Hello. It’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕️
The country’s in a mighty precarious situation when the anti-Trump contingent is relying on John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett to save democracy.
But with congressional Republicans cheering, or, at best, shrugging at Trump and Elon Musk’s rampage, the judiciary is the only institution with the power and, perhaps, the fortitude to stop them.
So far — and it’s early days — the judiciary has indeed started to throw sand into the Trump/Musk gears.
A mix of federal judges appointed by Ronald Reagan, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have blocked Trump’s rollback of birthright citizenship, his executive order requiring incarcerated trans women to be transferred to male facilities, his federal funding freeze, DOGE’s breaching of the Treasury Department payment system and at least temporarily extended the deadline by which federal workers must decide whether to take the “buyout.”
Additional lawsuits have been filed, including by FBI agents arguing that they’re at risk of being run out of their jobs for political reasons, and by labor groups arguing that Trump has illegally spun down USAID.
The pessimistic take: This is all well and good, but the 6-3 hard-right Supreme Court looms. President Joe Biden was most successful at appointing liberal judges at the district court level, where these cases will begin; Trump got more of his extremist judges in at the appellate levels. That could be a recipe for only temporary relief.
The optimistic take: It still matters, even if the Supreme Court hands down a reversal in the coming months. Part of revving up the opposition to Trump depends on having time to tell people what he and Musk are doing — and courts are a critical impediment there, slowing things down as Musk, in particular, tries to move very quickly.
And while we shouldn’t be under any delusions about the conservative justices’ appetite to deliver losses for Trump (especially on big cases), he lost before many of these same justices a lot during his first term. It’s unlikely that they’ll greenlight all of this.
But, lest I leave you on a positive note — the galaxy brain pessimistic case here is that the Supreme Court will shoot down one of Trump’s power grabs, and he’ll ignore it (as JD Vance has repeatedly urged). That would put us in uncharted, and very scary waters.
For now, at least temporarily, the judiciary is pushing back. And its judges are not mincing words in the process.
“No court in the country has ever endorsed the president’s interpretation,” U.S. District Judge Deborah Boardman said of Trump’s attempt to end birthright citizenship. “This court will not be the first.”
— Kate Riga
Here’s what else TPM has on tap this weekend:
- John Light looks at the South American president who claims to have helped inspire DOGE.
- Trump’s pick to lead the National Counterterrorism Center has, worryingly, long been known for his extreme positions, Hunter Walker writes.
- Republican senators are asking: when we’re all friends, can’t we just ignore the separation of powers? Emine Yücel has our weekly words of wisdom.
‘The Chainsaw Approach’
Before there was DOGE, there was the chainsaw-wielding political pundit who ran a long-shot campaign for president of Argentina on promises to radically slash government spending. In November 2023, he won.
Among Javier Milei’s first moves was setting up the Ministry of Deregulation and State Transformation, which has gone on to shut down 250 government offices and removed 40,000 government workers from their jobs.
One thing that most Argentinians know about their president is that he loves Twitter, and he loves Elon Musk. (An Argentinian programmer set up a website to keep tabs on Milei’s Twitter activity called “How many tweets did our President like today?” There was no single day this week when Milei retweeted fewer than 100 posts.)
Beginning in 2024, Musk and Milei had a series of meetings that Milei went on to describe on the Lex Fridman podcast. He cast the billionaire as a great man of history, “helping the world nowadays to wake up once and and for all and become aware of the socialist virus, the woke virus — that in itself makes him a hero in the history of humanity.”
But most interestingly, Milei cast himself as something of an inspiration for what has now become DOGE.
“He’s very interested in what our Ministry of Deregulation is doing, which seeks to remove regulations,” he said of Musk. “At the same time, he works with another person who is also interested in ‘the chainsaw approach,’” he added, a reference to the chainsaw prop Milei hauls out to symbolize slashing government.
“And so I’m very pleased,” Milei continued, beaming. “Because they are going to try to replicate the model we are implementing in Argentina. And, also, Donald Trump himself is very enthusiastic about this.”
Economist Federico Sturzenegger, the head of Milei’s “State Transformation” office, has also reportedly met with Musk and has claimed Trump was directly inspired by Argentina.
It should go without saying that Argentina and the U.S. are countries with very different economies and democratic forms of government. The U.S. Congress, under the Constitution, controls the power of the purse; it makes spending decisions, it creates independent agencies. Musk and Trump’s push to simply shut down wide swaths of government and clamp down on broad areas of congressionally appropriated spending flies in the face of that — a massive infringement on legislative power. For now, the Republican majority in Congress appears unbothered.
— John Light
The Extreme Congressional Candidate Now Leading The National Counterterrorism Center
Back in September 2023, we told you that Joe Kent was “the most extreme House candidate you haven’t heard about.”
Well, now he’s the most extreme nominee to lead the national counterterrorism center that you might not have heard about.
On Feb. 3, President Donald Trump announced Kent as his pick to lead the National Counterterrorism Center, which helps coordinate and inform the government’s response to terrorist groups. Kent is a former Special Forces veteran and CIA officer whose wife died in 2019 while fighting ISIS. He’s also mounted two unsuccessful congressional bids in Washington State. During those races, Kent made headlines here at TPM and elsewhere for his many associations with extremists — including neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, Three Percenters, Proud Boys, and others. Along with questionable associations, Kent has a bunch of conspiratorial positions on the Jan. 6 attack, the COVID pandemic, and the “trans agenda.”
Kent ultimately disavowed Fuentes. He also vehemently denies being a white supremacist.
Needless to say, Kent’s extensive links to the far right are alarming given that he could become a major part of America’s counterterror response. And Kent also has repeatedly expressed a desire to target “antifa” and left wing groups as “terrorists.” In a slew of social media posts and interviews in recent years, Kent has described “antifa” and Black Lives Matter as “domestic terrorists” who should be targeted, “arrested,” and “prosecuted.”
“Antifa is a terrorist organization. Find, fix, finish,” Kent wrote in a post on Elon Musk’s “X” platform last May. “We know how to do this, we just lack a government that’s serious about protecting our nation. ….
Weakness invites predatory violence.”
Back in 2023 when we highlighted Kent’s extreme candidacy on TPM, we wrote that his campaign was evidence far right extremism was becoming “business as usual for some segments of the GOP.” Now, it might be business as usual in the National Counterterrorism Center.
— Hunter Walker
Words of Wisdom
“Nobody should bellyache about that … That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense … [but] it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”
That’s Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) dismissing DOGE leader Elon Musk’s attempts to take over several government systems filled with sensitive and personal information, and his promises to block government spending approved by Congress and even shut down agencies.
Tillis, according to NOTUS, also acknowledged what Musk is doing is unconstitutional, and gave TPM a similar set of quotes this week.
I don’t know about you, but unconstitutional acts by a random, unelected, far-right billionaire is certainly on top of the list for what gives me bellyaches. It seems Tillis and other GOP senators might just have different priorities — or perhaps a stronger gastrointestinal tract when it comes to unilateral power grab attempts by MAGA allies.
— Emine Yücel
