The Daily Fuckup

The Trump administration spent the spring and summer of 2025 trying to pressure major law firms through executive orders. Courts kept getting in the way.

In March and April 2025, Trump signed orders aimed at firms including Perkins Coie, Jenner & Block, WilmerHale and Susman Godfrey. Judges moved quickly. A federal judge in Washington temporarily blocked parts of the order targeting Susman Godfrey in April. Another judge later permanently blocked the Perkins Coie order in May, and courts had already intervened against orders aimed at Jenner & Block and WilmerHale. By June 27, a judge had permanently blocked the Susman Godfrey order as well.

The cases turned on orders that singled out law firms for their clients, their past work, or the people who had worked there. Susman Godfrey said it was targeted in part because of its election-related work for Dominion Voting Systems. The Perkins Coie order cited the firm’s ties to Democratic politics. The WilmerHale order pointed to Robert Mueller’s former partnership there.

The rulings were more than narrow victories for a handful of firms. They limited a White House effort to use federal power, including access to contracts, security clearances and government facilities, as leverage against lawyers and the firms that represented them. In multiple rulings, judges found the orders unconstitutional or unlawful and blocked enforcement.

So the story by late June was not a single dramatic loss. It was a sequence of them. Trump’s team kept issuing punishment-focused orders against prominent firms, and federal judges kept stopping them.