The Trump administration is no stranger to the courts. Since the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, his actions have resulted in a reported 300 legal challenges, largely due to the issuance of executive orders later deemed "baseless." These repeat court appearances, says legal scholar Kimberly Wehle, are an intentional part of Trump’s mission to make “lawlessness seem normal.”
According to Wehle, a key part of a White House lawyer’s job is to advise the administration on the legality of its efforts and dissuade it from attempting to implement edicts that could be struck down as illegal. But in the case of Trump, the administration has “pumped out a tsunami of baseless, illegal, and even unconstitutional” orders, which have “forced judges to waste precious time stating the obvious — that there’s no justification for much of the legal garbage coming out of this administration.”
Wehle uses the recent example of the administration’s actions toward Anthropic. After the company refused Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s demands to drop safety protocols from its Claude AI that prevent the mass surveillance of Americans and autonomous killing, it was designated a “supply chain risk” and banned from use by federal contractors. A judge, however, ruled that this was illegal.
But what was most incredible, says Wehle, was that “a government lawyer showed up in federal court to defend these indefensible policies” in the first place. The lawyer even went so far as to admit there was no statute to support the government’s actions, and that its proclamation regarding Anthropic had “absolutely no legal effect at all.”
In a functional administration, this would never have made it to court.
“From the standpoint of legal ethics and the rules governing civil proceedings in federal court, legally baseless representations to a court of law constitute grossly sanctionable misconduct,” writes Wehle. “This should raise questions about how any lawyer could enter a federal courtroom and try to defend something so indefensible.”
According to its own principles, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel is supposed to vet orders from the White House to provide “clear, accurate, thoroughly researched, and soundly reasoned” advice. Wehle asserts that it is “tragically evident” that government lawyers are failing to do so.
Instead, it seems that the mission of Trump’s lawyers is merely to “cast a false patina of legality upon his lawlessness.”
