Oregon’s National Guard lawsuit hinges on Trump’s Truth Social posts

After getting off the phone with Oregon Governor Tina Kotek on Saturday, the president mused over something that had baffled him about the call. Kotek had been “very nice,” said Trump in an interview the next day. But she was trying hard to convince him not to send in the National Guard, and that just didn’t make any sense to him. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening?’”

Hours later, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum federalizing 200 members of Oregon’s National Guard to deploy to Portland, and the state of Oregon promptly filed suit to stop it from happening.

In a hearing on Friday, the state of Oregon and the city of Portland presented arguments as to why a federal judge should grant a temporary restraining order against Trump. Over the course of about an hour and a half, the court appearance became a strange collision of television and reality, internet posts and statutory provisions. The two sides veered over a wide swath of legal territory — the prongs of Section 12406, the Posse Comitatus Act, the Administrative Procedure Act, irreparable harm. But the formalized structure of the hearing and the stolid, wood-paneled surroundings could not disguise the sheer insanity at the heart of the case. The lawsuit boils down to two things: the “great level of deference” owed to the Executive Branch when federalizing the National Guard, and the obvious truth that the Executive Branch is, at the moment, completely out of its gourd and posting through it.