Retired conservative judge says Trump repeating abuses of Britain before Revolutionary War

MSNBC host Michael Steele and retired U.S. Circuit Court Judge J. Michael Luttig on MSNBc on October 1, 2025 (Image: Screengrab via MSNBC / YouTube)

One retired federal judge is urging Americans to read the Declaration of Independence and note the similarities between King George III and President Donald Trump.

During a Wednesday interview on MSNBC's "The Weeknight," J. Michael Luttig — who former President George H.W. Bush nominated to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in 1991 — said he was "struck" how the colonists' 27 grievances against the British Crown closely resembled Trump's second term. The conservative jurist noted that he wrote about the similarities on Constitution Day last month as a "sequel" to a July 4 post comparing Trump to George III, and wrote 26 grievances against Trump in the same vein as the colonists' grievances.

"The parallels were astonishing and they were striking," Luttig said. "Every person in America should read the grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence, and every American will be struck by the grievances then, and the grievances that America has today against the president of the United States."

MSNBC host Alicia Melendez asked Luttig about one particular grievance, in which Luttig wrote that Trump has "enthralled our Supreme Court, spellbinding it into submission to him and his will rather than to the Constitution and its will, and our Supreme Court has favored him with its affirmation and its acquiescence in his lawlessness." The judge responded that he chose the word "enthrall" specifically because of its use as a word describing "slavery or bondage."

Luttig observed that former President Abraham Lincoln called on Americans to "disenthrall themselves from the dogma of the past" in an 1862 speech prior to his issuing of the Emancipation Proclamation. According to Luttig, the Supreme Court has become inexorably tied to Trump, and that the two institutions now effectively act as one unified force.

"[Lincoln] was saying to Americans that they needed to disenthrall themselves from the dogma of the past and recognize that the moral thing to do was to release slaves from bondage," Luttig said. " ... So to answer your question, how does the Supreme Court become disenthralled from the president? I don't believe that it wants to."

The former appellate judge went on to say that the Supreme Court was in the midst of a "crisis" of legitimacy. He argued that while lower court judges have abided by their oaths to the Constitution and written "unassailable opinions of law and of Constitutional law almost all ruling against Donald Trump," the Supreme Court has disregarded those rulings with "emergency docket" (also known as "shadow docket") rulings that offer no rationale or explanation for doing so.

"When the Court acts that way — and it has never acted that way in all of American history — it is squandering itrs own legitimacy," Luttig said. "And as long as the court continues to 'decide' cases this way, its legitimacy will continue to plummet in the eyes of the American people."

Watch Luttig's segment below:

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

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