MAGA Melts Down After Chief Justice Roberts Rebukes Trump
Enraged pro-Trumpers went as far as to suggest the Supreme Court be done away with.
- “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision,” Roberts said.
- “The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
- He disparaged James Boasberg, the federal judge who blocked his attempt to deport suspected Venezuelan gang members using an arcane law, as a “Radical Left Lunatic” and a “troublemaker and agitator.”
- “This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED!!!” Trump added, prompting cheers from MAGA nation.
- Rep. Brandon Gill, an ardent Trump supporter in the House, had already filed articles of impeachment against Boasberg when Roberts’ bold rebuke arrived just a few hours after the president’s post.
Many of the biggest figures in MAGA nation were incensed.
Far-right pundit Mike Cernovich said it was “totally out of line for John Roberts to involve himself in a political dispute.”
In another X post, he went as far as to suggest that the Supreme Court could be done away with.
“The Supreme Court has been such a drag on the country,” Cernovich wrote. “They invent constitutional rights to bypass the will of the people. Losing the Court is no loss at all, it is a gain for the country. It would allow issues to be decided democratically.”
The popular right-wing account Catturd, meanwhile, called for Roberts himself to be impeached.
“Roberts has always been a Trump hater,” the account wrote in separate post to its 3.6 million followers.
Roberts, who rarely issues public statements, previously rebuked Trump in 2018 after the president disparaged a judge who ruled against him as an “Obama judge.”
“We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” he said in a statement at the time. “What we have is an extraordinary group of dedicated judges doing their level best to do equal right to those appearing before them. That independent judiciary is something we should all be thankful for.”
Last month, however, Trump was caught on a hot mic thanking Roberts after the president had addressed Congress, adding that he “won’t forget it.”
Many commentators observed that Roberts had authored the Supreme Court decision giving the president sweeping immunity from prosecution, although Trump later said he was just thanking Roberts for swearing him in.
Sean Davis, the right-wing media personality who founded the site The Federalist, fired off a string of posts raging against Roberts’ statement.
“For more than two centuries, the question of whether to impeach judges has been left solely to the elected representatives of the American people,” he wrote in one. “John Roberts has no say in the matter, regardless of how much he wishes otherwise.”
“John Roberts is setting the entire judiciary on fire to protect Venezuelan terrorists,” he added in another.
DOGE head Elon Musk, who for weeks before Trump’s post had been calling for the judges ruling against the administration to be impeached, offered a similar sentiment.
“As Justice Roberts well knows, impeachment is a constitutional right of the legislature,” the unelected tech billionaire wrote.
Michael Flynn, the former Army lieutenant general who briefly served as Trump’s first national security advisor, suggested that Roberts was “out of touch with the American people” and couldn’t “see the forest through the trees.”
“Wake up, but I sincerely doubt if your clerks will care a wit about what the American people believe,” he wrote. “Trust in our American judicial system is practically non-existent.”
Multiple popular MAGA accounts reacted to Roberts’ statements by pushing the unfounded conspiracy theory that Roberts visited sex-trafficking financier Jeffrey Epstein’s island.
“Did the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, visit Epstein Islamd [sic]?” pro-Trump influencer Mila Joy wrote to her nearly 200,000 followers. “I’ve heard rumblings and it sure would make a LOT of sense, right? There IS a John Roberts on the Epstein flight logs…is it the Cheif [sic] Justice?”
Earlier this month, MAGA had raged against another conservative Supreme Court justice, Amy Coney Barrett, after she sided with three liberal justices against Trump’s attempt to withhold billions in foreign aid.
Trump later defended Barrett, who he nominated to the court in 2017, as “very smart.”
The White House has not returned the Daily Beast’s request for comment on Roberts’ statement.
Chief Justice John Roberts criticized a call by President Donald Trump for the impeachment of a federal trial judge who temporarily barred the federal government from deporting noncitizens pursuant to an executive order published on Saturday.
The rare public statement was the latest development in a fast-moving battle over Trump’s efforts to deport non-citizens alleged to be members of a Venezuelan gang pursuant to an eighteenth-century law that had been invoked only three previous times in the country’s history.
Trump’s executive order relied on the Alien Enemies Act, a 1798 law that allows the president to detain or deport citizens of an enemy nation without a hearing or other judicial review when Congress has declared war or when an “invasion” or “predatory incursion” occurs. Trump found that Tren de Aragua “is perpetrating, attempting, and threatening an invasion or predatory incursion against the territory of the United States.” Based on that conclusion, he indicated that “all Venezuelan citizens 14 years of age or older who are members of TdA are liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as Alien Enemies.”
On Saturday, James Boasberg – the chief judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia – prohibited the federal government from deporting any noncitizens for 14 days pursuant to the executive order published earlier in the day.
Boasberg also ordered the Trump administration to turn around any flights that had already taken off.
Despite Boasberg’s order, news outlets – including The New York Times – reported that the Trump administration had deported more than 200 noncitizens to El Salvador on Saturday night and Sunday morning. None of the planes carrying those noncitizens landed in El Salvador before Boasberg issued his written order.
Boasberg held another hearing on March 17 on whether the Trump administration had violated his March 15 order. Citing “national security concerns,” a lawyer for the Department of Justice declined to answer the judge’s questions, insisting only that the government had not violated the written order.
In a post on Truth Social on Tuesday morning, Trump contended that Boasberg should be impeached.
In a statement released by the Supreme Court’s Public Information Office on Tuesday, Roberts indicated that “[f]or more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision. The normal appellate review process exists for that purpose.”
Last year, Roberts handed Trump a significant victory in Trump v. United States, which bolstered the power of the presidency and established that the president is generally immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. But Tuesday’s statement was not Roberts’s first rebuke of Trump. In 2018, after Trump described a federal district judge who had ruled against his administration’s asylum policy as an “Obama judge,” Roberts pushed back. “We do not have Obama judges or Trump judges, Bush judges or Clinton judges,” Roberts told the Associated Press.
This article was originally published at Howe on the Court.
