District judges, including those appointed by President Trump, have been remarkably scrupulous despite overwhelming pressure to accept the administration’s claims that various blue cities are war-torn, burning, deadly.
Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee, blocked the deployment of the National Guard to Portland, writing that the administration’s assessment of the unrest in the city was “simply untethered to the facts.”
“As of September 27, 2025, it had been months since there was any sustained level of violent or disruptive protest activity in Portland,” she wrote.
In reward for her refusal to buy the administration’s apocalyptic fantasies, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller called her ruling “legal insurrection” and “one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order we have ever seen.” Trump whined about his advisers telling him to appoint her, saying “he” (she’s a woman) “ought to be ashamed.” Right-wing commentators and pundits called on Trump to defy her rulings.
Judge April Perry, a Biden appointee, blocked Guard deployment in Illinois from the bench Thursday, calling the administration’s characterization of protests as “rebellions” — terminology the law requires in order to trigger the power to deploy troops — “audacious.”
She mentioned, when the Justice Department lawyer brought up threats to federal officers, that “mine started about 10 minutes after I got this case.”
Still, the Trump administration and its allies are so confident that they’ll ultimately prevail in the courts that Trump has kept on the shelf a backup plan to invoke the Insurrection Act, which gives the president extremely broad latitude to deploy the military for law enforcement activities, per multiple reports.
“To be frank, if somebody wants 20-1 odds that this temporary restraining order would survive Supreme Court review, I’d give it to them,” said Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the Trump-supporting Article III Project, told Politico. “That’s how strongly I think this is doomed to be reversed.”
You don’t have to take this infamously untruthful administration (or its supporters) at its word to see that this confidence isn’t just bluster. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals arguments on Thursday showed how eager Trumpified courts are to hand the president whatever powers he wants, to endorse a maximal expression of executive power no matter how “untethered” that flexing is from the facts on the ground. The long history and tradition of American wariness of military rule pales in comparison to right-wing judges’ enthusiasm to crown Trump king.
“The President gets to direct his resources as he deems fit and it just seems a little counterintuitive to me that the city of Portland can come in and say ‘no, you need to do it differently,’” Trump appointed Judge Ryan Nelson said to Oregon’s Senior Assistant Attorney General Stacy Chaffin Thursday. “Now, I understand there’s a statute here and we’re going to have to review that, but this goes to the level of deference that I think the president is entitled to in these circumstances. And it’s not all driven by what we see on the streets, it’s also driven by, to some degree, what’s going on behind the scenes, and you don’t have full view into that.”
Later, channeling Justice Samuel Alito, he pressed her to admit that Portland’s ordering of the ICE facility to take boards off of its windows was “ill-advised.”
The constant refrain of the hearing was concern about hemming in Trump’s powers, of handcuffing the executive in the face of (imagined) violence. The opposite concern, that a famously bloodlusty president could turn the military against his people at any time, was reduced to a brief aside as Nelson assured the audience that he was concerned too about the slippery slope argument.
Both of these cases will end up before the Supreme Court, which has distinguished itself in its flat refusal to support guardrails on the Oval Office, going so far as to legalize most criminal activities a president could engage in.
This all suggests that Trump’s hesitancy to invoke the Insurrection Act doesn’t stem from any personal restraint, or concern about public backlash. He has been famously obsessed with the law since his first term, has expressed regret about not invoking it during the protests over George Floyd’s killing. He just doesn’t think he’ll need it. The odds of the Supreme Court mirroring the courage of these district court judges are so obviously slim that he can save the Act as a backup, just in case.
“If I had to enact it, I’d do that. If people were being killed and courts were holding us up, or governors or mayors were holding us up, sure I’d do that,” Trump told reporters last week.
The Court, stacked with Trump appointees, supports his quest for power. His turning the military on American citizens is simply the newest edict from the king.
