The decision this past week by Judge Christopher R. Cooper to hand President Donald Trump a legal victory but denounce his wrecking-ball approach to government reform showed, if nothing else, the tensions confronting the federal bench in Washington.

Even as he admitted that the district courts might not always be the place to stop Trump’s bid, Cooper, in a ruling issued Thursday, acknowledged that the new administration had been marked so far by “an onslaught of executive actions” leading to “disruption and even chaos.” Chief among them, he wrote, were serial efforts to gut government agencies and slash the federal workforce.

Many of these proposals have landed at the feet of Cooper and his fellow jurists in U.S. District Court in Washington who have spent the past four years dealing with an exhausting caseload emerging from efforts by Trump and his supporters to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Now these same judges are grappling with how to handle a different sort of power grab by Trump, sometimes halting his blizzard of executive actions and sometimes letting them move forward.

“These mixed results should surprise no one,” Cooper said, in what almost seemed to be a tone of somber resignation. “Federal district judges are duty-bound to decide legal issues based on evenhanded application of law and precedent — no matter the identity of the litigants or, regrettably at times, the consequences of their rulings for average people.”

This frank confession came as he and the 23 other federal judges in Washington have faced a tsunami of emergency petitions in the past few weeks, arising from a complex constellation of concerns and leading to a series of hastily called hearings.

The issues they have dealt with, essentially on the fly, have been mind-bogglingly varied: transgender rights, immigration policy, the status of independent agencies and the inner workings of Elon Musk’s government efficiency body.

“It’s absolutely extraordinary, just on the numbers of issues being raised,” said Nancy Gertner, a former federal judge who was appointed to the bench by President Bill Clinton.

“Then again, Washington is the seat of government. It’s where all of this stuff happens.”

While some of the Trump cases are being heard in courts outside Washington — matters are pending in Maryland, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, for example — many of the proceedings are playing out in the capital, where politics is the impassioned local pastime.

That has often meant that the judges handling these matters have faced a torrent of partisan abuse even as they struggle against the clock with complicated questions. They have suffered calls for impeachment from powerful figures like Musk.

Last week, Judge Carl J. Nichols, who was appointed by Trump, took the seemingly innocuous step of extending an order temporarily barring the U.S. Agency for International Development from involuntarily evacuating its employees from overseas assignments. Shortly after, someone posted a photo of him on social media with a caption reading, “DOMESTIC ENEMY.”

In a similar fashion, just hours after Judge Tanya S. Chutkan was assigned a case questioning Musk’s role as a government employee, an ally of Trump attacked her online.