How Trump is using popular political issues to test the system of checks and balances : NPR
President Trump is banking on the public caring more about the politically popular things he is trying to do than how he is going about doing them in his fights with the judicial branch.
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President Trump is going to battle against the judicial system and against the critics who argue that he is denying immigrants' due process. Trump is betting that Americans care more about removing gang members than whether they get a by-the-book court hearing. NPR's Franco Ordoñez has this story on how Trump is picking favored political issues to test the U.S. system of checks and balances.
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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: Thank you very much. It's a great honor to be with you.
FRANCO ORDOÑEZ, BYLINE: Last week, President Trump spent days attacking the judge who tried to stop him from deporting members of a Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, and other migrants. He laid out why he felt the various fights he's having with the judicial branch help him more than hurt him.
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TRUMP: I just can't imagine that the Democrats are taking this issue where they want to have them back, you know? So now they have men playing in women's sports. They have transgender for everyone. They have open borders. They have all of their crazy policies that are – I think 95-5, not 90-10, OK? And their new policy is let's bring Tren de Aragua back into our country. Let's bring the worst of – these are the worst gang members there are.
ORDOÑEZ: Trump and his team have no intention of allowing these cases to only play out in the courts. Instead, they're driving headlines. His spokesman, Harrison Fields, tells NPR that Trump is, quote, “delivering on the common sense policies” that helped him win the election and that, quote, “leftist judges” shouldn't stand in the way. It's a strategy that one veteran Republican strategist compared to a matador waving a red cape of a provocative political issue. Doug Heye says Trump knows very well that all of Washington and the press will follow him like a charging bull.
DOUG HEYE: Well, there are legal proceedings and then there's the politics to this. And the politics are the rhetoric that we hear from Trump. That's what drives the attention.
ORDOÑEZ: He says by constantly churning out aggressive rhetoric, Trump is able to set the parameters of the debate so that Democrats and the media are responding to him and not the other way around.
HEYE: In politics, you always want to be talking about what you want to talk about and have your opponent talk about what you want to talk about.
ORDOÑEZ: Legal cases move slowly and can be boring. They often hinge on complexities the ordinary public doesn't care about or understand. Sandy Moyer is the chairwoman of the Republican National Hispanic Assembly of North Carolina. She says Trump knows what the public does care about.
SANDY MOYER: They want to be able to be safe in their own neighborhoods.
ORDOÑEZ: She says her neighbors worry about, quote, “activist judges” encouraging other judges to make questionable rulings that will make it harder for Trump.
MOYER: There is a concern that, all right, is this going to delay this issue that we want to see swiftly being handled?
ORDOÑEZ: The White House says it's going to obey court orders, and they're confident they're ultimately going to win the court cases, and there are a lot of them. Trump has also attacked a judiciary for hampering his efforts to cut the federal workforce. This weekend, Trump's defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, criticized a judge who blocked an executive order banning transgender people from serving in the military. Jon McHenry, a Republican pollster with North Star Opinion Research, says it makes sense that Trump and his team are picking these specific issues to go public.
JON MCHENRY: So when you're picking the fight, you're essentially fighting from your safest ground.
ORDOÑEZ: McHenry says reasonable people may disagree about immigration and who should be allowed to remain in the country. But Trump is making this about deporting criminals.
MCHENRY: It's harder for the other side to argue it on the point of, no, you shouldn't be deporting gang members. Well, 80% of Americans probably do think you should be deporting gang members as quickly as possible, and they don't really care about any constitutional rights or separation of powers between, you know, the presidency and the judicial.
ORDOÑEZ: The administration has given little evidence that the deportees even are gang members, but Jenny Stromer-Galley, who studies political messaging at Syracuse University, says if Trump and his surrogates allow the lawyers to start telling the story, they lose the message.
JENNY STROMER-GALLEY: The Trump administration wants the fight with the judicial branch.
ORDOÑEZ: She says it's about reinforcing Trump's image that only he, a strong executive, can cut through the gridlock of Congress and the judiciary.
STROMER-GALLEY: They're not willing to let the judiciary and these processes just play out because then, to some degree, they're acknowledging that the judiciary could be a check on the executive branch's power.
ORDOÑEZ: Which, she says, appears to be the only constraint on the president's power since the Republican-led Congress appears to have deferred to Trump's authority.
Franco Ordoñez, NPR News.
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