Trump Has a Terrifying Plan to End Future Court Losses

Donald Trump is planning to nominate troves of loyalist judges to the federal judiciary, and their confirmations will likely go off without a hitch, according to Politico.

Trump is likely to unveil his first round of judicial nominations in the coming weeks, four people familiar with the conversations told Politico Tuesday. During Trump’s first administration, a whopping 234 judges were confirmed, some of whom proved to be fierce loyalists willing to upend Trump’s legal battles—such as Judge Aileen Cannon, who has since been floated for a potential seat on the Supreme Court.

This time, Trump is looking for more judges willing to demonstrate their fealty, according to Mike Davis, who served as the former chief counsel to Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Chuck Grassley.

“They’re going to be looking for even more bold and fearless judges,” said Davis, who assisted Trump’s first administration in taking fights to the Supreme Court. “Judges who have been battle-tested.”

Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said that he expected this round of nominees to be more “ideologically extreme.”

“They will be MAGAs, basically. Given the trend of the end of the last Trump term, we’re heading over a cliff in terms of fringe right wing views. They will have a litmus test on steroids,” Blumenthal warned.

Trump’s plan to reshape the judiciary comes as federal judges have become one of the last stoppages for the administration’s onslaught of unlawful legislation and executive actions.

Trump saw a double whammy of losses on Tuesday, when a federal judge blocked the implementation of his policy that would effectively bar transgender people from serving in the U.S. military. Another federal judge ordered a pause on cuts to the United States Agency for International Development, arguing that Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency’s shuttering of the agency was likely unconstitutional because it had sidestepped congressional authority.

Separately, two federal judges have ruled that DOGE’s blanket dismissal of probationary federal employees was also illegal, setting the Trump administration scurrying to reinstate roughly 24,000 wrongfully terminated employees.

Over the weekend, Judge James Boasberg ordered a pause on Trump’s massive deportations under the Alien Enemies Act—but the administration continued undeterred, sending planefuls of people who the government claimed were gang members out of the country. When Boasberg accused Trump of defying a court order, the president called for him to be impeached. In a rare statement, Chief Justice John Roberts scolded Trump, saying that threatening to impeach judges wasn’t an “appropriate” response to disagreeing with a ruling.

But Trump has already begun to set the stage for outright ignoring the orders of any judges who rule against him, claiming that they must be biased. During an interview on Fox News Tuesday, Trump claimed he didn’t defy anything.

“I never did that, however we have bad judges. We have very bad judges. And these are judges that shouldn’t be allowed,” Trump said. The president claimed that Boasberg was a “lunatic” in any case that involved him.

Trump clearly hopes to flush out the judges who are willing to stand up to his legally dubious activity, while supplying more and more MAGAs to rubber-stamp his every whim.

A federal judge on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order against Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency, stopping it from eliminating three nonprofit grant agreements made under the Biden administration and seizing back the funding.

EPA head Lee Zeldin tried to eliminate the programs as part of his attack on Biden’s Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, which Congress established in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022. Zeldin posited that the program, like every other one the Trump administration doesn’t like, was a source of waste and fraud. But Judge Tanya Chutkan viewed these claims as “vague and unsubstantiated assertions,” according to Reuters.

The ruling affects $13.97 million of grant funding awarded to Climate United, Coalition for Green Capital, and Power Forward Communities. Chutkan’s temporary restraining order prevents Citibank from transferring the grant money out of their accounts, despite the EPA order.

While this certainly isn’t over, Chutkan’s ruling offers the environmental nonprofits temporary respite.

Donald Trump is planning to ramp up his ill-advised tariffs and place them on “trillions” of dollars in imports.

The Washington Post reports that most U.S. imports will get hit with the new fees on April 2, on a day Trump is calling “Liberation Day.” The news is causing shock waves among congressional Republicans and economists. Even White House officials are concerned, with discussions taking place involving Vice President JD Vance, aide Peter Navarro, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

“We don’t know exactly what they’re going to do, but from what they’re saying, it sounds functionally like new tariffs on all U.S. imports,” Joseph Politano, an economic policy analyst, told the Post.

The past few weeks of tariffs have upended the U.S. economy, hurting businesses and sending the stock market plunging. This new round of tariffs “seriously could make all of that look like a tempest in a teapot,” Politano said.

“It’s a liberation day for our country because we’re going to be getting back a lot of the wealth that we so foolishly gave up to other countries, including friend and foe,” Trump said on Monday.

Trump has pressed ahead with his tariffs despite criticism from the right, including his normal cheering section at Fox News. The network’s Maria Bartiromo snapped at Bessent in an interview on Tuesday, pointing out how businesses are upset with Trump’s economic decisions. Even Republican Senator Rand Paul has been trying to rally the rest of his party to come out against the tariffs. But none of that seems to be convincing the president, which means the worst is still yet to come for America’s economy.

Nebraska Representative Mike Flood was excoriated by the crowd at his own town hall on Tuesday for basically every position he took. When he told his constituents he supported Elon Musk, he was booed mercilessly.

“What makes Elon Musk a better person to audit our government for waste, fraud, and abuse than the inspectors general that Donald Trump fired?” one constituent asked Flood. “Elon Musk gets $40 billion a year in funding from the federal government. What makes you think he has no conflict of interest? … Do you think he would cut that before he would cut our Medicare, or our Social Security, or our jobs?”

“I support Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency,” Flood replied with a shrug before being overpowered by the voices of his enraged constituents. 

Flood also took serious heat for the GOP’s 180 on Ukraine, cozying up to Russia in a historic role reversal. 

“I do wanna say: shame,” one woman said to Flood. “Shame for your comment … that you said ‘President Zelenskiy’s approach today was disrespectful to President Trump and undermines the goal of bringing peace.’ … Shame on that.” The crowd roared in support. 

“I do believe that that White House meeting was a disaster, and I believe that President Zelenskiy should have signed that agreement,” Flood replied, to immediate boos.

The deep-red state crowd also began chanting, “Tax the rich.”

This is yet another installment in the string of tense, confrontational town halls that have occurred as Republicans have to answer for the actions of Trump and DOGE—actions that are directly hurting the people who put them in office.    

Trying to usurp Canada is becoming less and less of a joke to Donald Trump.

In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday, the president claimed that the reason he’s so tough on America’s northern neighbor is because it’s “meant to be our fifty-first state.”

“You’re tougher with Canada than you are with our biggest adversaries. Why?” asked Laura Ingraham.

“Only because it’s meant to be our fifty-first state,” Trump said, when Ingraham attempted to interject. “No, no but listen to this for a second.”

“We need their territory. They have territorial advantage. We’re not going to let them get close to China, right?” pressed the Fox host.

“Look, I deal with every country—directly or indirectly. One of the nastiest countries to deal with is Canada,” Trump said about the longtime U.S. ally.

Trump then went on to take another jab at Canada’s former Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, even though Trudeau was succeeded by Mark Carney last week.

“Now, this was Trudeau—good old Justin. I call him ‘Governor Trudeau.’ His people were nasty, and they weren’t telling the truth. They never tell the truth,” Trump said. “You know, they’d say, ‘We don’t charge,’ and they do, they charge tremendous.”

Trump’s tariff plans aren’t going over well with the American public. Instead, they have sparked fears that the country—which just last year had a strong economy—could be en route for a recession. Trump’s foreign policy, which involves a global trade war, has instigated unrest with some of America’s longest allies.

Trump has even admitted that his tariffs will destabilize the economy. Last week, he floated that the “little disruption” caused by his aggressive trade policies could go on for quite a bit longer, suggesting that Americans should model their economic projections on a 100-year model—like China—rather than assess his performance on a quarterly basis.

The market continued to tumble last week as Trump’s 25 percent levy on all steel and aluminum imports took effect, as well as our global allies’ retaliatory efforts.

In his exit message, Trudeau pleaded with the American public to see past Trump’s divisive agenda, which he argued was dropping America’s Western allies in favor of a rocky relationship with Russia.

“What do the American people think?” Trudeau said earlier this month. “How do Americans feel about jettisoning one’s friends and allies in favor of a country that has never wished Americans well, and continues to act in ways that harm the global economy and, specifically, the American economy and American values and principles?”

Feeling more paranoid because of the Donald Trump administration? Don’t worry, Elon Musk is feeling it too.

The billionaire bureaucrat stopped by Fox News’s Hannity Tuesday on a victory lap from the successful return of two astronauts in a SpaceX capsule. But Musk got sidetracked whining about his Tesla dealerships being vandalized and alleging that he was the victim of a larger conspiracy—one led by people who wish to see him dead.

“It’s really come as quite a shock to me that there is this level of, really, hatred and violence from the Left,” Musk told Sean Hannity. “I always thought that the left, that Democrats were supposed to be the party of empathy, the party of caring, and yet they’re burning down cars, they’re firebombing dealerships, they’re firing bullets into dealerships, they’re just, you know, smashing up Teslas.

“Tesla is a peaceful company. We’ve never done anything harmful,” Musk said. “I’ve never done anything harmful. I’ve only done productive things.”

Musk claimed that the perpetrators must have a “mental illness thing going on here, because this doesn’t make any sense,” before suddenly claiming that all the acts were connected.

“I think there are larger forces at work as well. Because, I mean, who’s funding and who’s coordinating it? Because this is crazy. I’ve never seen anything like this,” he said.

Hannity surmised that Musk was being wrongly targeted and that his only crime was being aligned with Trump and identifying troves of supposed government waste, fraud, and abuse.

“It turns out when you take away people’s, you know, the money that they’re receiving fraudulently, they get very upset,” Musk said. “And they basically wanna kill me because I’m stopping their fraud and they wanna hurt Tesla, because we’re stopping the terrible waste and corruption in the government. And, well, I guess they’re bad people. Bad people do bad things.”

Unfortunately for Musk, Tesla is not just a “peaceful” company but the customer-facing branch of his corporate takeover of the U.S. government, which has seen essential lifesaving programs slashed and thousands of people out of work. And customer feedback can be harsh. Trump has even called it domestic terrorism.

Musk has managed to insulate himself from any criticism thus far by clinging to his so-called “productivity.” But in many cases, Musk’s productivity isn’t even real. The Department of Government Efficiency’s website claims $115 billion in savings from slashed government spending—but a closer look revealed that only $35.1 billion was actually listed in the itemized cuts, with only $12.6 billion of that being verifiable. Of the scores of federal workers his organization saw terminated, many are currently being reinstated because the way he fired them was illegal.

What Musk also fails to see is that it doesn’t matter how productive you are, if you’re not actually working toward anything good. In any case, Musk’s limp concerns for his personal safety as the grand vizier in the face of an angry mob pales in comparison to those who are actually vulnerable to state violence.

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo grew fed up Tuesday morning with Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s feeble attempt to defend Trump’s tariff policies.

“As important as a tariff are some of these non-tariff barriers, where they have domestic content production, where they do testing on … food, our products, that bear no resemblance to safety or anything that we do to their products,” Bessent mentioned.

“See, these are the things that people are really worried about. Because they first thought it was just about trade. Then, they thought it was just about fentanyl. Then, after that we talked about, ‘Well, maybe it’s currency manipulation.’ Now you’re talking about food testing,” Fox News’s Bartiromo pressed. “And when I bring up the issue of clarity, that’s what I’m talking about, and that’s what I’m hearing from corporate America, that we’re not sure where this is going.”

“But of course, we will get resolution on April 2,” Batiromo continued, referring to the date Trump plans to announce yet another set of tariffs.

Trump has continued to portray the economic impacts of his tariffs as temporary, transitional, and even positive. That could not be further from the truth, as Americans in both blue and red states prepare to take a direct hit from the president’s own spite.

A right-wing Minnesota state senator, who infamously co-sponsored a bill Monday to label “Trump Derangement Syndrome” a mental illness, was arrested hours later for allegedly soliciting a minor for prostitution.

Senator Justin Eichorn was arrested at 6 p.m. Monday in Bloomington, Minnesota, and is being held in the city’s jail after sending messages to and arranging a meetup with a person who he thought was a 16-year-old girl but was actually a Bloomington Police Department detective. After the arrest was made public, his Republican colleagues in the Minnesota Senate, including Speaker of the House Lisa Demuth, called for his resignation. 

“While he is entitled to due process, we must hold legislators to a higher standard,” Demuth said in a statement.

It’s quite a fall for the 40-year-old Eichorn, who is married with four children and has served in the Minnesota Senate since 2016. His day began with himself and four other Republican senators introducing the bill to declare “Trump Derangement Syndrome” a mental illness, describing it as “the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal persons that is in reaction to the policies and presidencies of President Donald J. Trump.”

The bill was attacked by state Democrats, who asked that it be withdrawn. Democratic Senate Majority Leader Erin Murphy called it “possibly the worst bill in Minnesota history.” 

“If it is meant as a joke, it is a waste of staff time and taxpayer resources that trivializes serious mental health issues,” Murphy said in a statement. “If the authors are serious, it is an affront to free speech and an expression of a dangerous level of loyalty to an authoritarian president.”

This isn’t the first bill Eichorn has sponsored that has verged on the absurd. Last year, he co-sponsored a bill inspired by the discredited “chemtrails” conspiracy theory, which included pseudoscience such as “xenobiotic electromagnetism and fields.” Now, unless he resigns, he’ll have to conduct legislative activity under the suspicion of being a child sex offender. 

Trump’s Justice Department believes the president has the authority to fire agency heads based on age and gender, according to a report from Talking Points Memo.

The stunning argument came during a testy court hearing Tuesday on Trump’s firing of board members at the National Labor Relations Board and the Merit Systems Protection Board.

“Could the president decide that he wasn’t going to appoint or allow to remain in office any female heads of agencies or any heads over 40 years old?” Judge Karen Henderson of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals asked Deputy Assistant Attorney General Eric McArthur, at one point in the arguments.

“I think that that would be within the president’s constitutional authority under the removal power,” McArthur said. “There would be separate questions about whether that would violate other provisions of the Constitution.”

Lower courts have already ruled against Trump’s firings of the board members, and the panel of three judges on Tuesday appeared skeptical of the Justice Department’s reasoning. But the Trump administration welcomes these challenges so that it can drive its aggressive policies to the nation’s highest court, where they have an overwhelming ideological advantage.