Can The Federal Courts Still Tar Trump With The Brush of Bigotry Against Muslims and Hispanics?

The 2024 election results suggest just the opposite.

There was a constant theme in the #Resistance litigation during President Trump's first term in office: he is a bigot, and everything he does is tainted by bigotry. The prime example was the travel ban. Federal judges in Hawaii, Maryland, Brooklyn, and elsewhere gleefully cited President Trump's tweets to show that he had animus against Muslims. As I wrote at the time, they tarred Trump with the brush of bigotry. Similar reasoning was raised in the challenge to the cancellation of DACA. The New York Attorney General argued that the policy could not be wound down due to Trump's animus against Hispanics. The AG cited Trump's interview with Jorge Ramos, lines about "bad hombres," and countless other tweets. At the time, I wrote that even if these "comments should have given pause to his voters, courts cannot properly consider them in evaluating this policy."

Now, as the second term begins, the #Resistance is already starting to whirl again. But will these same animus arguments work? Can California and New York and Maryland once again argue that everything Trump does is tainted by bigotry against Hispanics and Muslim people? Is Trump perpetually tainted? I'm sure they'll try to make that argument. But there is some countervailing evidence. The 2024 election returns!

For starters, Trump won the most votes in Dearborn, Michigan, the city with one of the highest Arab populations in the country!

Unofficial results released by the city of Dearborn show that Mr. Trump won 42 percent of the vote in Dearborn, compared with 36 percent for Ms. Harris and 18 percent for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.

In 2020, similar results released after the election showed that Mr. Biden had won almost 70 percent of votes by Dearborn residents. . . .

This week, the sentiments of Arab and Muslim Americans in Dearborn were heard through the ballot. In interviews with The Times on Tuesday outside polling stations, voters backing Mr. Trump said they wanted to give him a chance to rein in wars across the world and bring peace to the Middle East.

Despite everything that we have been told over the past decade, a significant share of Muslim voters chose Donald Trump over Kamala Harris. Certainly they know more about Muslim animus than some cloistered judges on the Acela corridor.

The trends were even greater for Hispanic voters:

President-elect Donald Trump was backed by 46% of Latino voters Tuesday, surpassing Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush to win the biggest share of the national Latino vote by a Republican presidential contender in modern times, a new exit poll shows.

These mini vignettes concretize how much the #Resistance movement overplayed their hand. Calling Trump a bigot every day for a decade has had no actual impact on voters. None. The Times observed regarding Muslims:

Many voters brushed aside comments Mr. Trump has made that were critical of Muslims, and some of them cited his willingness to visit Dearborn and bring prominent local Muslim leaders onstage at a recent campaign rally as evidence of an olive branch.

And Axios reported about Hispanics:

Latino voters appeared to look beyond the racist rhetoric Trump's used to describe undocumented immigrants in an election in which the economy and inflation were top concerns of many voters.

All of the attacks on Trump were mostly noise. It was Lawfare designed to cripple a presidency. Yet during the first term, courts sopped this slop up.

What happens in Trump's second term? You might say that courts should not take cognizance of electoral returns. I agree, and I'll raise you one more: courts should have never performed a "judicial psychoanalysis of [Trump's] heart of hearts," to quote McCreary County. But psychoanalyze they did. And if judges are going to go off script, they may as well consider improper evidence that supports Trump.