Trump: Fingers On Phone Disease.


Both The Daily Beast and Think Progress have articles up about the Tiny Tyrant’s latest Tweet Tantrum, which happens to be directed at the wrong court. Jay Michaelson at The Daily Beast says Trump has to be the ultimate nightmare for his lawyers. They say one thing, he says another. They say shhhh, he’s flapping it all about. One thing he is doing is happily documenting every ill, every wrong, and every cock up by morphing into Mr. Tweet with clock-like, predictable regularity.

President Donald Trump is the worst client in the world.

Yet again, this time in a case involving his threat to withhold funding from so-called “sanctuary cities,” Trump’s careless out-of-court statements have come to bite him in the behind, just as they did in the travel ban cases.  You can almost hear his lawyers sigh with exasperation.

And yet, following the judge’s injunction against the sanctuary cities order, finding it overbroad and likely unconstitutional, Trump issued yet more outrageous statements, more lies, and more of a record for what would be the president’s ultimate court case: his impeachment trial.

[…]

But it was Trump’s unforced errors that really swung the decision.  The government’s lawyers said the funds affected were small, but Trump said they were huge.  The lawyers said it was just a mild allocation of funding, but Trump said it was punishment.  The lawyers said that the order was narrowly focused on the sharing of information, but Trump said it was a broad weapon against cities not complying with the law.

In other words, Trump’s tweets sunk his case.

And yet, he went right back at it.  As if to reassure those of us worried that Trump’s incompetence might not protect us from his malevolence, the ruling was greeted by another tweetstorm filled with usefully outrageous claims.

At 6:20 a.m. today, he went off:

First the Ninth Circuit rules against the ban & now it hits again on sanctuary cities-both ridiculous rulings. See you in the Supreme Court!

This is false: the ruling was from a district court, not the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Indeed, the Ninth Circuit, which Trump just insulted, will be the next court to hear the appeal of the order. Trump just pilloried the judges he’s going to be standing in front of next week.

There’s much, much more at The Daily Beast.

Think Progress also has this story.

Comments

  1. blf says

    (The following is cross-posted from poopyhead’s…)

    Judge William Orrick, the judge who issued a temporary stay blocking the attempt to defund “sanctuary cities,” is  a district court judge from San Francisco. He  does not sit on the Ninth Circuit, which is an appeals court.

    Not quite, this is a confusion about the term “Ninth Circuit”. As the Ninth Circuit’s own website puts it, What is the Ninth Circuit?:

    The United States Courts for the Ninth Circuit consists of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals along with district and bankruptcy courts in the 15 federal judicial districts that comprise the circuit, and associated administrative units that provide various court services.

    Yes, the judge in Hawai’i who blocked the second Muslim ban, and the one in San Francisco who blocked the sanctuary cities defunding, are not on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, [but] they are part of the US Courts for the Ninth Circuit, being district judges for federal districts in the Ninth Circuit.

    Also, unsurprisingly, hair furror is misleading about the 80% overturn rate (see, e.g., Snopes, for details).

  2. blf says

    I quoted this Ninth Circuit’s own website!

    It is reasonable to presume they are both legal experts, and also know the various multiple meanings of “Ninth Circuit”.

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