long time,” he added.
Trump’s remarks follow a deluge of attacks from Elon Musk, Vice President JD Vance, administration officials and their allies, casting aside checks and balances and falsely suggesting that the presidency has supreme authority over Congress and the judicial branch.
Their comments — raising alarms among constitutional scholars and legal analysts for an impending constitutional crisis — follow rulings from judges across the country after an avalanche of lawsuits from civil rights groups, federal workers and state officials, among others, challenged the Trump administration’s swift policy moves.
Federal judges have responded by blocking the administration from redefining the 14th Amendment’s birthright citizenship clause, firing thousands of aid workers, deleting health information from government websites, and imposing a deadline for more than 2 million federal workers to accept so-called “buyout” offers, among other actions.
On Monday, a judge in Rhode Island found that the administration defied the “plain text” of an earlier ruling commanding Trump to unfreeze billions of dollars in federal grants.
Judge John J. McConnell Jr. said his order was “clear and unambiguous, and there are no impediments to the Defendants’ compliance.”
Trump has appealed several decisions, including the decision over his funding freeze and rulings that have temporarily blocked his birthright citizenship executive order, among others.
But the decisions striking down his actions have ignited a firestorm among Trump allies, accusing judges – many of whom were appointed by Republicans – of launching a judicial “coup” to undermine his agenda.
“We are witnessing an attempted coup of American democracy by radical left activists posing as judges,” Musk wrote Tuesday.
Musk also called for the impeachment of a federal judge after a ruling temporarily blocked his Department of Government Efficiency’s access to Treasury Department data.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, whose right-wing legal advocacy group repeatedly sued Joe Biden’s administration to force the courts to block his agenda, took a swing at an “unelected district judge” with “decision-making control over the entire executive branch.”
Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal attorney who is now serving as counselor to the president, told Fox News on Tuesday that “there’s a separation of powers for a reason” — seemingly arguing that it is designed to preserve the president’s “ultimate authority” rather than establishing checks and balances to prevent a president from abusing it.
“The executive branch is the ultimate authority on federal issues, and we have rogue judges who are trying to stop [administration officials] from doing their job,” she claimed.
Inside the Oval Office on Tuesday, Trump said courts shouldn’t prevent any federal agency from going over their books, but the lawsuits accuse him of unconstitutionally withholding federal funds and international aid and target Musk’s alleged hijacking of federal data.
“I can’t imagine that could be held up by the court,” Trump said. “Any court that would say that the president or his representatives — like Secretary of the Treasury, Secretary of State, whatever — doesn’t have the right to go over their books and make sure everything’s honest, I mean how can you have a country?”
His remarks echo statements he made on Air Force One on Sunday, when he said that “we don’t have a country anymore” and that “no judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision,” which he called a “disgrace.”
