Former Trump White House attorney Ty Cobb on Sunday warned that President Donald Trump’s attacks on the judiciary now represent “one of the greatest threats to our democracy at this stage of the game.”
Cobb, who served as a lawyer for the White House during Trump’s first term, suggested on MS NOW’s “The Weekend” that Congress had been “neutered” by its own cowardice and by Trump’s attacks, to whom it had “ceded basically all control.”
Trump “dictates everything,” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) does, Cobb argued. “That’s tragic because the way the Constitution is designed, Congress, not the courts, were deemed to be the first wave of resistance to an evil president,” said Cobb, now a fierce critic of his onetime boss.
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The attorney noted that Congress actually “has greater powers than the president” with its ability to impeach, spend and declare war, but has “handed it to Trump in a basket with a bow on it, which is dangerous.”
“The courts don’t have the ability to say what’s best for America. They can’t look at a case that way,” he explained. “They have to say what does the Constitution require, and the Constitution really is not adequate to deal with a president as evil as Trump is, somebody whose desire is to accumulate and abuse power.”
By “denigrating the judiciary, Trump is basically trying to weaken one of the only remaining pillar that is standing up to prevent the total authoritarianism that he desires,” Cobb said. “And that war is very dangerous for us all. We need a very strong judiciary, particularly at this time, where the constitutional stresses are extreme and Trump’s abuses of power are unprecedented.”