(Dobbs) Slander and Libel to Erode Confidence in JusticeThe very fact that the chief justice of the United States has to warn us about the behavior of the president of the United States should give us chills.
Here is the president of the United States, the president of all the people, slandering a federal judge who ruled against his asylum policy in November 2018: “This was an Obama judge. We have very bad judges, and these are judges that shouldn’t be allowed.” Here is the president of all the people libeling the judge who stopped the administration a year ago from shipping immigrants to the gulag prison in El Salvador: A “Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator.” Here is the president on the six justices of the Supreme Court, including two of his own appointees, who shot down his tariff plan in February this year: “Fools and lap dogs,” “A disgrace to our nation,” and “an embarrassment to their families.” Here is the president on judges who ruled against his plan to ban birthright citizenship in March: “The World is…. laughing at how STUPID our U.S. Court System has become (TARIFFS!) Dumb Judges and Justices will not a great Country make!” Here is the president, also last month at a National Republican Congressional Committee event in Washington, singling out no judge in particular but venting at all of them who defy his desires: “We got rogue judges that are criminals. They are criminals, what they do to our country. The decisions that they hand down and hurt our country.” Here is the president on the judge who ruled this month that while a protective bunker can be built underground where the East Wing once stood, Trump’s ballroom must at least temporarily be stopped: “A Trump Hating, Washington, D.C. District Court Judge, a man who has gone out of his way to undermine National Security, and to make sure that this Great Gift to America gets delayed, or doesn’t get built.” The president’s pattern is unmistakable and odious: undertake to convince Americans that our judges undermine rather than uphold the law. He’s even got his underlings doing it. From a White House spokeswoman on the federal judge who ruled that the administration cannot stop funding PBS and NPR: “An activist judge attempting to undermine the law.” “Activist judge.” That used to be the worst thing critics would say about judges who ruled against their unconstitutional schemes. Now, with the spiteful standard that Donald Trump has set, that phrase is almost placid.. It’s not that Trump hasn’t been rebuked. After his “Obama judge” remark in 2018, Chief Justice John Roberts went to an extreme that the Supreme Court normally doesn’t have to reach. He issued a statement that said, “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges.” He went on to extol “an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them.” He was wasting his breath. While out of office, Trump spent a lot of time in courtrooms, and that only made him worse, because everything did not go his way. In 2023, he was indicted on four different criminal charges. At his hush money trial, he was convicted on 34 criminal counts. He was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming the writer E. Jean Carroll. His indictments for conspiracy to interfere with the election in connection with the Capitol invasion of January 6th, and for hiding top secret documents at Mar-a-Lago, were only dismissed because he won his way back into the White House. But he wore his guilt as a badge of honor. He wickedly trashed every judge who ruled against him. He called the hush money judge, Juan Merchan, “corrupt,” “crooked,” “conflicted.” He called the judge in the Carroll case “a nasty judge,” “a nasty man,” a “Trump-hating guy.” So by the time Trump won his second election in 2024, Justice Roberts knew what was coming. In his 15-page annual year-end report on the state of the judiciary, he gave a warning that the independence of the justice system was under attack: “It’s got to stop. Violence, intimidation and defiance directed at judges because of their work undermine our Republic, and are wholly unacceptable.” The very fact that the chief justice of the United States has to warn us about the behavior of the president of the United States should give us chills. Equally chilling is the fact that Donald Trump’s repulsive reprisals have consequences. Not just by weakening faith in our system of justice, but by weakening the personal security of judges themselves. Earlier this month, The New York Times published a piece with the headline, “State Judges Turn to Guns in New Era of Judicial Threats.” That’s where Trump and his lapdogs have taken us. The Times reported “thousands of threats targeting state judges in the past three years alone, among more than 14,000 broader security incidents involving state courts and their employees across the country.” Among others, it gave an alarming example about a Florida state judge named Jennifer Johnson: “In an animated video, a man in an American-flag-print face mask who called himself ‘the Patriot’ tracked his target, Judge Jennifer Johnson, with a hatchet in his hand. ‘Judge Johnson, let’s bury the hatchet,’ the man said, striking his virtual target in the back until she fell to the ground. Then he swapped the hatchet for a gun and shot her in the head. As blood pooled around her corpse, the man celebrated her ‘execution.’” The Times wrote that according to the U.S. Marshals Service, “Threats are also on the rise against federal judges, of which there are around 2,700. Such threats have more than doubled in four years, from 224 cases in 2021 to 564 in 2025.”Share To be sure, threats are directed at judges affiliated with both parties, not just one. And to be sure, judicial rhetoric has progressed from antiseptic rulings about the law to critiques not just about the law but about the legitimacy and morality behind it. In a lawsuit over the National Park Service policy under Trump to cleanse “woke” displays from the parks, a federal judge in Pennsylvania wrote, “As if the Ministry of Truth in George Orwell’s 1984 now existed, with its motto ‘Ignorance is Strength,’ this Court is now asked to determine whether the federal government has the power it claims—to dissemble and disassemble historical truths when it has some domain over historical facts. It does not.” Trump isn’t responsible for every threat or every act of violence. But he can’t claim he bears no blame, and knowing how he likes to look macho, maybe he wouldn’t even want to. He has turned up the heat, and some of his fans have followed. Justice, and the confidence Americans have in it, is the first victim. |