Leonard Leo is a conservative activist who helped Donald Trump create the most lasting legacy of his first term: the appointment of 226 federal judges, including three to the Supreme Court. As the longtime head of the Federalist Society, an organization of young conservative lawyers, Leo nurtured and advanced many of Trump’s nominees.

Yet now Trump has turned on Leo, denouncing him as a “real ‘sleazebag’” and “bad person who, in his own way, probably hates America.”

Trump’s intemperate tantrum reveals his deepening fury, and frustration, with federal judges — including some he appointed with Leo’s advice — who are thwarting his attempts to reshape the federal government.

The New York Times calculates those judges have blocked Trump’s initiatives in more than 180 cases covering a wide range of issues — closing agencies and firing workers; deporting migrants and imposing tariffs; attacking law firms, news outlets and universities. Trump has called for impeaching some of his more obdurate judicial opponents, and Reuters reports that at least 11 judges and their families have faced threats of violence from Trump supporters.

“Trump’s attack on the judges is an attempt to undo the separation of powers,” Ty Cobb, one of Trump’s lawyers during his first term, told the Times. “It’s an attempt to take what is three coequal branches and make it one dominant branch.”

In Trump World, only one allegiance matters: to King Donald. You wear a red hat, or you don’t. But when they are admitted to the bar, lawyers swear to defend legal principles and constitutional order, even if those values clash with their political leanings.

That difference in perspective, and motivation, is clearly visible in today’s Washington. Only two House Republicans voted against Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill setting tax and budget policy, while every Democrat opposed it. Yet 72.2% of federal judges appointed by Republicans have ruled against Trump, according to statistics compiled by Stanford political scientist Adam Bonica. Their rate of rejection almost matches judges named by Democrats, who oppose Trump 80.45 of the time.

Writing for the Substack blog On Data for Democracy, Bonica argues that the “most compelling” explanation for the current “judicial rebellion” is a “collision of loyalties.”“The Trump administration’s escalating attacks on the legal profession itself — from targeting major law firms to individual judges … appears to have triggered a defensive reflex,” he writes. “Judges, even highly partisan ones, often harbor deep-seated loyalties beyond political alignment: to the integrity of their profession, to the judiciary as an institution, and to the elite educational establishments that trained them. When forced to choose between political allegiance and professional identity, many are choosing the latter.”

That’s exactly the way the system is supposed to work.

When George Washington left the presidency in 1796, he warned: “The common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and the duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”

Today, it’s the “judicial rebellion” that must defend democracy against the “common and continual mischiefs” coming daily out of the White House.