Some Judges Overseeing Trump Cases Are Speaking Out

For months, critics warned that President Donald Trump might push the country into a constitutional crisis by ignoring court orders he didn’t like. But Harvard law professor Adrian Vermeule just flipped that argument on its head: the real crisis, he says, is coming from inside the judiciary itself.

According to Vermeule, some lower-court judges in deep-blue states are effectively staging a “mutiny” against the Supreme Court — openly defying or undermining its orders in cases involving Trump’s policies. His examples are eyebrow-raising.

Take Judge Brian Murphy in Massachusetts. After the Supreme Court stayed his injunction blocking deportations of certain migrants, Murphy doubled down, issuing a new order that — unbelievably — cited only Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent as authority. The Supreme Court had to step in again, with even Justice Elena Kagan concurring, to slap it down.

Or the Oregon judge who ruled against DHS on parole terminations — citing cases that had already been stayed by the Supreme Court as though those stays didn’t exist. And then there’s the Fourth Circuit panel that refused to follow SCOTUS precedent in Trump v. Wilcox, blocking Trump from removing members of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The high court promptly stayed that one too, explicitly reminding the lower court that its orders aren’t optional.

Vermeule says this isn’t just sloppy judging — it’s a pattern. Progressive activists are “forum shopping” for partisan judges who will hand them resistance-friendly rulings, knowing they’ll get their headlines even if the Supreme Court later reverses them. And in the meantime? Chaos for the executive branch.

So what’s the president supposed to do when a district judge openly defies the Supreme Court? Vermeule floats a controversial idea: departmentalism. In short, the president can refuse to comply with a judicial order that oversteps the court’s legitimate authority — especially when the Supreme Court has already weighed in. It’s rarely used, but he argues the case is stronger when the issue isn’t a clash between branches, but a rogue lower court flouting the hierarchy of the judicial system.

You can imagine how the media would frame that: Trump “ignoring court orders,” “assaulting democracy,” etc. But Vermeule’s point is that in these cases, it’s the judges who are undermining the rule of law, not the executive branch.

Meanwhile, tensions between the judiciary and Trump’s team are boiling over. Federal judges overseeing major Trump-era cases say they’re facing harassment, swatting, and death threats. Judge John McConnell of Rhode Island says he’s received over 400 vile voicemails — some explicitly threatening assassination. Judge John Coughenour of Washington said his home was swatted, with officers arriving armed after a fake murder call. And Judge Esther Salas — whose son was murdered in 2020 — says judges across the country are being targeted with intimidation tactics like unsolicited deliveries sent in her late son’s name.

The judges are blaming “political leaders” for stoking this fire. Salas warned that by attacking judges personally rather than appealing their rulings, politicians are “inviting people to do us harm.”

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