President’s tweets meet the rule of law
President Trump is losing another court fight, this one over his sudden decision in July to kick transgender people out of the military. A federal judge’s ruling blocks the move, but the case highlights the president’s quirky and self-defeating approach to policymaking that’s producing a string of legal losses.
In the latest case, a Washington, D.C., judge halted the transgender ban, using Trump’s own tweets against him. Justice Department lawyers tried to sell the slashing change as something else: the beginning of an administrative and legal review with a more distant deadline.
The judge wasn’t buying it. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly responded to suits brought by veterans, LGBT advocacy groups and several states, including California, to block the exclusion. In her ruling, the judge noted there was a good chance the complaint about unfair treatment would prevail if the matter went forward and the reasons offered by the president for the ban “were not merely unsupported, but were actually contradicted by the studies, conclusions and judgment of the military itself.”
The ban was a blindsiding action from a president famous for doing just that. The Pentagon was caught unaware of the president’s switch and hurried to clear up the confusion with a stretched out policy review intended to soften the president’s words. But the judge, as others before her, cited Trump’s tweets as the underlying intention and blocked the president’s order for now.
It’s not the first time Trump has stumbled on his own words. Two other high-profile issues — a travel ban from Muslim-majority countries and a financial cut to sanctuary cities — were entangled in litigation over the president’s bluntly spoken words and challenges that he was acting improperly.
When lawyers for the White House tried to soften the president’s own words with less divisive explanations, opponents brought up Trump’s original remarks. Instead of crafting a policy carefully, the president throws out red-meat sound bites via Twitter, leaving legal advisers to scramble for a defensible position. It isn’t working.
When it comes to policy making, Trump may be his own worst enemy, especially in federal court. The tweeter in chief isn’t accomplishing much in these recent cases.