You may have noticed that the Trump administration seems to be spending more time in court than its predecessors. You may also have noticed that it seems to be on quite the losing streak in those court cases.
What you might not have realized is how remarkably bad the Team Trump record has gotten.
Two-thirds of the cases accuse the Trump administration of violating the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), a 73-year-old law that forms the primary bulwark against arbitrary rule. The normal “win rate” for the government in such cases is about 70 percent, according to analysts and studies. But as of mid-January, a database maintained by the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law shows Trump’s win rate at about 6 percent.
The Washington Post gently hints, with the usual tactfulness expected of a top press outlet, that this is because Donald Trump’s team is made up of bungling incompetents who have been so devoted to overturning prior regulations and policies that they often have hurried past the bits where they’re expected to justify those radical changes with something resembling sound legal logic. And it’s often because of the idiot manchild himself: In at least a dozen cases, Trump’s own tweets and public statements have been offered as evidence of racist-tinged or otherwise illegal decision-making.
What the Washington Post does not mention, in its rundown of Team Trump’s legal setbacks across a wide range of policy battles, is that we probably ought to have expected this from the get-go. The Trump White House has relied heavily on the B-list of the Republican Party, individuals who arrived pre-disgraced from past duties (John Bolton, Larry Freaking Kudlow); or who have been plucked from the Republican far-right flank despite more than ample warnings that something was definitely not quite on the up-and-up (Scott Pruitt, Kris Kobach); or who were elevated from the white-nationalism-and-conspiracy crowd that tends to run roughshod over conservative gatherings like CPAC despite efforts by more serious figures to sweep them under the rug (Stephen Miller); or whom Donald Trump Saw on His Television Set. They were picked for their absolute devotion to Trump and/or his policy goals, not for any identified competence at achieving them.
And with a 6 percent win rate, nobody will be mistaking them for competent anytime soon.