Bluntness that won Trump a second term backfires to attract legal trouble

Donald Trump’s shoot-from-the-lip style had kept Americans on the edge of their seats during last year’s presidential campaign.

But now that he is speaking as a President and not as a candidate, his words are being used against him in court in the blizzard of litigation challenging his agenda.

The spontaneity is complicating his administration’s legal positions. Nowhere has this been clearer than in cases involving his adviser Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), the driving force in his efforts to downsize and overhaul the federal government.

The latest example came earlier this week, when U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang ruled that Mr. Musk had likely violated the Constitution by dismantling the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

The lawsuit turned on the question of whether the billionaire entrepreneur had overstepped his authority. Justice Department lawyers and White House officials insist that Mr. Musk is merely a presidential adviser, not the actual leader of DOGE.

But Mr. Trump has said otherwise — in speeches, interviews and public remarks — and Mr. Chuang quoted him extensively in his decision.

Mr. Trump most notably boasted of creating DOGE during his primetime address to a joint session of Congress and said it was “headed by Elon Musk.” Republicans gave Mr. Musk a standing ovation, who saluted from the gallery above the House chamber.

“Trump’s words were essential, central and indispensable,” said Norm Eisen, one of the lawyers for USAID employees who filed the lawsuit. “His admissions took what would have been a tough case and made it into a straightforward one.”

The looseness with words is a shift from predecessors like Barack Obama, who used to say that he was careful because anything he said could send troops marching or markets tumbling.

Mr. Trump has no such feeling of restraint, and neither do other members of his Republican administration like Mr. Musk.

Mr. Chuang, who is based in Maryland and was appointed by Mr. Obama, also cited social media posts from Mr. Musk, who writes frequently on X, the platform that he owns.

For example, Mr. Musk posted “we spent the weekend feeding USAID to the woodchipper” on February 3. The agency was being brought to a standstill at that time, with staff furloughed, spending halted and headquarters shut down.

“Musk’s public statements and posts … suggest that he has the ability to cause DOGE to act,” Mr. Chuang wrote in his ruling.

Harrison Fields, principal deputy press secretary at the White House, said Mr. Trump was fulfilling his campaign promise “to make the federal government more efficient and accountable to taxpayers.”

“Rogue bureaucrats and activist judges attempting to undermine this effort are only subverting the will of the American people and their obstructionist efforts will fail,” he said.

Anthony Coley, who led public affairs at the Justice Department during President Joe Biden’s administration, said statements involving civil litigation were always coordinated between his office and the West Wing.

“The words could be used to support what we’re doing or undermine what we’re doing,” he said. “It is a carefully choreographed effort to make sure there was no daylight between what was said in the court of public opinion and what could ultimately play out in the court of law.’

In comparison to how things were done in the past, Mr. Coley said, Mr. Trump has a “ready-fire-aim approach of doing business.”

Unbothered approach

Mr. Trump does not usually let legal disputes force him to turn down the volume. During a criminal investigation over his decision to keep classified records at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida after leaving the White House following his first term, Mr. Trump spoke extensively about the case in an interview with Fox News.

Long-time defence lawyers were startled — defendants are usually encouraged to keep mum while facing an indictment. But the situation panned out for Mr. Trump. His legal team delayed the case, and the special counsel’s office dropped the charges after he won the election because Presidents cannot be prosecuted while in office.

DOGE has been the focus of nearly two dozen lawsuits. It has often prevailed in cases involving access to government data, where several plaintiffs have struggled to convince judges to block the organisation’s actions.

But it has also run into challenges, such as a lawsuit over whether DOGE must comply with public records requests. The Trump administration asserted in court that DOGE is part of the White House, meaning it is exempt.

Judge Christopher Cooper, also appointed by Mr. Obama, disagreed.

“Musk and the President’s public statements indicate that USDS” — the original acronym for the organisation that was renamed as DOGE — “is in fact exercising substantial independent authority,” wrote Mr. Cooper, who is based in Washington.

However, just because Mr. Musk claims credit online for deep agency cuts, does not necessarily translate to DOGE having authority in the eyes of the law, Stanford Law School professor Michael McConnell argued in a recent debate on the issue.

DOGE is recommending changes, he said, but it is the agency heads who are actually putting them into effect.

“And that is all that the courts are going to care about as to what the Supreme Court is going to do,” Mr. McConnell said at the debate hosted by the National Constitution Center.