Trump Judge Thumps Trump

A Trump appointee blocked Trump's USAID assault, citing his lack of evidence

Feb. 10: Judge blocks USAID demolition … Other judge blocks Gitmo plan … Trump liberates Wall Street from tyranny of not being able to fuck you at will … More tariffs should fix things …

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Judge Carl Nichols, appointed by Pres. Donald Trump due to his eerie likeness to Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

A judge appointed by previous Pres. Donald Trump has joined the bipartisan judicial rebellion against the administration’s unlawful attempts to do whatever it wants.

At least ten judges now have issued rulings against the Trump administration, directing the executive branch, in legal terms, to fuck all the way off. At least temporarily.

U.S. District Judge Carl Nichols on Friday ordered Secretary of State Marco Rubio to reinstate 500 workers at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), blocked Rubio from putting another 2,200 on administrative leave, and stopped Rubio from recalling 1,400 USAID workers from overseas posts.

Nichols was appointed to the bench by Trump in 2019. He’s served on a number of high-profile, Trump-adjacent cases, sometimes ruling in Trump’s favor, sometimes sending Steve Bannon to prison.

(TFN BONUS STORY: Over the weekend, your not-on-administrative-leave TFN posted a piece showing how different our politics would be if media headlined the real-world consequences of shutting off billions of dollars in aid for people with AIDS instead of obsessing over the politics.)

In court on Friday, Nichols rejected one Trump legal arguments after another. For instance, Nichols said that Trump’s legal team had failed to show “what harm would befall the government if it could not immediately place on administrative leave the more than 2000 employees in question.”

Another thing Trump’s lawyers were wrong about: Claiming that administrative leave is cool and shit. Nichols schooled Trump’s legal morons: “Administrative leave in Syria is not the same as administrative leave in Bethesda: simply being paid cannot change that fact.”

In fact, some of the people ordered home to the U.S. have no home in the U.S. Some have lives in the countries where they’re posted, with families and kids in school. In other words, irreparable harm.

Nichols also pointed out that Trump’s own legal representatives couldn’t offer a single piece of evidence to back up Trump’s lies about USAID “corruption and fraud,” which Trump made up presumably because he was too lazy to look up actual possible examples.

Nichols sided with the union for the USAID workers and his order remains in effect through Friday, with another hearing set for Wednesday.

The ruling did not explain how Nichols came to acquire even a basic understanding of the law in light of his previous experience clerking for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.

Other Judge Blocks Gitmo Deportations

U.S. District Judge Kenneth J. Gonzales yesterday blocked the Trump administration from sending three Venezuelan detainees to Guantanamo Bay.

Homeland [sic] Security Secretary Kristi Noem said last week that the U.S. has begun sending detainees there, keeping alive the legacy of Pres. George W. Bush, who used Guantanamo Bay as part of a global network of illegal and unconstitutional measures to fight terrorism and forever stain the honor of the United States. Pre-Pres. Donald Trump was a vocal critic of Bush’s efforts, which he is now expanding to include drug dealers and gang members.

(Noem last week said the Trump administration is ending temporary protected status for Venezuelan refugees, a decision that will be challenged in court.)

The White House has prioritized Venezuelan members of the Tren de Aragua gang for detention at Gitmo, outside the U.S. and some of its legal protections. Three accused members — who say they’re not members — proactively sued to prevent their transfers.

The lawsuit was filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, the American Civil Liberties Union of New Mexico, and Las Americas Immigrant Advisory Center. One reason they sued to block the transfer: It’s very hard to access legal counsel when you’re in a cage in Cuba.

Gonzales wrote, “the mere uncertainty the government has created surrounding the availability of legal process and counsel access is sufficient to authorize the modest injunction.” The order is only short-term and the legal fight over the transfers will continue.

Gonzales is an appointee of Pres. Barack Obama, but legal experts believe that still counts since some Republicans voted to confirm him.

Ten Judges Have Now Stood Up to Trump

Gonzales’s ruling brings to at least ten the number of judges who have said “no” or at least “no for now” to illegal and/or unconstitutional orders and actions and threats and pouting by Pres. Donald Trump.

Their ranks include appointees of Democrats and Republicans alike, including Trump himself and even defrocked saint Ronald Reagan.

In addition to the aforenewsfucked USAID and Gitmo rulings, judges have dared to fuck with Trump’s plans to:

• Freeze federal spending

• Offer buyouts to millions of federal workers

• End birthright citizenship

• Access Treasury Department records

• Transfer incarcerated transgender women to men’s prisons

• Disclose the names of FBI agents who worked on Jan. 6 cases

The orders are temporary but have already accomplished at least three things. They’ve slowed the Trump steamroller. They’ve provided morale boosts to Americans who believe in checks and balances. And, perhaps most importantly, they’ve asserted judicial power in the face of executive overreach and legislative abdication.

Dozens more lawsuits are making their way to courts around the country, filed by non-governmental organizations, unions, aggrieved parties, and Democratic prosecutors. Some of the most recent include challenges to Trump’s ban on gender-affirming medical care and some of his anti-immigration measures.

With congressional Republicans abandoning their vows to uphold the Constitution, the judiciary remains the only federal impediment to Trump being both unchecked and unbalanced. So, naturally, Vice President JD Vance and recidivist lawbreaker Elon Musk have turned their sights on the judiciary.

Government Rookies Don’t Understand Basic Constitutional Principle

It was a ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer that really cheesed off Musk. The world’s richest man has for much of his life been unable to hear the word “No” when uttered by authority, his employees, or women he wanted to do stuff to.

So when Engelmayer on Friday blocked Musk and his team of DOGE bros from accessing Treasury Department records — even though said bros wanted to access them! — Musk lost at least some of his $400 billion worth of shit.

In multiple posts, Musk called for Engelmayer and other judges to be impeached for the high crime and/or misdemeanor of not agreeing with Musk. Musk, it’s worth noting, is not a lawyer and is responsible for breaking multiple laws and also for killing people with his cars.

Vice Pres. JD Vance weighed in on Sunday with a post that freaked out the left, but should be assessed with some calm, your calm-keeping, on-carrying TFN suggests.

Vance, who now has two years and one month experience in government and whose knowledge of the law was obviously severely impaired during his time at Yale Law School, tweeted the following:

“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal.

“If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that's also illegal.

“Judges aren't allowed to control the executive's legitimate power.”

No one tell Vance about Richard Nixon!

TFN gets why some people are freaking out. Vance is suggesting that judges have no power to control the executive branch. Like, what? Each branch is suddenly allowed now to check and balance the others?

But read his whole Tweet. Every sentence is wrong. Morally but also factually. Judges not only tell generals how to, um, generalize, but generals literally plan their operations factoring in what’s legal and what’s not…as judges will decide.

Same thing with attorneys general. Judges all the time tell attorneys general what to do.

The danger on the left is treating Vance’s critique as something it’s not. Do not start debating judicial power. It’s well established including in the areas Vance cites.

By his own reasoning he’s wrong. He’s arguing that 2+2=6 and 3+3=2 so therefore 4+4 must = lasagna. Between the two of them, Musk and Vance have approximately 2.5 years experience in government. And it shows.

The really, really good news here is that all the Republican whining is an implicit admission of judicial power. If rulings didn’t matter…they wouldn’t matter.

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) whined that Engelmayer’s ruling was “outrageous” and the judge himself an “outlaw.” Cotton’s remedy? The appeals court should “immediately reverse” it. Well, duh, senator dipshit, that’s how the system works. But the point is, Cotton’s endorsing the system. #GoodThing

Musk’s impeachment approach — which obviously MAGA loves — also won a lot of support. Impeachment is an implicit acknowledgment of judicial power. The premise of an impeachment attempt is that the judge can not be ignored and therefore must be removed. Again, endorsing the system. #GoodThing.

Also: Go for it!

Nothing would be better for democracy — and for Trump’s New Deal-scale effort to educate Americans about civics — than the spectacle of congressional Republicans staging impeachment trials for judges who upheld the law and the Constitution.

Go ahead, try to impeach Gonzales, a military veteran who wasn’t voted against by a single Republican. Try to impeach Nichols, the Trump appointee and veteran of Clarence Thomas’s judicial chambers of horrors.

What none of them is arguing is the real scary rubicon here, the notion that judicial orders can simply be ignored. And even that isn’t as clean and final as it sounds. Trump can’t on his own ignore a judicial order. He needs underlings to defy those orders — underlings who may rightly fear the future consequences.

As Trump himself said, there’s a long legal process ahead.

Trump Frees Wall Street to Return to its Feeding Grounds in Your Bank Account

Pres. Donald Trump yesterday liberated the tiny, besieged enclave known as Wall Street, carrying on the great tradition of America once again freeing an oppressed people from the yoke of tyranny.

For almost a decade, the dreaded Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, also known by its feared acronym, CFPB, terrorized and trapped entire Wall Street firms within the steely confines of rules preventing them from fucking you over.

Project 2025 co-architect Russell Vought was named CFPB’s acting director last week. And yesterday, the Trump administration shut down the CFPB — for a week, but possibly longer. For now at least, Wall Street is free. Here’s the CFPB homepage:

Created in the aftermath of the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, the CFPB for years has cruelly imprisoned Wall Street financial firms within the confines of laws that Wall Street was denied the right to write.

Once the CFPB began its work, the region known as Wall Street was virtually closed off from the outside world, fenced in by Michelin-starred restaurants, the world’s most refined strip clubs, and towering lines of cocaine.

Those inside were pressed into forced labor, compelled, for instance, to write their predatory terms and conditions in text large enough for consumers to read.

They were denied basic human rights, including rights of conscience such as the right to choose whether to treat borrowers equally or discriminate against veterans, women, and Black borrowers — a clear violation of the Judeo-Christian principle that Limited Liability Corporations and Delaware-incorporated firms are given dominion over the Earth and the beasts.

This morning, they’re emerging for the first time in years into the light of freedom, blinking into the sunlight as they remove their $400,000 Chopard sunglasses, gaunt from years of personal training and 24-hour dietary consultants, their very anatomy warped by shadowy medical experiments and repeated injections of drugs such as Ozempic®, their facial muscles paralyzed by years of the CFPB injecting its atrocities.

Some tales of the horrors inflicted have managed to get out. In December, survivor Marianne Lake managed to smuggle out allegations of human-rights abuses. “The playing field isn’t even,” said Lake, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase’s $70 billion consumer and community banking, in a haunting evocation of The Diary of Anne Frank.

Uneven playing fields aren’t the only horrors we’re still learning about.

Freedom fighter Jamie Dimon in October tried to spur the world to action, revealing that CFPB storm-troopers were attacking his people with metaphorical knives.

"We don't want to get involved in litigation just to make a point," Dimon bravely declared, "but … if you're in a knife fight, you'd better damn well bring a knife."

Damon said, “I’ve had it with this shit,” referring to CFPB’s “onslaught.” He said, “It’s time to fight back,” in a modern-day version of Henry V’s St. Crispin’s Day speech at the Battle of Agincourt.

Life inside the CFPB’s cruel clutches wasn’t totally devoid of life’s little pleasures. Even with CFPB on patrol, Wall Street firms managed to make their existence bearable by focusing on the little things.

In October, for instance, the world learned that JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and Citibank, were all still able to lend to non-white borrowers with an average interest rate of 3.83% while white borrowers only paid 3.77%

Touchingly, these intrepid resisters were even able to charge non-non-Black borrowers an average rate of 4.13%.

Rescuing Wall Street was clearly the number-one priority for most MAGA voters, who wept openly at campaign rallies that the Biden administration was prosecuting gigantic Wall Street financial firms for nothing more serious than actual crimes.

Unlike industries led by public pressure and a vestigial sense of shame to hire non-white people, Wall Street’s forced labor included being compelled to lend money to non-white people.

If Trump succeeds at taking out CFPB permanently, Wall Street will soon be able to exercise without persecution or discrimination its legal right to:

• Extort desperate borrowers with usurious interest rates

• Deny Reserve and National Guard members legally authorized rate reductions

• Resume charging veterans illegal overdraft fees

• Continue to charge servicemembers more for car loans

Americans for Financial Reform lawyer Christine Chen Zinner celebrated the green lights and free passes of freedom:

“Vought is now giving all sorts of financial companies a green light to defraud and gouge their customers … Every corporate bad actor in finance now has a free pass from the Trump administration to make life more expensive and less fair for families all over the country.”

TAKING ACTION There’s a rally today at CFPB headquarters, 1700 G Street NW, Washington, DC. Staged by the Progressive Change Institute, Indivisible, MoveOn, and Americans for Financial Reform, it runs from 4:15pm - 6pm eastern time. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), who pretty much created the CFPB, will be there along with Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), and others.

And Democracy Forward says it will sue to keep CFPB on life support.

Trumpconomy Battered by More Trumpflation-fueling Tarumpiffs

Pres. Donald Trump’s new tariffs on products imported from China, Canada, and Mexico have proved so successful fun that he’s doing more of them.

Trump is expected today to announce a new 25% tariff on imported steel and aluminum, as soon as he figures out exactly what he means by that. Like, anything containing steel and aluminum? Or just raw steel and aluminum?

He’ll also launch reciprocal tariffs this week — he says. Meaning, if any other country has tariffs on U.S. products, Trump will mirror those on U.S. imports of those same products here.

All of which, of course, is terrible news for U.S. companies that import things and humans in America who buy things.

So stock markets fell on Friday after Trump threatened the reciprocal tariffs and after a new gauge of consumer sentiment came out showing people are already anticipating higher costs due to Trump’s tariffs. Which means they’re gonna buy less crap.

Of course, given Trump’s performative show with Canada and Mexico, it’s possible this is all bullshit and Trump is just threatening this stuff in order to win concessions from the presidents of, uh, steel and aluminum?

Two Quickies

• Michigan state Rep. Laurie Pohutsky told a crowd last week that she had surgery to remove her reproductive organs. She’d been considering it for a few years and the re-election of Pres. Donald Trump sealed both the deal and the fate of her fallopian tubes. Doctors have reported a rise in elective sterilization since Trump got back in office.

• America under Pres. Donald Trump is now so poor it can’t even afford to make pennies. Trump yesterday ordered the Treasury Department to stop making them, because they’re too expensive to produce, even though Trump could pay for it by also ordering the Treasury Department to print more dollar bills and then just asking for change.

TCB

If you’re a fan of confirmation bias, dear Newsfucker, I’m here to confirm that bias. Because I just got my own confirmed. I came across this post articulating better than I do the theme I’m trying to hammer in TFN about rising above despair:

Restoring Sanity

I also want to share with you Newsfuckers some bookends from the Deep Midwest: Politics and Culture Substack. Last week, they laid out how the Trump administration’s actions map against the playbooks for tyranny. It makes the point that they rely on a sense of crisis, which we don’t have to give them.

Then, this morning, Deep Midwest made their pitch for how Democrats can and should respond. Whether you agree with all of it, the central point, I think, is that Democrats — and everyone — can’t respond solely with normal tactics to abnormal assaults on our democracy. It’s not a call to violence, it’s a call for all hands on deck.

SUPPORTING TFN Here at The Fucking News we’re committed to not letting the media convince us the battle is over. So, no, TFN doesn’t amplify every victory claim they make. We don’t pass on the DC media’s boundless awe at Trump’s awesomeness. We do the work to elevate the consequences — like the USAID disaster — because that’s how Americans will recognize the failures, and TFN highlights the challenges against Trump — because that’s how we all know hope is not lost.

You can help TFN push back on these media narratives with a donation or paid subscription. If you can afford it, your support makes both my original reporting and the weekday TFN newsletter possible. Thank you.

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Go get ‘em, kids. Ten judges can’t all be wrong.