The Morning Briefing

A few items from on the road

On my way to Dallas from Washington DC this morning, so just a few quick items of note.

• Right now President Trump is engaged in a contest with the judiciary with few parallels in American history (Jefferson in 1803; Jackson in 1832; FDR in 1937; Truman in 1952 perhaps), with district court judges issuing nation-wide injunctions or TROs against Trump’s executive actions.

Kim Strassel notes in her latest WSJ newsletter that:

Universal injunctions are a relatively new thing—and mostly a Trump thing. Former Attorney General William Barr noted in 2019 that there were “only 27 nationwide injunctions in all of the 20th century.” While they’ve grown in the past 25 years, a 2024 Harvard Law Review article explains that the entirety of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama presidencies, as well as the first three years of Joe Biden’s, counted just 32 nationwide injunctions combined. By contrast, Trump was subject to 64 in his first term, while a recent DOJ filing says courts issued “15 universal injunctions (or temporary restraining orders) against the current Administration in February 2025 alone.” (There have since been more.) The Harvard articles notes that 92% of the first-term Trump injunctions were “issued by a judge appointed by a Democrat.”

We’ll have more on this issue in a separate item from Lloyd Billingsley later today.

• It is popular sometimes to employ the pop psychology term that the left engages in “projection,” that is, attributing to opponents what it is guilty of thinking or doing themselves. This certainly explains the relentless obsession with racism, since the left is by far the most racist group in our country. But the current Democrat/left complaints that Trump is a “threat to the Constitution” reminds me more of the cliche about the person who murders their parents and then asks for leniency on account becoming orphans! The left has been eroding the Constitution for a century, and indeed to the extent it is true that Trump is using executive power to attack the progressive left’s most prized achievement—the administrative state—he is only using tools they themselves built up over the decades. Remember Obama’s “pen and phone”? Or Biden saying “I didn’t let the Supreme Court stop me”? Maybe the left will now discover that the separation of powers isn’t such a bad thing after all. (Remember one basic axiom: the left’s “living Constitution” always means that the written Constitution is dead.)

• I’m so old I can remember when the old GOP hands of the Lincoln Project were supposed to be the “responsible, centrist” voices of our discourse. Turns out they are anarchists (I’ll just skip over the pedophile bit for now):

But remember: Trump and populism are the danger.

• Listeners to the 3WHH podcast will know that Lucretia, the International Woman of Mystery, thinks the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote should be repealed. Well here’s some new evidence in support of her view, from the very sharp left-leaning voter analyst David Shor:

More on this point from NBC News polling:

More from Shor’s latest report:

—It has long been Democratic dogma that higher turnout would favor Democrats. Shor concludes that if every eligible voter turned out last November, Trump would have won by a much larger margin. I won’t go through the methodology here, but this is Shor’s chart for it:

—Trump’s share of the white vote didn’t increase over 2020 or 2016, or even over the GOP share going back more than 20 years. Instead, every minority group moved toward Trump and the GOP:

These findings ought to be igniting a five-alarm fire among Democrats.

Have a nice day everybody!