Trump’s Census Tantrum Hits the Wall

Edition · July 5, 2019

Trump’s Census Tantrum Hits the Wall

On July 5, 2019, the administration kept digging after the Supreme Court slapped down its census citizenship gambit, and the White House started floating a legal end-run that looked more like panic than strategy.

The day after the administration’s census citizenship question plan was knocked off the track by the Supreme Court, Trump was still publicly shopping ways to force it back in. The result was a fresh round of legal confusion, a bigger credibility hit, and a reminder that the White House’s immigration obsession had started to look less like governance than a grudge match with the courts.

Closing take

July 5 was less a reset than a sequel to a losing case: the administration had already been told its rationale was broken, and it still sounded determined to keep throwing elbows at the judiciary. That’s not policy. That’s a tantrum with a filing deadline.

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Ranked by how bad the fuckup was

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Story

Trump Floats a Census End-Run After the Court Said No

Census end-run Confidence 5/5

★★★★☆Fuckup rating 4/5 Serious fuckup

The White House spent July 5 trying to revive its citizenship-question push after the Supreme Court rejected the administration’s stated rationale for adding it to the 2020 census. Trump said he was considering an executive order or other options, even as court filings showed the departments of Justice and Commerce were still looking for a way to keep the question alive. The move turned a legal defeat into a public embarrassment and set off another round of warnings that the administration was trying to bulldoze a court loss instead of accepting it.

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