With Congress on the sidelines, judges and world leaders defy Trump

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans are in thrall to Donald Trump, while Democrats are baffled about how best to oppose him.

Rather than stock his White House with a “team of rivals,” Trump has opted instead for a den of disciples.

At this point in Trump’s presidency, the most serious and forceful pushback he’s faced has come from two sets of people with little in common: foreign leaders and American judges.

Each has dished out comeuppance that is seldom seen in presidential politics.

Judges have stymied parts of Trump’s agenda they say violate the law, while world leaders have challenged him for taking positions that upend the rules-based order that the U.S. helped build.

In doing so, they risk provoking Trump in ways that could boomerang. Trump is attuned to slights of any kind. Anyone who crosses him, especially on camera, risks his ire.

Trump administration officials told Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy to leave the White House grounds and later paused arms shipments to his country after he clashed with Trump over the state of peace talks with Russia.

Already, Trump’s billionaire aide-de-camp Elon Musk has used his massive public platform to call for the impeachment of judges who’ve impeded Trump’s agenda.

“There’s a troubling aspect to this: The more the Trump administration and the folks that support them say these ridiculous things about federal judges, the more it puts their families and personal safety and courthouses at risk,” Doug Jones, a former Democratic senator and U.S. attorney from Alabama, said in an interview.

Yet neither the courts nor a corps of foreign leaders are deterred. Federal judges have lifetime tenures, after all, and overseas officials answer to their own citizenry. For now, they’re acting as the emergency brake as Trump pushes ahead with plans to remake the world.

In slapping down the Trump administration’s attempt to fire a member of the National Labor Relations Board, a federal judge saw fit to issue a stark reminder of the limits of presidential power.

“A President who touts an image of himself as a ‘king’ or a ‘dictator,’ perhaps as his vision of effective leadership, fundamentally misapprehends the role under Article II of the U.S. Constitution,” U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell wrote last week. (Trump said during the campaign he’d be a “dictator” on the first day of his presidency. After scuttling New York City’s congestion pricing system last month, he proclaimed in capital letters on his social media site, “Long live the king!”)

Another judge, William Alsup, in the Northern District of California, ruled in a case involving the Trump administration’s firing of probationary federal workers: “The ongoing, en masse termination of probationary employees across the federal government’s agencies has sown significant chaos.”

Foreign leaders push back

At least four U.S. allies have publicly rebuked Trump in recent weeks over statements they’ve deemed untruthful or unwise.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gave a speech last week addressing Trump by his first name, “Donald,” and telling him that imposing tariffs on Canada was “a very dumb thing to do.”

Aides to Trudeau had given him a draft of the speech beforehand. Deciding he wanted to say something stronger, Trudeau rewrote it, a Western government official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk freely.

“Frankly he has had enough,” the official said of Trudeau.

“The Prime Minister spoke quite honestly and was saying the very least that he needed to say in order to deal directly with the level of contempt that has been shown by the president toward him as a person” and toward Canada, the official added.

Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, said in an interview: “We know Americans love Canadians and Canadians love Americans. This is one person. President Trump has created a total mess. He’s created uncertainty.”

“This isn’t the way you trade with your closest ally and your closest friend in the entire world.”

Both President Emmanuel Macron of France and British Prime Minister Keir Starmer stepped in to correct Trump after he claimed Europeans were being paid back for the aid they’ve sent to Ukraine and that U.S. taxpayers had gotten stiffed.

Putting his hand on Trump’s arm in the Oval Office, Macron said without hesitation on Feb. 24, “No, in fact, to be frank, we pay. We paid 60% of the total effort.”

After Trump said in his Oval Office meeting with Starmer three days later, “We don’t get the money back,” Starmer told him: “We’re not getting all of ours. Quite a bit of ours was gifted.”

Both leaders were guests sitting with Trump in the Oval Office as reporters asked questions and the cameras rolled. That they felt compelled to interject and correct Trump is a rarity in such settings, where decorum and deference are the norm.

“Foreign leaders don’t normally criticize or correct each other on camera,” said Peter Westmacott, who has served as British ambassador to the U.S., France and Turkey. “But we aren’t living in normal times. Sometimes the president’s lies don’t matter. But sometimes, because of the office he holds, they do.”

Asked about those moments with Starmer and Macron, a White House official said Trump wasn’t bothered by either. Trump has a long relationship with Macron, and when the cameras were off, the president and Starmer seemed to forge a real connection, the official said.

What’s more, neither man interrupted in quite the same way as Zelenskyy, the official added. (Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, lost their temper with Zelenskyy after he recounted how Russian President Vladimir Putin had broken agreements made with his country over the past decade.)

How world leaders prep to meet with Trump

When world leaders come to the Oval Office, they’re not in the habit of winging it. They arrive with points they want to make and rebuttals they’ve prepared in response to arguments they expect to hear, diplomats say.

As an example, prior to his first-ever meeting with Trump last month at the White House, Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba huddled with advisers in Tokyo for more than 20 hours of preparatory meetings, a person familiar with the planning said.

All that homework paid off. Ishiba arrived for his Oval Office meeting bearing charts that clearly and colorfully illustrated Japan’s investments in the United States, the source said, the sorts of visual aids that Trump prefers.

Ishiba also brought a golden samurai helmet as a gift, two people familiar with the present told NBC News. In Japan, this often signifies prayers for prosperity and longevity.

So, when leaders like Macron and Starmer interject to tell Trump he’s wrong, it’s not something they do lightly; they feel they can’t let his statements stand unchallenged, diplomats said.

“It’s remarkable and certainly to my knowledge, at least, unprecedented. We have some of the most seasoned diplomatic leaders, Starmer and Macron, who know Trump and who know precisely how thin-skinned he is,” said Ned Price, a former State Department spokesman in the Biden administration.

“The fact that they did this in this setting, in front of reporters and cameras, only underscores the concerns they have about how these false assertions really get at the fabric of the alliance,” Price added.

Democrats struggle to find their footing

The most natural impediment to Trump’s aspirations would be the opposition party. But Democrats have looked hapless following their defeat in the 2024 presidential race.

At Trump’s speech last week to a joint session of Congress, Democratic lawmakers sat in the House chamber holding up paddles reading “False.” Late night talk show hosts mocked that bit of theater.

But Jones sees a way for his party to emerge from exile. Eight years ago, he did the unthinkable in bright-red Alabama, winning a Senate seat. Now, he says, Democrats can recover if they choose their targets more selectively rather than object to the dizzying number of policy pronouncements and walk-backs coming from the West Wing.

“Democrats have struggled a little bit in part because there was so much hitting quickly,” Jones said. “It was like playing whack-a-mole. You go down one path and Trump reverses course. That may be by design to keep Democrats off their game, and it worked.”

“But Democrats are beginning to home in on key important points. Medicaid is a really big deal. Health care is a really big deal that’s important to a lot of the swing districts and a lot of red districts.”

“What you’re seeing is Democrats are begging to fine-tune a message. They won’t go down every rabbit hole the administration throws at them.”

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Stephen Collopy

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