The totalitarian toddler’s wet dream

Until August of 1934, German judges swore an oath that reflected the spirit of the democratic Weimar republic: “I swear loyalty to the Constitution, obedience to the law, and conscientious fulfillment of the duties of my office, so help me God.”

But that fateful summer, the judicial oath was tweaked just a wee bit: “I swear loyalty to the Fuhrer of the German Reich and people, Adolf Hitler, obedience to the law, and conscientious fulfillment of the duties of my office, so help me God.”

Donald Trump would love to mimic what Hitler intoned on April 27, 1942: “I expect the German legal profession to understand that the nation is not here for them, but that they are here for the nation” – the national interest, as defined by Hitler – and woe to any recalcitrant judges “who evidently do not understand the demand of the hour.”

Short of that, Trump is currently doing the next worst thing: defying federal court orders whenever he thinks he can get away with it and rampaging through the wild like a predatory grizzly, chewing with malice aforethought on our democratic sinew.

Separation of powers? Nah, those are just words on old parchment.

An independent judiciary, a co-equal branch of government? Roy Cohn, his dead mobbed-up mentor, would eat that crap for breakfast.

And Trump’s impulse, as always, is to paw demagoguery on his phone, ranting about “USA HATING JUDGES WHO SUFFER FROM AN IDEOLOGY THAT IS SICK.”

On the upside (there’s an upside!), it’s been inspiring to see so many “USA hating” judges stand tall for the rule of law and thwart him at every turn. As of May 29, he has reportedly suffered 180 beatdowns in federal court since the dark day he waddled back to power. In May alone, he reportedly lost 96 percent of the cases brought against him. Even 72 percent of the Republican-appointed judges ruled against him.

Lest we forget, this is the same loser who tried to stage a coup after his 2020 election loss, only to lose 63 of 64 court cases. This guy’s win-loss record is worse than the Colorado Rockies.

His biggest beatdown came last week, when the U.S. Court of International Trade, which has broad powers over trade issues, ruled his authoritarian imposition of tariffs is patently illegal. The three judges (one of whom is a Reagan appointee; one of whom is a Trump appointee) ruled unanimously that Trump pulled his policy out of his rear.

Trump’s repeated strategy is to declare fake national emergencies in order to justify whatever he does. A 1977 law allows presidents to impose tariffs on other countries in very limited circumstances, like when there’s an “unusual and extraordinary” national security emergency. The three judges spotted Trump’s obvious con and put his sweeping tariffs in limbo. (In a separate case, a federal judge also ruled against Trump, citing the tariffs’ illegality.)

That’s been happening all over the check-and-balance scoreboard. Federal judges have blocked Trump’s attempts to kill federal research on women’s health, blocked his attempts to kill pandemic relief funding, blocked his attempts to swipe $12 million from Radio Free Europe, and blocked his attempts to fire lots of Education Department workers.

Judges have also blocked his attempts to sabotage the U.S. Agency for International Development, blocked his attempts to bar Harvard from enrolling international students, and blocked his many attempts to use a 1798 law (intended for wartime) and a 1940 law (intended for wartime) to justify his broadly illegal deportation actions.

The big question is whether all these valiant efforts will turn out to be fingers in the dike and nothing more. Authoritarians are notoriously adept at playing the long game – crushing the judiciary not with one dramatic blow, but whittling away its powers bit by bit to justify what Hitler called “the demand of the hour,” all the better to ensure that it’s barely noticed by a feckless oblivious citizenry.

At every step, Trump’s propaganda apparatchiks continue to denounce “unelected judges” and continue to claim, as Trump’s press secretary said the other day, that they are trying “to stop him from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him.”

The MAGA regime’s abiding goal is to force federal judges to march in goosestep. The pressures to conform, to bow to the rising threats, will increase with each passing month. The rest of us, besieged by the onslaught on so many fronts, may be tempted to look away for the sake of our sanity. But we can ill afford a complicit judiciary staffed by “soldiers of law.”

That term was coined in 1934 by Nazi jurist Roland Freisler, who said all judges should work with Der Leader to create “combat law…like the weapon’s tip which in battle is pointed at the enemy.”

Freisler was killed on Feb. 3, 1945 during the Allied bombing of Berlin. I’m pleased to end this piece on an upbeat note.

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Dick Polman, a veteran national political columnist based in Philadelphia and a Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, writes the Subject to Change newsletter. Email him at [email protected]