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Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Nine months into the second Donald Trump administration, the legal and political issues underlying nearly all the conflicts between Trump and his critics boil down to his claims of extraordinary executive powers, which are allegedly required to deal with an extraordinary set of horrifying conditions in the country. This president, of course, arrogates to himself the exclusive right to determine whether and when such circumstances exist and then treats resistance to his edicts as another emergency requiring even more executive power. We are seeing this pattern repeated in the Trump administration’s battle with a federal judge who has banned the president’s deployment of National Guard units to Portland on the grounds that the president’s claim that Portland is a “burning hellhole” besieged by violent anarchists is “untethered to facts.”

Judge Karin Immergut’s temerity in second-guessing Trump’s description of the city where she lives has driven the White House into a frenzy of rage. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it was apparent to everyone that protests in a one-block area of Portland surrounding an ICE facility represented a “radical left reign of terror.” Trump’s top domestic-policy advisor Stephen Miller was beside himself. “Today’s judicial ruling is one of the most egregious and thunderous violations of constitutional order we have ever seen — and is yet the latest example of unceasing efforts to nullify the 2024 election by fiat,” he said.

This last Miller comment reflects the novel MAGA theory that because Trump told the country he would undertake mass deportations of illegal immigrants during the 2024 campaign, he is not restrained by laws or the Constitution in how he goes about it. But Miller doesn’t simply condemn Immergut’s ruling; he calls it a “legal insurrection” aimed at facilitating an “organized terrorist attack on the federal government and its officers.”

As absurd as the administration’s rhetoric has become, there’s a deadly serious issue beneath it. A saying often attributed to the late U.S. senator and social scientist Daniel Patrick Moynihan holds, “You are entitled to your own opinion. You are not entitled to your own facts.” It is precisely the contention of the Trump administration that the president is entitled to his own facts, which preempt anyone else’s facts. As Georgetown law professor Stephen Vladeck explains, this is a scary and unprecedented power grab:

Typically, our constitutional system resolves these kinds of factual disputes through litigation. Neutral judges and juries hear legal arguments and factual testimony and decide for themselves what has, and what has not been, established …

The Supreme Court will no doubt have the last word. And the question is going to be whether the president can use a contrived crisis as a justification for sending troops into our cities. In other words, the issue is going to come down to who decides the facts when it comes to domestic use of the military. That question meant one thing when we had presidents who, for whatever reason, were constrained to acknowledge reality. It means something else altogether in an administration for which, to borrow from George Orwell, 2 + 2 = 5.

Trump and Miller, to be clear, share a dangerous take on the facts about opposition to their policies and conduct. The 47th president spent much of the 2024 campaign accusing Democrats of consciously seeking to destroy America by “opening the borders” to “the worst of the worst,” who raped and killed their way across the country, pausing only to cast illegal votes. He now routinely refers to Democrats as “the radical left” and just last week said Democrats were the party of “evil, hate, and Satan.” Stephen Miller said this of the opposition on Fox News last month:

The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.

In the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination, both Trump and Miller muttered darkly about prosecuting “terrorists” who verbally attacked the president and his supporters; Miller suggested anyone calling Trump “authoritarian” was illegally inciting violence. And throughout 2025, virtually everyone associated with this administration has routinely denounced judges who stand in the way of Trump’s wishes as “radical left activists” seeking to thwart the will of the people (again relying on the idea that the 49 percent of voters who cast a ballot for Trump validate absolutely anything he chooses to do).

What’s unclear now is whether the White House will await redemption by a Supreme Court whose conservative majority has been so solicitous of Trump and permissive in deferring to his claims of executive power, or whether the administration will take more immediate actions to back up their claims. You definitely get the sense that Trump is itching to invoke the Insurrection Act and harvest plenary powers to deploy troops domestically without the restrictions he’s had to deal with in calling up Guard units to fight crime or protect ICE. And given the administration’s penchant for treating any resistance as insurrectionary, it could happen any day now.

Trump and Stephen Miller See Insurrection Everywhere

Trump and Stephen Miller See Insurrection Everywhere