Trump Gives His Dumbest Lawyer a Giant Promotion

Donald Trump is appointing his personal lawyer Alina Habba as the interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey.

The president announced the move in a Truth Social post Monday morning, saying that Habba “will lead with the same diligence and conviction that has defined her career.”

The move will put Habba in charge of all federal cases in New Jersey on what is supposed to be a temporary basis, bypassing Senate confirmation. The state is the home of Trump’s golf club in Bedminster, and is also the jurisdiction for the government’s case against pro-Palestine activist and Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, whom Trump is trying to deport after rescinding his green card.

Habba has a reputation as one of Trump’s most ardent defenders, backing him up when he spreads conspiracy theories and, during his hush-money trial last year, offering defenses for his unusual behavior, from falling asleep in court to his penchant for holding press clippings of himself.

More recently, earlier this month Habba responded to the Trump administration’s firing of thousands of military veterans by saying that “perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment.” Her seemingly unconditional support for the president also extends into her legal acumen, which is highly flawed at best.

Throughout Trump’s New York hush-money trial, Habba misspoke in court, hurting Trump’s case and even seeming to misunderstand the term “due process.” While representing the president in a defamation lawsuit from writer E. Jean Carroll, Habba’s opening statement seemed to immediately undermine Trump’s case, and during the case, she was reprimanded by the judge on multiple occasions.

Making Habba the top federal prosecutor in New Jersey seems like a recipe for disaster, considering she is supposed to uphold and enforce the law in accordance with the Constitution. But Trump’s decision to appoint Habba is almost certainly by design: He wants a loyalist to push prosecutions that he wants, regardless of legal justifications, and protect his interests in the state.

Education Department staffers warn that Trump’s mass firings will do irreparable harm to the student loan system. At least 300 people were fired last week from Federal Student Aid, the office within the department that manages student loans. 

This was shortly followed by President Trump’s Thursday executive order to eliminate the Education Department entirely. 

“They got rid of all of the quality checkers. It’s only a matter of time [before] they cause the whole system to fail,” a high ranking department staffer told The Guardian anonymously. “If this was a bank, and they fired all the quality assurance team, their regulator would have shut them down.… It’s the opposite of safety.”

These anonymous workers believe the purge will create opportunities for fraud and abuse and  lead to more bureaucratic issues, like long wait times for loan service providers. “As an organization, we were already doing a lot more work than our staffing provides. We would need 10 times more people for a bank of our size,” the senior staffer said.

“What Linda McMahon has done is given 5,000 institutions the green light to cause massive amounts of taxpayer fraud and abuse of federal financial aid dollars financed by taxpayers without any check and balances in place,” one fired employee said. “The gatekeepers are gone.”

This is a massive blow to an already hobbled system. Many of those fired were working full time to make sure that American citizens could pay for college without drowning in millions of dollars in debt.

The MAGA movement is not falling in line behind Elon Musk.

Republican strategists and voters with an affinity for Donald Trump are not keen to see the world’s richest man make cuts to agencies and programs that they rely on, sparking concerns that Musk’s entrenchment in Trump’s agenda could cost conservatives in midterm elections.

GOP strategist Alex Conant told The Hill Friday that there’ll be “political costs” to empowering Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency if Republican voters don’t hear about the “benefits” of DOGE—and soon.

“What Republicans should be concerned about is Musk’s effectiveness,” Conant said. “If DOGE actually breaks things that people care about and rely on, there’s gonna be political costs to that.”

Republican strategist Doug Heye predicted that Musk’s involvement in the White House would result in “real job losses” in the coming weeks and months.

“And where that has an impact, especially in specific communities … that makes their life harder for the reliable voter, typically, for Trump,” Heye told The Hill. “That kind of slow burn, I think, could have an impact.”

Even some of Trump’s biggest fans have had their immense loyalty challenged by Trump’s new billionaire adviser.

Trump attended an NCAA men’s Division I wrestling championship in Philadelphia on Saturday, alongside White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, and Musk. But reactions to the Tesla CEO were less than warm, reported The New York Times.

Katy Travis, a 48-year-old wrestling mom from Montana, told the publication that Musk’s constant presence at Trump’s side “looks ridiculous,” and that his enormous influence over Trump made the president “look weak.”

“It makes him look like he’s kissing ass to get money,” Travis told the Times.

Others were worried about their investments as Musk’s aggressive slashes to federal agencies rattled the stock market.

“I know there’s a lot of concern about what he’s doing, as far as the DOGE stuff and all,” Jarrod Scandle, a 44-year-old retired Pennsylvanian police officer who specified that he’s more of a “Chevy or Ford” guy, told the Times. “I understand everybody’s concern. I’m concerned. I own stock, and you know, it’s red every day, and I’m worried.

Donald Trump has escalated his attacks on judges ruling against his administration, suggesting that they could be charged with sedition and treason.

The president reposted an article from Gateway Pundit, a right-wing website known for trafficking in hoaxes and conspiracy theories, on his Truth Social account Sunday. The article attempts to make a legal argument that federal judges who rule against Trump’s policies and executive orders can be prosecuted for sedition and treason.

The article makes wild claims about federal law concerning treason and seditious conspiracy, claiming that judges collaborating “with foreign or domestic entities to undermine national security-related executive decisions” would justify treason charges, while judges “intentionally obstruct[ing] executive functions and conspir[ing] to weaken presidential authority” could constitute seditious conspiracy.

Going even further, the article’s writer, Yaacov Apelbaum, argued that if judges’ rulings are “severely undermining the federal government’s operations,” that could constitute “aiding enemies or direct rebellion” under Article 3 of the Constitution.

If the president is giving serious weight to these legal theories, that goes far beyond his previous threats to impeach judges he doesn’t like, which has been echoed by Elon Musk and other right-wing figures and drawn a mealy-mouthed condemnation from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts.

It also suggests that Trump will stop at nothing to continue issuing legally questionable executive orders, which have decimated federal agencies created and regulated by Congress, and rushed through mass deportations and immigration penalties that very likely violate federal law and the Constitution. If Trump finds a way to sideline, impeach, or charge federal judges when they rule against him, he will have decimated the constitutional separation of powers and cemented himself as a dictator.

The judicial system has handed DOGE another loss.

Judge Deborah Boardman on Monday ruled that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has no legal right to the personal information of American citizens held at the Department of Education, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Treasury Department.

“No matter how important or urgent the President’s DOGE agenda may be, federal agencies must execute it in accordance with the law. That likely did not happen in this case,” Boardman wrote. She then filed a preliminary injunction blocking the aforementioned departments from sharing sensitive information with DOGE.

Boardman also referred to the Privacy Act of 1974 after noting that DOGE had already gotten its hands on systems containing Americans’ banking information, Social Security numbers, and marital and citizenship status.

“Congress’s concern back then was that ‘every detail of our personal lives can be assembled instantly for use by a single bureaucrat or institution’ and that ‘a bureaucrat in Washington or Chicago or Los Angeles can use his organization’s computer facilities to assemble a complete dossier of all known information about an individual,’ Boardman wrote. Those concerns are just as salient today.”

This story has been updated.