President Donald Trump’s own social media posts have come back to haunt him in at least a dozen rulings against his administration’s policies.
Since Trump returned to office, hundreds of lawsuits have been filed challenging his revenge campaigns, free speech crackdowns, federal funding freezes, firing of federal employees, and moves to end deportation protections for immigrants from certain countries.
All the while, the president has posted a non-stop stream of rants, tirades, and attacks on his Truth Social platform, giving plaintiffs a trove of evidence that they’ve successfully leveraged in court.
In at least a dozen cases, federal judges have pointed specifically to posts from Trump or other members of his administration in their rulings against the government, according to a new analysis by CBS News.
In March, Judge James Boasberg blocked a pair of grand jury subpoenas issued to the Federal Reserve as part of the Justice Department’s now-abandoned criminal probe into outgoing Fed Chairman Jermone Powell.
Boasberg’s ruling pointed to more than 100 of Trump’s social media posts attacking Powell as evidence that prosecutors had issued the subpoenas not to gather evidence, but to “harass and pressure” Powell.
In another case, Judge John McConnell found that the government’s decision to withhold Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, benefits during last year’s government shutdown was politically motivated, making it “arbitrary and capricious.”
In his decision, McConnell cited a Truth Social post in which Trump had ranted that benefits would be given “only when the Radical Left Democrats open up the government, which they can easily do, and not before!”
“This Court is not naïve to the administration true motivations,” McConnell wrote.
And when Judge Allison Burroughs ruled that the administration had violated the First Amendment when it froze more than $2 billion in federal research grants to Harvard University, she found that Trump’s social media posts corroborated the university’s claims.
The posts showed that the administration’s war on Harvard was “much more about promoting a governmental orthodoxy in violation of the First Amendment than about anything else, including fighting antisemitism,” wrote Burroughs.
In a statement to CBS, the White House said the president’s posts “aren’t the problem,” and accused federal judges of “pushing their own policy agenda.”
“The American people love and value President Trump’s transparency,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said.
The plaintiffs in the cases would appear to agree on that point, at least.
“We say, ‘Let him keep talking. Let him keep tweeting,’” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of a legal organization called Democracy Forward that has filed hundreds of lawsuits against the administration.
Perryman told CBS that the posts help the group’s cases by showing both the courts and the American people that “the administration is taking a range of actions that are motivated, often unconstitutionally motivated, by the president’s own viewpoint or retribution agenda.”
The Daily Beast has also reached out to the White House for comment.
