Trump declares war on the judiciary for delegitimizing the only check on his absolutist aspirations.

WashingtonThe dam that holds back Donald Trump's absolutist aspirations is the courts. Executive orders seeking to overstep presidential power have not stopped after a month in office, and the trickle of judicial blockages of executive orders has only increased. The judicial impediment is a thorn in the side of the new administration, which is already launching a campaign to delegitimize the authority of judges and challenge their power. Trump is looking for cracks in the system to try to trigger a constitutional crisis.

It wouldn't be the first time. During the previous presidency, Trump already clashed between the executive and legislative branches by declaring a national emergency at the border in order to allocate federal funds for immigration management that Congress had not authorized. The Republican's term ended without resolving the conflict. Now, the crisis Trump wants to provoke is not with the legislative branch, but with the judicial branch. Many of the cuts implemented by the Department of Government Efficiency (which isn't really a department) have been halted by injunctions from district court judges. The same has happened with many of the executive orders the president has been signing targeting immigrants and diversity, equity, and equality policies.

The Trump administration's latest move to hamstring the courts has been to file a petition with the Supreme Court seeking to remove a key tool that lower courts have used to block various actions in his agenda. On Thursday night, Trump's legal team asked the Supreme Court to halt or dismiss three federal injunctions against his attempt to eliminate birthright citizenship. The emergency petition argues that district court judges lack the authority to issue sweeping orders blocking policies nationwide. If the Supreme Court grants the petition and buys the argument that district court judges lack authority beyond that, Trump would be able to remove a major impediment to his plans.

While states with more progressive judges could still slow the initial onslaught of Trump's ultra-right agenda, other, more conservative states would have a clear path to further accelerate the Republican's agenda. Before the president took office, some states like Texas had already gotten down to work to move things forward.

Even though the Republican is appealing to the Supreme Court—trusting that the conservative majority will side with him—the campaign being orchestrated from within the magnate's inner circle seeks to delegitimize the entire judicial branch. The latest statements by Vice President JD Vance and Elon Musk seek to undermine the only effective counterweight that currently exists to the president's power.

Vance's provocations

Vance, who has been around for a while now has adopted his role as provocateur, He was the one who opened the floodgates and began questioning the power of judges when the first injunctions appeared, halting the tycoon's executive orders. "If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, it would be illegal. If a judge tried to order the attorney general how to use his discretion as a prosecutor, it would also be illegal. Judges are not allowed to check the legitimate power of the executive branch," he wrote. last month in X in front of one of the judicial blocks to executive actions.

While the vice president claims that the judiciary has no authority over the executive branch, Article III of the Constitution gives federal judges the power to rule on cases involving the president, as well as other branches of government. This is judicial review. What Vance suggests in his post would dismantle the current rule of law and lay the groundwork for Trump to later rebel against the judges.

This narrative has been repeated over the weeks, both inside and outside the White House. When the Trump administration's legal team filed an appeal against an injunction ordering the restoration of federal aid to social programs, White House spokesman Harrison Fields asserted, "Any legal challenge against them is nothing more than an attempt to undermine the will of the American people."

The Republican majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate has long remained silent in the face of this usurpation of their powers. The speaker House Republican Mike Johnson even expressed his support for the president's actions, even though they encroach on his territory. The legislature has already rallied around Trump; now all that's left is to rein in those judges who, in the magnate's opinion, are rebellious.

El Salvador, a role model for Musk

In the joint interview Musk and Trump's on Fox, The richest man in the world said again in prime time that the president is the one who embodies the will of the people, and that if his power was limited, we were not living in a democracy: "If the will of the president is not implemented, and the president is the representative of the people, this means that we do not live in a democracy, but in a bureaucracy."

Musk has not only charged against the separation of powers, but has even called for theimpeachment of judges and touting the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, as an example of what should be done with the judiciary. In several posts on X, in which Bukele responded to Musk by agreeing with him, the billionaire defended the following: "The only way to restore the rule of the people in the United States is to remove the judges. No one is above the law, including judges. This is what had to be fixed in El Salvador. The same applies in the United States."

In El Salvador, Bukele succeeded in getting the parliament—controlled by his party—to remove the judges of the Constitutional Court, the highest judicial body in the country, in 2021. Even then, alarm bells were ringing in a country that was falling into the abyss of authoritarianism.