One longtime conservative federal judge is not mincing words about President Donald Trump and his MAGA base, and is arguing that they present a severe threat to both the U.S. Constitution and the rule of law itself.
During a Tuesday interview on WBUR’s “On Point,” retired Judge J. Michael Luttig — who was appointed to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals by President George H.W. Bush — elaborated on points he made in an op-ed for the Atlantic earlier this year about how Trump and his movement are fundamentally at odds with the United States’ foundational principles. Host Meghna Chakrabarti began the interview by asking Luttig about his use of the Frederick Douglass quote: “The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
“Frederick Douglas was saying in that quote that tyrants will prevail so long as they are tolerated by the people,” the retired judge said. “… In the case that Frederick Douglas was talking about and in the case that I was talking about — namely President Donald Trump today in America — that’s the question. How long will the American people tolerate the conduct of this particular president?”
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Despite his intense criticism of a Republican president and today’s Republican base, the Republican judicial appointee maintained that conservatism as it has been understood hasn’t changed, but rather that the label has been hijacked by the far-right MAGA movement. He defined traditional conservatism as “faithful obedience to the constitution of the United States and the laws of the United States as enacted by the congress and signed into law by the president,” and said Trump has “waged war” on that concept ever since the first day of his second term.
“The MAGA movement is a radical movement and I would not even apply the label conservative to it,” he said. “It is anti-constitutional. It is anti-law of the United States and anti-rule of law in the United States for the reasons I explained in the Atlantic article, which I titled the end of the rule of law in America.”
Judge Luttig further warned that the United States was in a “constitutional crisis,” and said that was the proper term to use “whenever the President of the United States himself and his government … is at war with the federal courts and the rule of law.” He underscored the stakes of the current moment by insisting no previous president had done in 250 years what Trump has done in just a handful of months in office.
“We Americans have become numb to this to this president, and as long as they remain no to all of this, then America will continue in dramatic decline,” he said. ” … The overarching point that I’m making is that, 8 months into this presidency, his war on the federal courts and the rule of law has now blossomed into an open civil war.”
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Click here to listen to the full interview.