Trump Officials Intensify Attacks on Judges Over Tariffs Ruling

Most Americans have never heard of the U.S. Court of International Trade, which has wide-ranging authority over trade matters.

But after a three-judge panel ruled against the president’s aggressive tariff regime Wednesday evening, the response from President Trump and his allies was both immediate and familiar.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, called the decision a “judicial coup” on social media.

“We are living under a judicial tyranny,” Mr. Miller added on Thursday, reposting photos of the three trade court judges. Two of the judges were Republican appointees, one named to the bench by Mr. Trump.

Even by the judge-bashing standards of the Trump administration, the White House’s sharp reactions this week to court decisions curtailing its agenda appeared to intensify a strategic effort to undermine confidence in the judiciary.

“Trump’s attack on the judges is an attempt to undo the separation of powers,” Ty Cobb, a lawyer who defended Mr. Trump in a special counsel investigation in his first term, said in an interview. “It’s an attempt to take what is three coequal branches and make it one dominant branch.”

Across the country, in court cases not connected to each other, judges have ruled the Trump White House had gone too far on a broad range of issues, exceeding the constitutional authority afforded a president or violating statutes adopted by Congress. About 180 judicial rulings have at least temporarily paused some of the administration’s initiatives.

The Trump administration has also prevailed in a number of judicial decisions. The ruling against Mr. Trump’s tariffs that spurred so much White House anger, for instance, was temporarily halted Thursday by an appeals court.

But as the administration’s court losses pile up, so have the attacks on the judiciary, against judges appointed by Democrats, Republicans and Mr. Trump himself in his first term.

Mr. Trump began the week with an all-caps Memorial Day message on social media in which he castigated efforts to block his administration from quickly carrying out deportations and rebuked “USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK.”

After the U.S. Court of International Trade ruled on Wednesday that the Trump administration wrongly used a 1977 law to impose tariffs, a White House spokesman decried “unelected judges.”

“Three judges of the U.S. Court of International Trade disagreed and brazenly abused their judicial power,” Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, told reporters Thursday. She said they had moved to “usurp the authority of President Trump to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him.”

Ms. Leavitt then ticked off a list of other court rulings she said were “radical” and “ridiculous,” including decisions that blocked the firings of federal workers and dismantling the Education Department.

“President Trump had more injunctions in one full month of office, in February, than Joe Biden had in three years,” she said.

Mr. Trump is not alone in history in complaining about the federal courts.

During his tenure, President Franklin D. Roosevelt clashed with the Supreme Court whose conservative bloc thwarted his New Deal agenda. He then embarked on a losing court-packing battle.

President Barack Obama criticized Supreme Court justices directly during his 2010 State of the Union address over their decision in the Citizens United case.

And when President George W. Bush’s administration lost a Supreme Court decision concerning rights of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, he grumbled: “We will abide by the decision. That doesn’t mean I have to agree with it.”

But Mr. Trump and his allies have personalized attacks on judges who rule against their actions — and attacked the very idea that the judiciary has an appropriate role in overseeing the actions of the president.

Barry Friedman, a New York University law professor and expert on constitutional law, said that while there was a long history of presidents unhappy with the courts, “there’s something particularly corrosive about the Trump administration’s rhetoric.”

“Personalizing attacks on individual judges, publicizing who they are in ways that suggest action should be taken against them, that’s deeply concerning,” he said.

Indeed, threats against federal judges have risen drastically since President Trump took office, according to internal data compiled by the U.S. Marshals Service and obtained by The New York Times.

In a five-month period leading up to March 1 of this year, 80 individual judges had received threats, the data shows. Then, over the next six weeks, 162 judges received threats.

That spike in threats coincided with a flood of harsh rhetoric, including from Mr. Trump and his officials, criticizing judges who have ruled against the administration and even calling for their impeachment.

J. Michael Luttig, a conservative retired federal appeals court judge, said he believed the Trump administration had so consistently sought to undermine respect for judges because officials knew they were trying to push the powers of the presidency beyond the parameters defined by Congress or the Constitution.

“This was a planned war that he had been planning since he lost the last election,” Judge Luttig said. “From Day 1, the president, the vice president and then eventually his entire cabinet have been attacking the courts and the judiciary because they knew to a certainty that the courts would strike down his initiatives.”

The administration is winless thus far in court cases concerning punishments the president has tried to inflict on law firms. It has thus far not appealed those cases.

In other cases, the Trump administration has argued it should be granted wide latitude on matters ranging from tariffs to immigration enforcement because it faces emergency or an invasion.

Mr. Friedman said there was a political risk for Mr. Trump if he refused to abide by court rulings. Already, the administration has declined to carry out court orders seeking to return a deported man from El Salvador and turn around deportation flights.

“Historically and certainly in the last century, presidents have not done well politically by defying the courts,” Mr. Friedman said. “People might support the president’s agenda, but they balk at presidents ignoring the courts.”

During her remarks to reporters Thursday, Ms. Leavitt made the administration’s legal strategy clear: Get as many contested cases as possible to the Supreme Court, which has a conservative majority, including three justices appointed by Mr. Trump.

After criticizing “ridiculous orders that we have seen from lower district court judges every day,” Ms. Leavitt said the administration had “hope that the Supreme Court will weigh in and rein them in.”