Trump’s Red Queen Weekend

From Portland to the Fed to the DOJ, judges and prosecutors told him no, and still he storms around shouting “off with their heads!”

Good morning! Donald Trump spent his weekend cosplaying commander-in-chief and found out, once again, that the real battlefield is in the courts. Portland was his chosen playground this time, the city he insists is an insurrectionist hellscape desperately in need of boots on the ground. Never mind that Portland’s own police chief politely explained the “national portrayals” are fantasy, and that flooding streets with troops usually makes things worse. Trump wanted soldiers, so he reached for the nearest toy box: the California National Guard.

But U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, had other ideas. In a rare late-night Sunday ruling, she blocked his attempt to redeploy 300 California Guard troops into Oregon, just a day after she blocked his order to mobilize Oregon’s own Guard. That’s two rulings in two days, both reminding Trump that the Constitution still carries more weight than his Truth Social feed. California Governor Gavin Newsom, already prepping a lawsuit, called it “a breathtaking abuse of the law and power.” Oregon’s Governor Tina Kotek reminded everyone that her state is “not a military target.” And yet, in Trump’s America, federalizing the National Guard has become as casual as ordering DoorDash.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tried to extend the spectacle by calling up 400 members of the Texas Guard for Chicago and Portland. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, who was not consulted, labeled it “Trump’s Invasion”, and for once, the branding is spot on. The White House’s defense was that Trump was merely protecting “federal property.” Translation: when the courts say no, try again with someone else’s troops.

And this is where the constitutional fault line yawns open. As we’ve talked about before, the framers never designed the system to handle a president who treats the law like a speed bump. The Constitution assumes leaders will act in good faith. Trump doesn’t. He sees checks and balances as obstacles, not obligations. Judges can block him, governors can sue him, but the machinery of power still lurches forward because the blueprint was never written to stop a bad-faith operator at the top.

If you want a deeper dive on this theme, there’s a terrific new book I’ve just started,The Presidents and the People: Five Leaders Who Threatened Democracy and the Citizens Who Fought to Defend It, by Corey Brettschneider. It’s a sobering reminder that Trump is part of a lineage of bad actors in the Oval Office. We’ve seen versions of this before: John Adams signing the Alien and Sedition Acts to silence dissent, Andrew Jackson thumbing his nose at the Supreme Court, Richard Nixon building his own private security state out of the Oval Office. Each of them tested the boundaries of democracy, and each time it took ordinary citizens, the courts, or Congress to claw power back. The difference now is scale: Trump isn’t content to nibble at the edges, he’s going full Red Queen, running through the White House shouting “off with their heads!” at anyone who stands in his way.

The weekend brought more proof. On the judicial front, Trump was handed a quiet but devastating defeat when the Supreme Court refused his demand to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook at will. This was his gambit to seize control of monetary policy and turn the Fed into a political arm of Mar-a-Lago. Even his beloved “emergency docket” couldn’t cough up five votes, not even from the conservatives he stacked onto the bench. The Court essentially told him: we’ll hear you in January, but you don’t get to blow up the Fed today. That’s two branches of government, in the span of 48 hours, telling him to sit down.

And then there’s Michael P. Ben’Ary, the national security prosecutor Trump just purged from the Justice Department. Ben’Ary didn’t go quietly. He warned in a blistering letter that Trump’s regime is “sacrificing national security to purge perceived adversaries.” This wasn’t some mid-level bureaucrat sounding off, this was the lead prosecutor on the Abbey Gate terrorism case, the guy responsible for locking away the mastermind of one of the deadliest attacks of the Afghanistan withdrawal. He’s been replaced not because he failed, but because loyalty to law mattered more to him than loyalty to Trump. When career prosecutors are sounding the alarm that the president himself is the national security threat, we should believe them.

Of course, Trump himself was busy delivering his own version of reality at the Naval Academy, where he thundered about how America has “the strongest, most powerful, most lethal, most ready military on the planet” and promised to keep it that way. He even touted his motto of “peace through strength with common sense at every turn.” It’s a neat trick to invoke common sense in front of sailors while, back on the mainland, you’re suing for the right to use Portland as a live-fire training exercise. We’ll dissect the whole speech soon, for now, suffice it to say the disconnect between his rhetoric and reality could power a small city.

So there you have it: Trump spent his weekend losing to judges, alienating governors, purging prosecutors, and promising cadets a version of America that only exists in his head. The rule of law is holding, just barely, not because the Constitution was designed to save us from a corrupt president, but because enough judges and public servants are still willing to tell him no.