President Donald Trump is sick and tired of judges telling his administration it needs to follow the law.
During an appearance Monday night on the Mark Levin Show, he complained about “some very bad rulings” as legal challenges to his sweeping executive orders pile up.
On Saturday, a judge issued a temporary restraining order blocking Elon Musk’s government efficiency task force DOGE from accessing the Treasury Department’s federal payments system, which oversees $5 trillion in annual payments.
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“It’s a shame to see it. Frankly, they want to sort of tell everybody how to run the country,” he said. “They just say, ‘Oh it’s unconstitutional.’ But when you look at what’s been found, the fraud and the waste and the abuse, but the fraud, outright fraud, at you know, so many different places.”
During his first few weeks in office, Trump has signed dozens of executive orders freezing federal spending, suspending birthright citizenship—which is enshrined in the Constitution—and giving Musk’s “department” of government efficiency, or DOGE, free reign to “audit” trillions of dollars in payments.
More than 40 lawsuits have been filed challenging the orders, many of which have been paused as the courts review claims they violate federal laws and constitutional separation of powers, according to the New York Times.
A judge blocked the federal spending freeze, and a temporary restraining order has barred Musk’s DOGE minions—many of whom are engineers under 26 with no government experience, which begs the question of how they could possibly be qualified to conduct a public spending audit—from accessing sensitive personal and financial data.
Allowing the DOGE team access increased cybersecurity risks, judge Paul A. Engelmayer wrote in the order. The 19 state attorneys general that brought the suit had also shown a “likelihood of success” on the merits, particularly their claims that it violated the Administrative Procedure Act and exceeded the Treasury Department’s statutory authority, he wrote.
That ruling, in particular, prompted a meltdown in MAGAland, with Musk calling Engelmayer a “corrupt judge” who needed to be impeached. Engelmayer was nominated to the bench by President Barack Obama in 2011 and confirmed by the Senate 98-0.
Vice President JD Vance also weighed in over the weekend, comparing Engelmayer to a judge telling a general how to conduct a military operation.
“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he wrote in a post on social media. Others were quick to point out that, as every civics textbook in the country makes clear, it’s the federal judiciary that decides when the exercise of executive authority is in fact legitimate.
During his interview with Levin, Trump claimed that the DOGE team was uncovering “unthinkable” abuse.
“Judges should be ruling. They shouldn’t be dictating what you’re supposed to be doing,” he said. “And why is somebody saying that you’re not allowed to?”
Trump also claimed he was the victim of “massive fraud” after he was prosecuted for attempting to overthrow former President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
“I see where they’re trying to Donald Trump-proof places like New York and California. I mean, New York, the corruption and the court system is unthinkable,” he said. “What they’ve done in the court system to people, and in particular to me and to others, it just can’t be allowed to go on.”
