You’d think a president who’d endured two assassination attempts would be especially sensitive to the potential threats that other public officials face. Not Donald Trump. Worse, he stokes threats against others.
So it was that, just after 7 a.m. on Monday, Memorial Day, the commander in chief thumbed out 174 words on his cellphone, not one of which paid tribute to Americans who lost their lives in service to the nation. No, Trump addressed his “Happy Memorial Day” greeting (who says that?) “to all, including the scum … trying to destroy our country.” His all-capitalized screed (I’m dispensing with the caps) made clear whom he meant: as usual, predecessor and punching bag Joe Biden (“an incompetent president”), but mainly federal judges — including some of his own appointees — who’ve overwhelming been ruling against his power grabs in numerous lawsuits involving tariffs, federal spending, appointments, retribution against law firms and universities and migrant deportations.
Referring specifically to judges who’ve put the brakes on his lawless efforts to disappear untold noncitizens to foreign prisons and detention centers, Trump wrote that these “USA hating judges” “are on a mission to keep murderers, drug dealers, rapists, gang members, and released prisoners from all over the world, in our country so they can rob, murder, and rape again.” They’re “monsters who want our country to go to hell.”
And we’re debating Biden’s stability and mental acuity?
Such unhinged attacks, more pronounced than Trump’s anti-courts tirades of past years, must not be dismissed as simply Trump being Trump. Yes, he’s undermining Americans’ faith in the judicial system. But the danger is more immediate.
The day after Trump’s Memorial Day diatribe, a New York Times story led with this: “Threats against federal judges have risen drastically since President Trump took office.” In that time, not only Trump but also his vice president, attorney general and other suck-ups in his administration and Congress have regularly leveled broadsides against judges, often by name, and called for their impeachments. It’s hardly unthinkable that unstable Trump supporters could take matters into their own hands.
Certainly some judges find it thinkable. Another disturbing, too-little-noted report appeared days earlier in the Wall Street Journal: Federal judges are considering forming their own armed security force. Why would they do that, you might ask, given that the judiciary receives protection from the U.S. Marshals Service? Well, federal marshals report to Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi, a Trump loyalist who’s damned as ”deranged” the judges who’ve had the temerity to rule against him. That’s left some wondering whether they can’t rely on marshals for their security. Some jurists reportedly took their concerns all the way to Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr.
The Marshals Service itself was the source for the New York Times’ report on threats to judges, though its data were given to the newspaper by a federal jurist who, tragically, knows worse than threats: U.S. District Judge Esther Salas of New Jersey. In 2020, Salas’ 20-year-old son was killed and her husband critically injured in their home by bullets that a disturbed lawyer intended for her — “a lazy and incompetent Latina judge appointed by Obama,” the attorney had written.
Salas said federal marshals have told her of 103 instances in which unknown persons lately sent pizzas to judges. Message: We know where you live. Ghoulishly, 20 were delivered in her dead son’s name. On Wednesday, she was on MSNBC “begging, pleading” for political leaders who disagree with judicial rulings to do so responsibly, to quit “villainizing us.” Salas didn’t name Trump — she didn’t have to — but J. Michael Luttig, a former federal appeals court judge who appeared alongside her, didn’t hold back.
Luttig, a conservative luminary who was on President George W. Bush’s short list for the Supreme Court, called on Chief Justice Roberts to condemn the invective against judges more forcefully — and pointedly — than he has to date. Roberts’ problem, Luttig suggested, “is that to condemn it is to condemn the president of the United States. As far as I’m concerned, so be it.”
Yes, so be it.
Other administration actions are unnerving judges. In April federal agents arrested a Wisconsin judge for allegedly obstructing their apprehension of an unauthorized immigrant appearing in her courtroom — a warning to other officials, Bondi underscored, not to interfere in the administration’s immigration crackdown. Also, Trump has taken what’s been bipartisan abuse of a president’s pardon power to new heights, discarding the evidence-based convictions of judges and juries scores of times already, not counting his Day 1 clemency orders for nearly 1,600 rioters who assaulted the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Just this week, in what the Washington Post called a “clemency spree,” Trump pardoned, among others: a MAGA-backing Virginia sheriff convicted of bribery (“dragged through HELL by a Corrupt and Weaponized Biden DOJ,” Trump claimed). A former reality TV couple sentenced for tax evasion and massive bank fraud (“Both prosecutors were Democrats,” their daughter, who spoke at the 2024 Republican National Convention, told Fox News). A former nursing home executive who pleaded guilty to tax crimes and bilking employees (his mother recently dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, for a $1-million donation. And a former Republican member of Congress convicted of corruption, the ninth party lawmaker to be so favored.
Meanwhile, the president was provoked to new rage, this time by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of International Trade. Appointees of Presidents Obama, Reagan and, yes, Trump on Wednesday unanimously found that his signature tariff orders “exceed any authority granted to the President.” (An appeals court on Thursday temporarily stayed the ruling, leaving tariffs in place while litigation proceeds.)
“Is it purely a hatred of ‘TRUMP?,’ ” Trump fulminated on social media late Thursday about the decision of the “backroom ‘Hustlers.’ ”
No, it’s simply three judges’ respect for the law. These days, that requires more courage than ever.
