Conservative former federal judge says Trump has ‘declared war’ on US rule of law

Donald Trump has “declared war on the rule of law in America” and is pitching the country into a constitutional crisis, a prominent former conservative federal judge said.

“The president of the United States has essentially declared war on the rule of law in America,” J Michael Luttig told MSNBC. “In the past few weeks … the president himself has led a full-frontal assault on the constitution, the rule of law, the federal judiciary, the American justice system and the nation’s legal profession.

“When the president of the United States wages a war on the rule of law and the federal judiciary alley, America is in a constitutional crisis. The constitutional role of the president is to faithfully execute the laws. Needless to say, the president is doing anything but that at the moment. Most constitutional scholars have long agreed that a constitutional crisis exists at least when the president defies a court order. That’s essentially what the president is doing today and what it appears he intends to do in the future.”

On Tuesday, Trump called for the impeachment and removal of James Boasberg, the chief US district judge in Washington DC.

Boasberg issued a temporary restraining order halting deportations under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which gives the president the power to conduct removals without due process in wartime. The administration has invoked the act, most scholars say wrongly, as it deports supposed Venezuelan gang members.

“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump wrote, also calling Boasberg, appointed under Barack Obama, a “Radical Left Lunatic” and a “troublemaker”.

Trump or his lawyers did appear before a succession of state and federal judges in four criminal cases between 2021, when he left power, and this year, when he returned. Found guilty on 34 felony charges in New York, regarding hush-money payments to an adult film star, he is the only convicted criminal to be president.

On Tuesday, Brandon Gill, a Republican congressman from Texas, loyally filed articles of impeachment against Boasberg.

From the supreme court, John Roberts, the conservative chief justice who last year authored a ruling giving Trump some legal immunity, issued a rare rebuke.

“For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said. “The normal appellate process exists for that purpose.”

Rightwing commentators were furious.

“The supreme court has been such a drag on the country,” said Mike Cernovich, a conspiracy theorist now courted by the Trump administration. “They invent constitutional rights to bypass the will of the people. Losing the court is no loss at all, it is a gain for the country. It would allow issues to be decided democratically.”

Trump later told Fox News he had not and would not defy the courts, but deportation flights to El Salvador were not turned around after Boasberg’s intervention.

Luttig said: “This is very deliberate by the president. As you know, he, the vice-president [JD Vance] and [Trump ally and adviser] Elon Musk have been taunting the federal courts for months, suggesting the president would soon defy the federal courts. Elon Musk called for an immediate wave of judicial impeachments … against all judges who issue orders blocking the power of the executive branch to unilaterally overhaul the government.”

Musk, the world’s richest man, gave Trump’s campaign hundreds of millions of dollars and is now slashing federal staffing and budgets through his so-called “department of government efficiency”, or Doge. Multiple judges have ruled against Doge actions and Trump orders including his attempt to end birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the constitution since 1868.

Luttig continued: “As of today, we know that all of this taunting and intimidation was toward the end of provoking this constitutional crisis.”

Luttig, 70, was long thought a possible supreme court nominee himself. A mentor to the hard-right Texas senator Ted Cruz, he was an ally of Clarence Thomas, a hard-right justice still on the supreme court, during his confirmation in 1991.

But Luttig has emerged as a prominent Trump opponent, giving memorable testimony to the House January 6 committee, which investigated the attack on Congress that Trump incited in an attempt to overturn the 2020 election.

On Wednesday, he doubled down on his remarks to MSNBC, in which he said: “No president of the United States, in the country’s almost 250-year history, has defied a federal court order … If this president defies a federal court order, the country will be in a constitutional crisis. How does that crisis end? We don’t know, because it’s never happened before.”

The courts, Luttig said, “have no effective means to enforce their orders, other than by judgments of contempt … enforced by the marshals of the court. So if the president of the United States defies even a supreme court order, there is nothing the supreme court itself could do.

“This has been a very tempting thing for [Trump] … He was immensely critical of the federal and state judiciaries throughout his first term, and then during the last four years when he was out of power he was accusing the federal and state judiciaries and even individual judges of being corrupt and biased and what have you.

“Never before has an American president even thought to utter one single one of the words against the federal judiciary that this president has uttered every day.”

Luttig said he “knew personally that the federal judiciary is shaken” by Trump’s attacks, but said judges were “unshaken in their resolve to honor their oath to the constitution. It’s the president who has wanted this war ever since his first term in office. Well, he’s going to get what he wanted.”