Is the Tide Turning?

On multiple fronts, Trump has been pushed back or forced to dig in and defend.

US President Donald Trump speaks before signing executive orders in the Oval Office at the White House. Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images.

For eight long months, we’ve been collectively traumatized by the Trump regime. From mass layoffs of federal workers to mass incarceration and deportation of immigrants; from the illegal impoundment of billions in funds to the illegal cancellation of foreign aid; from the deployment of federal troops to U.S. cities to unlawful military attacks on civilian vessels in international waters; from the abandonment of our allies to the empowerment of dangerous war criminals; from chaotic tariff announcements to the firing of the experts tracking critical economic data; from assailing the First Amendment to using the White House itself to spread dangerous health misinformation—it has been a nonstop nightmare.

To make things worse, the opposition to Trump has fared poorly through these months with a series of cowardly betrayals. We’ve seen shameful capitulations by top business leaders, law firms, media companies and universities. Democratic leaders in Congress failed in their messaging and got steamrolled by the White House on the budget. A cynical, captive SCOTUS has handed Trump repeated wins via its “shadow docket.” And following the murder of Charlie Kirk, the country seemed more divided and closer to boiling over than ever.

And yet.

The country didn’t erupt in violence. Our culture wars have been fought via keyboards, not in the streets. Trump’s authoritarian impulses have begun to catch up to him with some notable setbacks lately. And his uniquely unqualified and incompetent loyalists keep making unforced errors, while internal squabbling and paranoia in the upper ranks have paralyzed much of his administration.

Is it possible the tide has turned in Trump’s open war on democracy? Or at least, have we fought him to a standstill, with the two sides well dug in, and Trump unable to move fast and break quite as many things?

Dare I say it, perhaps? Today, I’ll run through a list of instances where Trump has been beaten back or is now basically stuck. This is meant more as a representative list, not an exhaustive one. But it does give an overall sense that Trump’s initial blitz may have run its course, and we are now deep in the trenches as he seeks to find weaknesses in our defenses—even while his own MAGA loyalists flounder and continue to beclown themselves.

Trump’s executive orders are mired in the courts

It’s generally understood that Trump has sought to rule not through the legislative process but through presidential decree. But his efforts to reshape our national political landscape by issuing executive orders are a decidedly mixed bag.

Alien Enemies Act and Summary Deportations

One of Trump’s most controversial early moves was to invoke the Alien Enemies Act to justify summary deportations of those suspected to be members of the Tren de Aragua gang from Venezuela. But that decree has since met with harsh criticism from what should be fertile ground for it. District court judges from across Texas ruled against Trump, and, finally, even the conservative Fifth Circuit found the invocation unsupportable.

Meanwhile, the negative publicity generated from the renditions of entirely innocent men to El Salvador’s CECOT prison, some rounded up solely due to tattoos that had nothing to do with Tren de Aragua, gripped the nation for months. The White House ultimately caved to public and legal pressure to release the prisoners, but it sent all of them to Venezuela. The regime continues to dig in over its unjustified detention of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, however, keeping its mistreatment of immigrants and contempt for the rule of law front and center.

Birthright citizenship

Trump’s controversial decree seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship for millions of Americans, in contravention of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, hit legal impediments right away. After several federal judges blocked the order, the administration ran to the ever-compliant Supreme Court majority to seek a ruling that nationwide injunctions are impermissible. So plaintiffs amended their complaints to demand classwide relief for nationwide classes—something the courts readily granted them.

Birthright citizenship is another loser for the White House and, in particular, Stephen Miller. During oral argument on the question of nationwide injunctions, even this radical SCOTUS majority appeared highly skeptical of the decree and may strike it down when it winds its way back to the justices for review.

National emergencies supporting global tariffs

Trump’s tariffs are facing strong headwinds in the courts as well, with both the International Court of Trade in New York and the Federal Circuit, sitting en banc, finding the tariffs to be illegal and void. The Federal Circuit held that while the laws cited by Trump grant him the power to take certain actions in response to declared national emergencies, when read together, they do not grant the authority to impose taxes and tariffs, which are the sole prerogative of Congress.

That case is now headed to the Supreme Court, where its fate is uncertain.

DOGE was a bust

Earlier this year, Trump let billionaire Elon Musk take a chainsaw to the federal government via “DOGE”—essentially a group of Musk coders and loyalists who forced their way into government buildings and systems to seize control of payment and other systems. This resulted in mass layoffs and stopped payments, which precipitated a slew of lawsuits and FOIA requests.

We don’t hear much about DOGE anymore because, following a power struggle within the administration, Musk was basically sent packing while the bureaucracy began to reassert itself. This is because cabinet officials want control over their own departments, not some outside 20-something coders with no experience getting in the way or mucking things up.

“The DOGE leaders are each and every member of the president’s Cabinet and the president himself, who is wholeheartedly committed to cutting waste, fraud and abuse from our government,” Karoline Leavitt told reporters when asked about DOGE’s future after Musk’s departure.

Recently, the Labor Department has even begun to rehire workers who had accepted Musk’s offer of early retirement because it desperately needs people with actual experience.

The key takeaway? The regime’s ability to generate chaos within our federal bureaucracy, via operations like DOGE, has begun to dissipate. While it caused incalculable damage to our system in the early months, the administration is slowly coming to terms with the fact that there was a reason seasoned and experienced workers were actually needed in these jobs and that the government can’t really operate without people who know the system and how to get things done.

White House bullying meets resistance

Trump has consistently used his office to incite animus, bully his political opponents and force powerful institutions to bend to his will. But his efforts lately have come up empty or even blown up in his face.

Trump’s absurd $15 billion defamation lawsuit against the New York Times was summarily thrown out by a Republican-appointed federal judge in Florida (yes, even Florida). As CBS reported,

U.S. District Court Judge Steven Merryday said the original 85-page complaint was “decidedly improper and impermissible” and went well beyond Rule 8 of federal rules of civil procedure, which requires that each allegation be “simple, concise and direct.”

Judge Merryday continued, clearly exasperated,

“The reader must endure an allegation of ‘the desperate need to defame with a partisan spear rather than report with an authentic looking glass’ and an allegation that ‘the false narrative about The Apprentice was just the tip of defendants’ melting iceberg of falsehoods.’”

In short, the judge said, “Miss me with this nonsense.”

Trump’s $10 billion lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal for allegedly defaming him over a note found inside the infamous Epstein Birthday Book, which Trump claims he never authored or signed, got a bad jolt. The Epstein estate itself produced a copy of that letter, and the signature matched that of many other letters Trump had written contemporaneously.

Today, the Wall Street Journal and its parent companies News Corp and Dow Jones moved to dismiss Trump’s lawsuit altogether, contending the original reporting was true. “The Birthday Book as produced by the Epstein estate and later publicly released by the House Oversight Committee contains a letter identical to the one described in the Article,” the motion states.

Meanwhile, Harvard won its first big legal battle against Trump after a judge ruled his cancellations of research grants were an illegal infringement of the university’s right to free speech. And just yesterday, a judge in California ordered the White House to unfreeze $500 million it had withheld from UCLA.

As I wrote about earlier, the concerted efforts of blue state attorneys general have resulted in significant clawbacks of impounded CDC funding grants. This chart demonstrates how Trump’s actions generally have hurt his own base of voters in the red states far more, while lawsuits by the blue states have been effective at blunting the impact of the illegal cuts.

Backtracking on censorship

One of the biggest blows to Trump’s perceived power came just last night, only a few days after the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, had openly threatened ABC with loss of its broadcast license if it didn’t take comedian Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

Disney, which owns ABC, disgracefully complied. But the company was met with fierce blowback from the public and its paid subscribers, and it backpedaled furiously. On Monday, the network reinstated Kimmel, underscoring that the power of the consuming public should never be underestimated.

Notably, Carr himself came under withering criticism not only from the left but from right-wing officials such as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX). It’s not often I find myself in agreement with Cruz, but in this statement he was correct:

“I think it is unbelievably dangerous for [the] government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you out there if we don’t like what you’re saying.”

Sen. Cruz appealed to conservatives’ self-interest: “It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel,” he stated, and later continued, “but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”

Even far-right influencers such as Tucker Carlson blasted Carr’s pressure on the networks and violation of free speech principles. Again, it is notable that the Trump regime overreached so far on this that it pushed radical voices like Carlson to defend basic tenets of our constitutional freedoms. Said Carlson,

“People with power don’t want to hear disagreement. They don’t wanna be challenged ever. That’s why we have free speech—to acknowledge that even those of us, people with less power, still have a right to talk because they’re human beings. You don’t own them.”

Carr is now looking for political cover as well. Per Heather Cox Richardson, following the uproar, Carr “began to deny he had had anything to do with the suspension and say that ABC had removed Kimmel for business reasons.” And right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, who had hosted Carr on his show, also began to make similar claims about Kimmel being bad for Disney’s bottom line, even though just days earlier, he had boasted that he and Carr had succeeded in getting Kimmel off the air.

Chickening out on Chicago

For weeks, we heard the threats. Trump was going to send federal troops into Chicago next, after doing so with Los Angeles and Washington, D.C. Out of control crime, Trump argued, was the reason the troops were needed. Trump even posted the most deplorable message ever from a sitting president:

Gov. JB Pritzker of Illinois was neither impressed nor intimidated. He made it clear that he opposed any National Guard troops on the streets of a city within his state and threatened a lawsuit if Trump sent them in.

Trump had already lost a suit in California after a federal judge ruled that the National Guard deployed to that state had exceeded its authority by conducting local police action in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. This loss may have given Trump pause; after all, he could write off one liberal judge as an outlier, but if he started to lose more lawsuits, especially over a core power of his office to command the military, he would begin to appear very weak.

Add to this that there were rumblings within the National Guard itself that may have caused the White House to blink. Leaked internal documents, reported by the Washington Post, revealed that the military was substantially concerned about how the public was perceiving it:

The National Guard, in measuring public sentiment about President Donald Trump’s federal takeover of Washington, D.C., has assessed that its mission is perceived as “leveraging fear,” driving a “wedge between citizens and the military,” and promoting a sense of “shame” among some troops and veterans, according to internal documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

Further,

The documents reveal, too, with a rare candor in some cases, that military officials have been kept apprised that their mission is viewed by a segment of society as wasteful, counterproductive and a threat to long-standing precedent stipulating that U.S. soldiers — with rare exception — are to be kept out of domestic law enforcement matters.

These documents were supposed to be for internal use only, but they were somehow “inadvertently emailed to the Post.” In other words, someone on the inside apparently wanted the outside to know what information military leaders were receiving and processing.

With little for the National Guard to do while deployed in D.C., it continuously spotlighted how it was helping with urban beautification projects, such as laying mulch and picking up trash. The effect has been predictable: The public doesn’t really want our costly military deployed in such ways.

Trump began to hedge on his Chicago rhetoric, with reporting indicating that his advisors were leery of legal action opposing the move. So Trump pivoted and began speaking about sending federal troops into Memphis, Tennessee—which by no coincidence is the largest majority Black city in the United States. Trump made arrangements with the Republican governor of that state to deploy the troops, once again in the name of diminishing crime.

This is, of course, all for show—so much so that Trump bragged about crowds of happy, smiling Memphis residents greeting the federal troops long before they had even arrived.

So far, Trump’s federal troop deployments have been a bust, and he hasn’t figured out a very good off-ramp for his bellicose rhetoric. That may explain why he’s now focused on something he believes he can get away with entirely: blowing up small vessels in international waters.

Three deadly attacks on civilian vessels

Trump has ordered a military build-up in the Caribbean, paired with increasingly hostile words aimed at Venezuela and President Maduro, whom Trump claims sponsors narco-terrorism. As part of this deployment, the military has begun intercepting and completely destroying vessels it claims are running drugs to the U.S., despite our shores being over 750 miles away.

The attacks are contrary to the generally accepted Law of the Sea and could comprise illegal murders under U.S. law. There is no legal basis for the U.S. military to kill civilians, even if they were running drugs, which itself is not a capital offense. So far, the military has provided no evidence to support its claims that these vessels are being used to transport drugs anyway, let alone to the United States.

There is a direct human cost to this lawless behavior. The U.S. admits it has killed an estimated 17 persons in three separate unlawful attacks. And while there is little hope that Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth or Secretary of State Marco Rubio will alter course, there is a deeper question about whether military officials who carry out these orders are acting illegally.

The White House appears to understand the risk and may be unlawfully seeking to shield them. As Mark Nevitt of Just Security noted, “I have questions about how legal advice—particularly from military JAGs and operational law attorneys with deep expertise in this area—was given in this scenario.”

Nevitt cited Executive Order 14215, titled “Ensuring Accountability for All Agencies,” which addresses the rules of conduct guiding federal interpretation of the law. One section states,

The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties. No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law…

Nevitt notes that “Military JAG attorneys have the statutory authority and responsibility to provide independent legal advice without interference,” but “Trump’s EO attempts to suggest otherwise.”

”For the attack on the drug vessel, what was the controlling legal advice provided, and who wrote the legal opinion? What was the military advice provided on the legality of this operation, and was it dismissed by higher officials in the Department of Justice?” Nevitt asked.

These questions are not going away. In a sign that the opposition is ready to play hardball when it takes back power, some have begun calling for a Presidential Crimes Commission to address the most egregious violations of the law, including those like the orders here that resulted directly in outright murders.

And while Trump may enjoy prosecutorial immunity even for criminal actions undertaken while in office, his underlings and those who carried out these illegal orders most certainly do not.

ICE raids are souring the public on Trump’s policies

While Americans voted for Trump knowing that he intended to implement a program of mass deportations, what sounded fine in theory—getting rid of the criminals—has become a dystopian nightmare in practice. The Department of Homeland Security has not targeted criminals as promised but has gone after immigrants without any criminal background at all, essentially arguing now that merely overstaying a visa is a crime and all such “criminals” must be punished and deported.

The terror and suffering that ICE has inflicted upon immigrant communities since Trump took office is incalculable. But it has been recorded and shared across social media. The effect has been to galvanize local communities against federal authorities, especially as documented ICE abuses pile up.

This has caused an implosion of the support Trump once enjoyed from Latino voters, with his job approval falling to net -23 in the latest polling, representing a 22 drop since he first took office.

Surveys of the broader population also show a steep drop in support for Trump on his signature issue of immigration, where he is remarkably now underwater by 11 points in a recent Washington Post poll. Meanwhile, and perhaps in response to Trump’s abuses, Americans’ positive views on immigration have climbed to their highest levels ever after falling for years, according to Gallup.

Trump’s weaponization keeps running aground

Trump vowed repeatedly that he would go after his political opponents if elected, and he has sought to make good on that promise. The problem with this, however, has arisen from within the Justice Department itself.

While the top leadership, including Attorney General Pam Bondi and chief weaponizers and former Trump personal lawyers Emil Bove and Todd Blanche, has leapt to try to fulfill Trump’s corrupt wishes, the successful prosecution of Trump’s foes requires 1) actual evidence to bring before grand juries, and 2) U.S. Attorneys willing to bring the cases. And it turns out, neither is in sufficient supply.

After the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert, found there was no basis to move forward with a criminal case against New York Attorney Leticia James, Trump was livid and moved to oust him. But he did so in an extremely clumsy way that will probably become Exhibit 1 in any motion to dismiss for prosecutorial misconduct: by publicly posting what appeared to be a private DM to his Attorney General, insisting that she prosecute his political foes.

This awkward social media post underscored the fact that there really is no daylight between the White House and the Justice Department. Instead of exhibiting political independence, Attorney General Bondi is no more than a political hack and lackey doing Trump’s bidding. Of course, we’ve known this for some time, but the possibly accidentally posted message to her confirmed it.

As for targeting other opponents of Trump, things aren’t proceeding smoothly there either. Trump has sought to level the same charge against Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) that he and his cronies have alleged against Letitia James and, more recently, Lisa Cook, the only Black member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors: that they lied on their mortgage applications about using a second home as a primary residence.

A lower-level Trump loyalist named Bill Pulte has been surfacing these claims, possibly by illegally accessing mortgage files he is privy to by virtue of his position as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency. Even the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal blasted Pulte’s overt weaponization, calling it “an ominous turn in political lawfare” and “nasty business.”

The irony, and a fitting example of karma, is that Pulte’s father and stepmother themselves apparently made this very sort of misrepresentation to their own lender, as reportedly did Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who listed two different homes as his primary residence.

Lisa Cook’s application apparently did not contain this kind of claim, however, as a Reuters investigation recently found. Cook, in fact, had declared her second home in Atlanta as a “vacation home.” This means the charges Trump made against her could be entirely false on top of being politically motivated.

As for Sen. Schiff, the U.S. Attorney on that case, Kelly Hayes, is keenly aware of the political tightrope she now must walk with the case as well as the case against Trump critic and former National Security Advisor John Bolton. As the New York Times reported,

Recently, Ms. Hayes told associates that she was under no illusions of the pressure she would face if she refused to bring a case she believed to be unsupported by evidence, as Mr. Siebert did, according to people with knowledge of those conversations. And while she signed off last month on asking for a warrant to search Mr. Bolton’s home in Bethesda, Md., she has indicated that she would not bring charges against Mr. Schiff unless her team discovered evidence to support them.

The cover-ups and denials are growing ridiculous

No summary of losing battles would be complete without inclusion of the Epstein albatross, which continues to weigh down the White House no matter how many distractions it throws up. FBI Director Kash Patel’s recent sworn testimony before Congress did little to help clear things up. To the contrary, as I wrote about last Friday, Patel sounded both evasive and non-credible as he refused to say whether he’d told Attorney General Bondi that Trump’s name was in the Epstein files and how many times it appeared.

Patel also made the patently absurd claim, in response to a question from Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA), that Epstein never trafficked any girls to anyone but himself. This of course raises the question of why Ghislaine Maxwell is in prison for sex trafficking, and why Patel discounts the testimony of all the witnesses who said they were trafficked with a list of some 20 individuals they are beginning to name.

Pair this with Trump’s absurd denial that he ever wrote the birthday letter to Epstein—in which he allegedly referred to a “wonderful secret” and to “enigmas” who “never age”—and even his own base is starting to question whether Trump has something big to hide. (Spoiler alert: He does.)

And now there is a new cover-up involving one of Trump’s most visible and dangerous henchmen, border czar Tom Homan. An investigation and report by MSNBC revealed that Homan was captured on film in a parking lot accepting $50,000 in cash from undercover FBI agents, whom Homan believed were business executives seeking lucrative deals should Trump be elected.

Under Patel, apparently at the urging of Emil Bove, the FBI buried the case and said there was no evidence of criminal or illegal behavior. (And who among us hasn’t taken $50,000 in cash in exchange for promises of government contracts?) The administration is now doubling down on this, claiming there was nothing illegal or criminal about what Homan did.

It’s time to demand the release of that tape before it mysteriously disappears.

Cover-ups, especially clumsy ones like these, have a way of sticking around and only growing worse the more the administration seeks to explain things away. We’re only eight months into Trump 2.0, and already his FBI and DOJ are hiding things from the American people because the truth is simply too damaging.

Playing defense

These examples demonstrate the many ways the Trump regime has overreached, walked back its threats, chickened out and hidden the evidence. They also show that even in places where traditionally the president ought to have the widest latitude, whether it’s use of the military, regulatory authority or immigration, Trump is badly fumbling.

We shouldn’t naively assume that Trump has played his last cards, or that he won’t find ways to make things worse as his term drags on. At the same time, however, we shouldn’t ignore the fact that he has lost and retreated in nearly every major confrontation lately, and that his own people simply don’t know how to make things happen the way he wants.

Meanwhile, Trump clearly would rather be planning out his presidential ballroom than negotiating in circles around Ukraine, and would rather be golfing than answering any legitimate questions from the press. Even as his approval numbers sink to historic lows, Trump continues to demand unwavering fealty from the GOP, which he may drag down into the murky waters with him.

So while things have not been going well for the U.S., they also have not been going very well for Donald Trump. The political tide may in fact be turning, and we may well gain a reprieve from his full-out assault upon democracy as we play the White House to a draw on every front.

Take heart, rest and prepare. It may soon be time to go on the offensive.