Donald Trump’s agenda on trade tariffs has long rested on a shaky legal foundation, predicated in part on the idea that there’s an “emergency” that allows the president to unilaterally impose economic penalties based on nothing but his whims.
This week, that dubious foundation started to shake when two separate courts — a three-judge panel of the Court of International Trade and a U.S. district court judge — ruled that the White House’s gambit was illegal. Those rulings were soon after paused by an appeals court, but Trump’s back-to-back defeats represented an important embarrassment on one of his top policy priorities.
As is usually the case, the president and his team responded to the legal setbacks by lashing out, with varying degrees of hysterics, at the country’s judicial system, as if there were something inherently outrageous about independent courts adjudicating cases involving the president’s agenda.
But one nagging detail got in the way: One of the judges that ruled against the White House was appointed by Trump and confirmed by Senate Republicans. The political problem was obvious.
And so, as Politico reported, the president has opened up a new line of attack.
President Donald Trump leveled unusually pointed criticism of a prominent conservative legal activist and organization Thursday as he railed against a ruling that struck down his sweeping tariffs. The president, in a post on his social media platform, slammed Leonard Leo, the former chair of the Federalist Society, calling him a ‘sleazebag’ who ‘probably hates America.’
As part of an odd and meandering online rant, the Republican wrote, “I am so disappointed in The Federalist Society because of the bad advice they gave me on numerous Judicial Nominations. This is something that cannot be forgotten!”
For those unfamiliar with the Federalist Society, it is a conservative organization that has long been seen as one of the most successful projects of the conservative movement. Indeed, throughout Trump’s first term, the group was a key part of a brutally efficient assembly-line process: The Federalist Society would vet and recommend far-right ideologues for the federal bench; the White House would use the organization’s lists for judicial nominations; Senate Republicans would rubber-stamp the president’s choices; and Americans would watch the judiciary lurch to the right to a degree unseen in generations.
But for Trump and some close to him, that victory wasn’t good enough — because some of the jurists backed by the Federalist Society have occasionally ruled in ways the Republican Party hasn’t liked. Sure, they were conservative, but not enough of them were mindless, knee-jerk conservatives who were willing to abandon free thought altogether. Some even had the nerve to take the rule of law seriously.
In fact, a year before Election Day 2024, The New York Times reported that Team Trump had begun looking at Federalist Society members as “squishes.” The article quoted Russell Vought, 15 months before he’d begin his latest tenure as the director of the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, saying, “The Federalist Society doesn’t know what time it is.” That was in late 2023. Now, midway through 2025, as several Trump-appointed federal judges rule in ways the president does not like, he won’t blame himself, and he’s won’t blame Senate Republicans for confirming his picks — but he can blame the Federalist Society for recommending jurists who sometimes see themselves as neutral arbiters in a separate and coequal branch of government. That’s precisely why Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, appeared on CNN the morning after Trump’s online rant and accused the Federalist Society of creating “a broken system.” He added, “We’re not going to be using the Federalist Society to make judicial nominations at all going forward.” As for what Team Trump might replace it with, watch this space.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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