This summer has been full of towing gone wrong. Back in May, a Ford Expedition sent a poor Saab 9-3 whipping around a Texas highway in a flat tow gone wrong. Later that month, I got a U-Haul stuck in mud after losing the key fob to a beautiful Ford F-350. Yet, I think I found it. Here’s the dumbest towing fail of the summer. Watch as a man straps a broken Mercury Montego to a broken Honda Pilot and fails so hard that an innocent Phở got obliterated twice in the process.

This news comes to us from the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office of Washington state, and the absolute mega failure of a disaster occurred on July 30 while stores weren’t open and folks were either sleeping or only just waking up for their day. Thankfully, this means that nobody got physically hurt. Instead, our victims here look to be what might have been a repairable Mercury Montego sedan and the UP Phở and Teriyaki of University Place, Washington. I feel very much for the owners of this establishment, as they seem to have some long days ahead of them.

Now, it would be easy to just laugh at the guy for his complete failure to tow a disabled car, but I’m going to take a different path here. I’m going to analyze this failure step-by-step and see what the person could have done here. Watch the video because it’s hilarious:

If At First You Don’t Succeed…

Our story starts off at around 5:44 p.m. on July 29. Security camera footage obtained by the Pierce County Sheriff’s Office shows a red Mercury Montego rolling through the parking lot and successfully stopping and parking at the AutoZone next to UP Phở and Teriyaki. The Sheriff’s Office says that the driver indicated that the vehicle was not driving properly and that they would return to tow the vehicle away. Alright, fair enough. I’ve been in that situation before.

The footage now spins over to July 30 at 3:41 a.m. as a white first-generation Honda Pilot appears on scene. The Pilot, which is rolling on a donut spare on its left rear side, is hitched up to a dolly.

The footage then rolls over to 5:13 a.m., suggesting that the driver had been wrenching and perhaps failed to fix whatever was wrong on the Ford. Confusingly, the driver of the Pilot doesn’t drive the Montego onto the dolly, but instead straps the car to the tongue of the dolly. As the Pilot and Montego pull away, a floor jack is left behind. The existence of the floor jack positioned where the Ford’s left front wheel was would have me thinking that there was a braking issue or perhaps a bad axle.

Anyway, it gets way worse from here, because the Honda Pilot’s pilot attempts to pull his rig out onto the road.

The image above is the parking lot on Google Street View. The lot itself sits on a gentle slope with the businesses on the bottom, but then the slope increases at the entrances to the lot. This is a terrible place to try to rescue a car out of all by yourself.

The Pilot driver’s strap setup works right up until he gets to the exit of the lot. Then, he stops because of cross traffic. Behind him, the Ford continues forward briefly, stops, rolls back, and then breaks the tow rope.

Oh, and a bunch of crap falls out of the guy’s tailgate while all of this was happening. The police don’t explain, but somehow, the Ford was able to be stopped and was abandoned at the parking lot entrance where the tow rope broke. If I had to guess, maybe someone was in the car and immediately threw it in park.

…Fail Again

Our hero returns at 5:50 a.m., and here’s where things get weird. The dolly is still attached to the Pilot, but now the front of the Pilot is facing the rear of the Ford. The police say that the man attempts to secure the car to the Honda again, but to my eyes, it looks like he’s trying to wrench on it one more time. You wouldn’t be hooking up a tow strap to the left front side where he was lying on the ground.

Either way, whatever he was doing failed when the car took off. Good ol’ gravity did its job and accelerated the car down the parking lot until the vehicle destroyed the entrance to UP Phở and Teriyaki. If you watch the video, you’ll see the guy hanging from the vehicle’s left mirror and hopelessly kicking his feet at the ground, hoping to achieve something. A well-equipped Mercury Montego weighs a little under 4,000 pounds, so whatever he was doing was a complete waste of time.

Amazingly, the doofus here is brazen enough to pull up in front of the destroyed restaurant with his broken Pilot. It’s here that we also get a look at his dolly, which doesn’t even have fenders or built-in straps. However, it clearly has ramps, spots to park the vehicle’s tires, and presumably, places to strap the wheels down.

Somehow, he manages to do something even dumber than his original towing attempt. This time, he fashioned a ridiculously long tow strap out of two or three tow straps knotted together into one mega strap. This works well enough to pull the Ford out of the restaurant, and save for piles of storefront glass on the hood, the Ford actually doesn’t look all that bad.

Now, you’d think our guy would stop and attempt to put the car onto the dolly, but I suppose he’s just trying to get out of there because, you know, he just destroyed a building. This time, he manages to get the Honda onto the road, but the Ford, which was probably about 45 feet or so behind the bumper of the Pilot, turns into the curb and shrubs at the entrance of the parking lot. The strap breaks again, and the Ford once again sails right into the entrance of UP Phở and Teriyaki.

This time, it appears the Ford slammed into a support column in front of the restaurant, saving the restaurant itself from a second direct hit.

Third Time’s A Charm?

Despite now failing twice in a row, the Honda guy still didn’t learn his lesson, and at 5:54 a.m., he hooks up to the Ford one more time, still using the extremely long strap. This time, a woman hops out of the Pilot and seemingly attempts to help the guy steer the Ford out of the lot. This, of course, fails. Using a tow strap was a dumb idea from the start, but a tow strap that’s over 40 feet long is even dumber. As you can see in the video, the Honda makes a complete turn while the Ford doesn’t even change directions.

First, the Ford almost slammed into the poor shrubs it had hit only a few minutes earlier, but the driver recovered, dragged the rear end over, and instead rammed the Ford into the retention wall and shrubs on the other side of the entrance. He doesn’t give up yet and pulls the car over the curb and shrubs, gets it across the parking lot, and then just abandons the car.

University Place deputies responded to the area only minutes later, at around 6 a.m., to find the Ford wedged into a parking space stop at the south end of the parking lot. The Honda Pilot pilot was nowhere in sight. Footage from the responding officer shows that the Ford had paint marker writing on its windshield. Perhaps the vehicle had only recently come from an auction or a junkyard sale. Sadly, it’s hard to make out what the markings said.

Police are looking for the suspect and the woman who was with him. Meanwhile, the owners of UP Phở and Teriyaki have a lot of damage to fix.

Update: A reader has pointed out that this car is not a Ford Five Hundred, but a Mercury Montego, the Ford’s rebadged upscale sibling!

So Many Ways To Have Done This Better

There are so many ways that this could have gone better. I’ve been in his position before. I’ve had a car break down on me, and either didn’t have the money to get it towed or thought I could tow it myself. I think this could have been successful with better planning.

If the car just didn’t have brakes, but still ran, he could have used gravity to his benefit. Park the Honda Pilot, siding uphill in the parking lot, and inch the Ford up the hill and onto the dolly. Then strap the car to the dolly and, as the kids say, “Bob’s your uncle.”

If the issue was that the axle was shot, that had a solution, too. Put someone in the car, fire up the engine, and pull it up the parking lot just far enough to get the Pilot in front of it. The person in the car can apply the brakes and put the vehicle in park if anything bad happens. Then, just use gravity to get the car onto the dolly.

If everything was broken, as in the car didn’t have brakes and didn’t start, I could see inching the car onto the dolly using a come-along winch, the wide array of straps that he already had, the woman he had along for the ride as an extra pair of hands, and some wheel chocks. A Harbor Freight was only 17 minutes from where this incident occurred, where he could have bought tools to make this recovery safer and easier. Of course, the Harbor Freight wasn’t going to be open at 5 a.m., and maybe the fella needed the car gone right then and there.

Either way, every single decision this guy made was the wrong one. I’ve been there before. It was only May when I made basically every incorrect decision after losing a press loaner truck’s key. But this one is somehow worse, because he destroyed a car and a business and then ran away, leaving everyone else to fix his mistake. It’s also a bit ridiculous because he tried to do the same thing three times, each failing spectacularly, and managed to crash into the same restaurant not just once, but twice.

Anyway, if you somehow happen to know who destroyed UP Phở and Teriyaki of University Place, Washington, both the authorities and the restaurant owner would probably be quite happy to find them. If you happen to get into a situation like this. Watch this video and don’t replicate anything that you’ve seen here.

The post Man Tries And Fails To Tow His Broken Ford Three Times, Somehow Destroys A Restaurant Twice appeared first on The Autopian.

Replace GoogleTV's ad-ridden home screen with something else

Mr. and Mrs. J. K. Cowdery, July 1, 1950.

My mother’s family was Roman Catholic and devoutly so. My father’s family was, as he described it, “vaguely Protestant.” They didn’t go to church and didn’t talk about religion. He had, however, been baptized Catholic at his mother’s insistence. She never took him to church either and divorced his father and left when Dad was six.

That baptism proved crucial when my parents married. They wanted to be married by a priest in her family’s parish church. Her family was not just devout but active in the parish. Her father was friends with the monsignor. Because Dad was baptized, he didn’t need to convert. He just needed to start following the rules. He had to become a practicing Catholic. Attending mass every Sunday was the main obligation. He wasn’t interested. So, the three men negotiated.

Each man had one non-negotiable position. Dad’s was that he would not pretend to be Catholic. Grandpa’s was that the marriage had to be recognized by the church. Monsignor’s was that Dad had to agree to baptize any children and raise them Catholic. Dad agreed so Monsignor allowed them to be married by a priest, though not by him, and not in the sanctuary. Instead, they were married by one of the parish’s other priests, in the house next to the church where the priests lived. 

At Grandpa’s direction, no pictures were taken of the ceremony. Instead, the wedding party adjourned to the front steps of the church and all pictures were taken there, and at the subsequent reception at a local restaurant. Grandpa understood optics.

At a recent Princeton Public Schools’ Board of Education meeting, Teddy, a fourth-grader from one of the district’s schools, got up and delivered a speech about the many reasons that PPS should teach about autism and other disabilities, including “so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future”. Here are Teddy’s full remarks:

Recently, the U.S. Secretary of Health, RFK Jr, made false comments about autism like people with autism are broken, that autism is caused by vaccines, and that people with autism will never have jobs or families. But that’s not true. I have autism and I’m not broken, and I hope that nobody in Princeton Public Schools believes RFK Jr’s lies.

Autism and all disabilities should be taught in the Princeton Public Schools curriculum at all grade levels because it will raise awareness, increase acceptance, and improve the quality of life for kids with disabilities.

But first, here is a quote from a Changing Perspectives article called Disability Inclusion in Education: “A truly inclusive environment does not value one marginalized group over another; instead, it recognizes the unique backgrounds of all members of the community, including but not limited to cultural heritage, religion, socioeconomic status, sexual orientation, gender, disability, or any other differences.”

Princeton Public Schools already recognizes Autism Awareness Month, but not much. There are posters in the cafeteria that say to be kind and inclusive. Students wear blue on April 2nd. But we are never taught about the spectrum of autism. Kids need to be taught more about the different kinds of autism, that autism is a natural variation in the genes that you are born with, not caused by vaccines, and about successful people with autism. The lessons should also be extended to other disabilities like ADHD, cerebral palsy, blindness, deafness, dyslexia, apraxia, and more.

This is important because it will teach kids how to accept people with disabilities. Accepting someone means really understanding someone for who they are and not minding their differences. I want everyone to know that people with autism and other disabilities are not tragedies, but just different, like all people. If everyone understood more about autistic people, and about people with other disabilities, they would know more about how to treat them, what their lives are like, and that they don’t need to be fixed or cured. This will help kids with disabilities have a better life.

When people are aware of disabilities and are accepting them, they will have friends and less bullying. Also, the teachers might be more aware because they learned about the disabilities also. Kids and teachers should know more about disabilities so they do not believe RFK Jr is right about autism, and they choose to treat them in a nice way that is good for the kid. By knowing more about it, kids and teachers will be nicer to the kids with disabilities.

This is important to me and Princeton Public Schools because I have a disability, and I noticed that disabilities are not being taught, only a few people mentioning autism. When teaching about culture, we teach many different cultures to accept them better — because that’s what disabilities are like, a culture, a culture of differences. Princeton Public Schools must add this to the curriculum of all grades and students, so we don’t have people like RFK Jr in the future.

I want to end with the district mission statement: “Our mission is to prepare all of our students to lead lives of joy and purpose as knowledgeable, creative, and compassionate citizens of a global society.” Adding disabilities to kids’ education will make them knowledgeable and compassionate, and help kids with disabilities to lead lives of joy and purpose.

Come on, challenging the district to uphold their own mission statement? That’s an S-tier move right there.

Tags: autism · politics · Robert F. Kennedy Jr · video

Aftermath:

Welcome to Aftermath, a worker-owned, reader-supported news site covering video games, the internet, and the cultures that surround them.

You might remember most of us from Kotaku, where we broke news, covered events, and brought you hard-hitting investigations. You might also have seen us at Motherboard by Vice, The Verge and The Washington Post’s games vertical Launcher. We got back together to start this site not just so we could all blog together again, but to try something new for ourselves and for games journalism.

These days it’s tough for journalism, especially about games. The past few years have seen mass layoffs and site closures, with remaining writers being asked to do more and more with less and less. The ad-supported model is crumbling, social media is a mess, and the businessmen and private equity firms buying up news outlets don’t care about workers, readers, and quality writing, they only care about profits. The five of us saw our sites closed, ourselves and our colleagues laid off, and our workplaces turned hostile in management’s pursuit of growth at all costs. [...]

As workers and owners, we’re beholden to no one but ourselves, and to you, our readers. When you subscribe, you’ll get access to writing that pursues the truth and casts a critical eye on gaming and the internet, that doesn’t need to placate capital or kowtow to PR. You’ll be supporting the kind of journalism our past experience has shown us you like best: honest and irreverent, written for people rather than SEO. You’ll get a site that prioritizes the reader experience, with no invasive popups or ads that burn up your device.

They’re a smart crew, so of course, they’re not launching this on Substack. (They’re using a platform called Lede, upon which the excellent Defector has built itself.) How can you not love a site with this ode to a classic bit of kit: “Bring Back Those Long-Ass Game Show Mics”. An elegant weapon, from a more civilized age.

In an unprecedented 102-page ruling that methodically dismantles the Trump administration’s executive order targeting the law firm Perkins Coie, Judge Beryl Howell has issued a permanent injunction that goes far beyond her initial temporary restraining order. The ruling represents a stark rebuke of what the court calls an “overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints” through the targeted destruction of a law firm that represented Trump’s political opponents.

The ruling excoriates not just the Trump administration’s unconstitutional overreach, but also delivers a withering critique of the law firms that chose to capitulate to similar threats. Drawing on sources from Shakespeare to the Founding Fathers, Judge Howell frames the order as part of a dangerous historical pattern of would-be autocrats targeting lawyers as a path to power:

No American President has ever before issued executive orders like the one at issue in this lawsuit targeting a prominent law firm with adverse actions to be executed by all Executive branch agencies but, in purpose and effect, this action draws from a playbook as old as Shakespeare, who penned the phrase: “The first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.” WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, HENRY VI, PART 2, act 4, sc. 2, l. 75. When Shakespeare’s character, a rebel leader intent on becoming king, see id. l. 74, hears this suggestion, he promptly incorporates this tactic as part of his plan to assume power, leading in the same scene to the rebel leader demanding “[a]way with him,” referring to an educated clerk, who “can make obligations and write court hand,” id. l. 90, 106. Eliminating lawyers as the guardians of the rule of law removes a major impediment to the path to more power. See Walters v. Nat’l Ass’n of Radiation Survivors, 473 U.S. 305, 371 n.24 (1985) (Stevens, J., dissenting) (explaining the import of the same Shakespearean statement to be “that disposing of lawyers is a step in the direction of a totalitarian form of government”).

The importance of independent lawyers to ensuring the American judicial system’s fair and impartial administration of justice has been recognized in this country since its founding era. In 1770, John Adams made the singularly unpopular decision to represent eight British soldiers charged with murder for their roles in the Boston Massacre and “claimed later to have suffered the loss of more than half his practice.” DAVID MCCULLOUGH, JOHN ADAMS 68 (2001). “I had no hesitation,” he explained, since “Council ought to be the very last thing that an accused Person should want in a free Country,” and “the Bar ought . . . to be independent and impartial at all Times And in every Circumstance.” 3 DIARY AND AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOHN ADAMS 293 (L.H. Butterfield et al. eds., 1961). When the Bill of Rights was ratified, these principles were codified into the Constitution: The Sixth Amendment secured the right, in “all criminal prosecutions,” to “have the Assistance of Counsel for . . . defence,” U.S. CONST. amend. VI, and the Fifth Amendment protected “the right to the aid of counsel when desired and provided by the party asserting the right,” Powell v. Alabama, 287 U.S. 45, 68 (1932). This value placed on the role of lawyers caught the attention of Alexis de Tocqueville, who in reflecting on his travels throughout the early United States in 1831 and 1832, insightfully remarked that “the authority . . . intrusted to members of the legal profession . . . is the most powerful existing security against the excesses of democracy.” ALEXIS DE TOCQUEVILLE, DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA 301 (Henry Reeve trans., 2002) (1835).

Quoting Shakespeare, John Adams, and Alexis de Tocqueville all in the first two paragraphs? You can tell we’re in for quite a ride. But the key point is this: Trump is acting like a dictator, doing things he cannot be allowed to do:

The instant case presents an unprecedented attack on these foundational principles. On March 6, 2025, President Trump issued Executive Order 14230 (“EO 14230”), 90 Fed. Reg. 11781 (Mar. 11, 2025), entitled “Addressing Risks from Perkins Coie LLP.” By its terms, this Order stigmatizes and penalizes a particular law firm and its employees—from its partners to its associate attorneys, secretaries, and mailroom attendants—due to the Firm’s representation, both in the past and currently, of clients pursuing claims and taking positions with which the current President disagrees, as well as the Firm’s own speech. In a cringe-worthy twist on the theatrical phrase “Let’s kill all the lawyers,” EO 14230 takes the approach of “Let’s kill the lawyers I don’t like,” sending the clear message: lawyers must stick to the party line, or else.

At the end of this paragraph, there’s a footnote which calls out those law firms that capitulated, noting that this should scare clients away from using those law firms, as you can never believe that they’re not just aligned with the government’s interests over a client’s.

This message has been heard and heeded by some targeted law firms, as reflected in their choice, after reportedly direct dealings with the current White House, to agree to demand terms, perhaps viewing this choice as the best alternative for their clients and employees. Yet, some clients may harbor reservations about the implications of such deals for the vigorous and zealous representation to which they are entitled from ethically responsible counsel, since at least the publicized deal terms appear only to forestall, rather than eliminate, the threat of being targeted in an Executive Order. As amici former and current general counsel caution, a “fundamental premise of the rule of law” is that “when parties challenge the government, their lawyers ‘oppose[] the designated representatives of the State,’ and ‘[t]he system assumes that adversarial testing will ultimately advance the public interest in truth and fairness.’ This safeguard against government overreach fails when attorneys cannot ‘advanc[e] the undivided interests of [their] client[s]’ for fear of reprisal from the government.”…

Only when lawyers make the choice to challenge rather than back down when confronted with government action raising non-trivial constitutional issues can a case be brought to court for judicial review of the legal merits, as was done in this case by plaintiff Perkins Coie LLP, plaintiff’s counsel Williams & Connolly, and the lawyers, firms, organizations, and individuals who submitted amicus briefs in this case. As one amicus aptly put it, “[o]ur judicial system is under serious threat when determining whether to file an Amicus Curiae brief could be a career ending decision. But, when lawyers are apprehensive about retribution simply for filing a brief adverse to the government, there is no other choice but to do so.”…. If the founding history of this country is any guide, those who stood up in court to vindicate constitutional rights and, by so doing, served to promote the rule of law, will be the models lauded when this period of American history is written.

This echoes what we wrote back in March. When the history books are written on this, those who capitulated will be remembered as pathetic cowards lacking the backbone to stand up for themselves against injustice.

Judge Howell then calls out just how unconstitutional this is, rightly pointing to two free speech cases that MAGA celebrated in the past two years when they came down: 303 Creative (the case about the fictional homophobic website designer) and Vullo (in which an elected official tried to coerce companies who worked with the NRA to stop doing business with them).

Using the powers of the federal government to target lawyers for their representation of clients and avowed progressive employment policies in an overt attempt to suppress and punish certain viewpoints, however, is contrary to the Constitution, which requires that the government respond to dissenting or unpopular speech or ideas with “tolerance, not coercion.” 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, 600 U.S. 570, 603 (2023). The Supreme Court has long made clear that “no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics . . . or other matters of opinion.” W. Va. State Bd. of Educ. v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624, 642 (1943). Simply put, government officials “cannot . . . use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression.” NRA v. Vullo, 602 U.S. 175, 188 (2024).

This is smart, even if the MAGA faithful don’t care about their own hypocrisy. Judge Howell is putting an exclamation point on that hypocrisy by directly calling out how their stance is a complete 180 to what they claimed to celebrate from the Supreme Court in the last two years.

She’s both calling out their total lack of principles and signaling to the same Supreme Court that made those rulings that, to be consistent with them, they should come to the same conclusion: that these executive orders are both unconstitutional and unconscionable.

I won’t go through all the reasoning (it is a 102-page order, after all), I will call out a few key bits, starting with the Court calling out just how incompetent the DOJ’s filings in the case were:

Neither the government’s motion to dismiss itself or its proposed order cites to any procedural rule as the basis for the requested dismissal, see Gov’t’s MTD; id., Proposed Order, ECF No. 43-2), and the government’s memorandum in support likewise contains no clear statement of the procedural rules relied upon as to each claim, leaving the legal bases for the motion to the Court to discern from vague headings used in the government’s memorandum or to tease out of the text of the same document, despite the critical differences in applicable standards depending on which rule is relied upon. Regardless of whether this reflects a strategy to “disguise[] the nature of its motion,” Pl.’s Opp’n at 5, plaintiff requests denial of any intended government cross-motion for summary judgment “for failure to comply with [D.D.C.] Local Rule 7(h)(1), which requires a statement of undisputed material facts supported by record citations,”

This is notable, if only to call out how almost all of the lawyers at the DOJ who know what the fuck they’re doing in court are either gone or sidelined from these cases. The lawyering from those left over is incompetent, and judges recognize that.

Also called out: the idea that the President can just claim something is “in the national interest” and that makes it unreviewable by a court. Not how it works:

When the government does not even claim that a general policy about security clearances was motivated by national security, judicial review of that policy could not threaten unduly entangling the judicial branch in questions of national security. Instead, the EO invokes “the national interest,” id., a concept seemingly far broader and more nebulous than threats to national security. When asked, government counsel was unable to define what exactly falls within the scope of “the national interest,” see, e.g., TRO Hr’g Tr. at 52:21-53:4, and the scope appears to be essentially unlimited, since disagreements about the benefits of diversity programs in hiring apparently qualify, see EO 14230 § 1, 90 Fed. Reg. at 11781 (stating that plaintiff’s alleged discrimination “represents good cause to conclude that they [should not] have access to our Nation’s secrets”); Gov’t’s Reply at 1 (complaining about plaintiff’s “aggressive DEI practices”). Finding any such government actions judicially unreviewable simply because the Executive branch invoked “the national interest” would represent a breathtaking expansion of executive power at the expense of the constitutionally mandated role of the judicial branch and the concomitant safeguards for the individual rights of Americans.

Judge Howell is also paying attention to Trump bragging about how much money he’s getting from capitulating law firms for doing nothing wrong:

President Trump referred to these deals being cut with law firms, in a speech on April 8, 2025, stating: “Have you noticed that lots of law firms have been signing up with Trump? $100 million, another $100 million, for damages that they’ve done. But they give you $100 million and then they announce, ‘We have done nothing wrong.’ And I agree, they’ve done nothing wrong. But what the hell, they’ve given me a lot of money considering they’ve done nothing wrong. And we’ll use some of those people, some of those great firms, and they are great firms too—they just had a bad moment.”….

The end result of all this is that a permanent injunction has been issued, which Trump is likely to appeal.

The U.S. Constitution affords critical protections against Executive action like that ordered in EO 14230. Government officials, including the President, may not “subject[] individuals to ‘retaliatory actions’ after the fact for having engaged in protected speech.” Hous. Cmty. Coll. Sys., 595 U.S. at 474 (quoting Nieves, 587 U.S. at 398). They may neither “use the power of the State to punish or suppress disfavored expression,” Vullo, 602 U.S. at 188, nor engage in the use of “purely personal and arbitrary power,” Yick Wo, 118 U.S. at 370. In this case, these and other foundational protections were violated by EO 14230. On that basis, this Court has found that EO 14230 violates the Constitution and is thus null and void. For the reasons explained, plaintiff is entitled to summary judgment and declaratory and permanent injunctive relief on Counts II through IX of the Amended Complaint. The government’s motion to dismiss is denied.

What makes this ruling particularly powerful is how Judge Howell deliberately frames it within recent Supreme Court precedents that Trump’s own supporters celebrated. By name-checking both 303 Creative and Vullo, the court makes it clear that those who cheered decisions protecting a website designer’s right to discriminate or defended the NRA against government coercion must now reckon with those same principles protecting law firms from presidential retaliation. While many will fall back on cognitive dissonance to ignore the contradictions, it will hopefully work on some (especially those at the Supreme Court).

The ruling also exposes, yet again, the institutional decay within the Justice Department, where competent career attorneys appear to have been sidelined in favor of those willing to advance legally incoherent arguments. When government lawyers can’t even properly cite procedural rules or define what constitutes “the national interest,” it signals a department that has abandoned legal principle for political compliance.

While this ruling alone won’t stop Trump’s campaign of lawless retribution, it creates a crucial judicial record documenting Trump’s continued weaponization of executive power to destroy those who challenge him. Judge Howell’s opinion doesn’t just reject Trump’s order — it methodically exposes it as part of a deliberate strategy to dismantle the rule of law itself. The question now is whether other courts — and the legal profession as a whole — will demonstrate similar courage in defending constitutional principles against authoritarian assault.