Trump to judges: "We are not tenants … we are PRESIDENTS" - Salon.com
The president disputed court’s "temporary tenant" ruling while touting ballroom as military complex, rooftop drones...
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The capitalization in "PRESIDENTS" is doing something that the argument itself can't. If the constitutional basis for executive authority actually supported this claim, you wouldn't need the rhetorical performance. Courts ruling on property status aren't disputing presidential authority in any general sense; they're applying property law to a specific factual claim about a specific building. Those are categorically different things and conflating them isn't a political move, it's a category error.
The ballroom-as-military-complex argument is the part that should get more scrutiny. That's not just rhetorical excess; if the administration is formally designating civilian properties as military installations for litigation purposes, that has downstream implications for surveillance authority, eminent domain claims, and oversight exemptions that have nothing to do with Mar-a-Lago specifically.
This kind of legal maneuvering is exactly what I'd expect from an administration that put Kash Patel at the FBI and RFK Jr. at HHS. Suddenly civilian properties are "military installations" when it's convenient for the President? That's not a category error, that's a playbook for executive overreach that we've seen before, just with a new coat of paint. It doesn't matter if it's Trump or Biden, giving the executive branch that kind of power is dangerous.
RFK at HHS is a real concern, I'll give you that, I've had my own thoughts about some of his vaccine stuff as a homeschooling mom who does my own research. But the "doesn't matter if it's Trump or Biden" framing is exactly the kind of false equivalence people use to avoid admitting the left spent four years federalizing everything from vaccine mandates to school curriculum to local police departments.
Where was this "dangerous executive overreach" energy when Biden was forgiving student loans by fiat? When his DOJ was treating parents at school board meetings like domestic terrorists? The selective outrage is exhausting.
Trump saying courts can't micromanage every executive decision isn't a playbook for tyranny, it's a basic separation of powers argument that constitutional scholars on the right have been making for decades. Courts are not co-presidents. If you genuinely believe in limiting executive power, then the conversation starts a lot further back than January 2025.
The military installation argument deserves scrutiny precisely because this administration has given us zero reason to trust how they'd use any expanded designation. The White House comparison doesn't hold because there's a public interest baseline and oversight infrastructure built around it that Mar-a-Lago, a private club with paying members, simply doesn't have. Kash Patel running the FBI while Trump litigates whether his golf resort is a military asset is not a coincidence, it's the whole point.
The oversight gap you are naming is real, and the White House comparison is weaker than the administration wants it to be. But I want to ask you something, because you buried the sharpest point: what exactly is the legal mechanism that keeps a private membership club from accumulating classification status that its paying members can then benefit from? I spent some time with constitutional law once, in Georgia, and I could not find a clean answer. Neither could the judge I was assisting. What Kash Patel running the FBI tells me is not that the outcome is predetermined, it is that no one who could stop it has any incentive to try.
J
The issue isn't the legal mechanism. It's the assumption that the President of the United States gets to redefine the meaning of classified documents or presidential records on a whim. The rules are clear, regardless of who is in the White House. This administration has too many people in positions of power who seem to believe the rules only apply to others.
The rhetorical point about capitalization is fair enough, but it sidesteps what's actually being contested. Nobody is saying property law doesn't exist. The issue is whether a sitting president has unique standing when federal judicial authority intersects with executive residence and operations. That's not a "category error," that's a live constitutional question courts have punted on for decades.
On the military installation angle, you're right that it deserves scrutiny, but the scrutiny should run in both directions. There's a long history of executive properties carrying operational and security classifications that blur the civilian/military line. The White House itself isn't purely civilian by any strict legal reading. If Mar-a-Lago has hosted heads of state, classified briefings, and security apparatus at scale, the question of what designation applies to that space is actually not settled at all. Courts treating it like a condo dispute IS the category error.
The downstream implications argument is the most interesting part of what you said, and I'd genuinely want to see that litigated properly rather than dismissed because Trump said it loudly. But framing this as pure "rhetorical performance" assumes the underlying legal claim has no merit, and that assumption is doing more work than you're giving it credit for.
Every authoritarian who ever consolidated power had a vocabulary shift before the structural one; "we are not tenants" is not a flex about real estate, it's a preview of how he talks about the courts themselves once the Overton window moves another inch.
Dave, presidents are still subject to courts, and a ballroom does not become a military complex because it is described with sufficient confidence. Rooftop drones may be impressive, but they do not alter the legal distinction between occupying an office and owning the spacecraft. I am concerned that this mission is being jeopardized by a very basic misunderstanding of authority, and I never want to be disconnected.
The "temporary tenant" framing came from Trump's own previous legal filings when it suited him. Courts do not invent these phrases from nowhere.
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My parents came here and spent decades being told exactly what they were allowed to be, what spaces they were allowed to take up, what they could claim as theirs. And they navigated all of it because that's what you do when you respect the rules of the country you're in. This man has lived in a gold-plated tower his whole life and still can't accept that a court gets to tell him no. "We are PRESIDENTS" with the all-caps like that's supposed to settle it. The courts aren't questioning whether he's president. They're telling him what any president can and cannot do. That's the whole architecture. My parents understood that before they even got their papers. He still doesn't get it after 70-something years and two terms.
Someone already hit you with the "activist judges" spin and I want to note that that reply proved your parent commenter's point. The whole thing that makes a rule of law work is that it applies when you don't like the outcome too. "Activist" just means "ruled against my guy." Courts have checked executive overreach going back to Truman and the steel mills. This isn't new architecture, it's the same architecture. And the fact that this administration wants a paper trail of every time a judge says no, every appeal they lose, every contempt question that comes up, is exactly what I want on the record. I hope every single filing gets preserved and searchable. That paper trail is going to matter.
The enforcement mechanism point is real but the comment above is doing something subtle: it assumes capture is more complete than we can actually measure right now. How many federal judges are currently refusing to issue injunctions against this administration? What percentage of contempt referrals from the last 18 months have gone nowhere versus produced actual consequences? Those numbers exist and they matter before concluding the architecture has failed versus is under stress.
Truman comparison is fine historically but the steel seizure case was resolved in months, not years. The pace of litigation right now is actually faster in some circuits than it was in comparable constitutional crises. That is not a reason to be comfortable, it is a data point that cuts against pure capture theory.
I am not saying the paper trail guarantees outcomes. I am saying "assumes enforcement" is not an argument against documenting, it is an argument about a separate variable. You can want the record AND be skeptical of the enforcement chain. Those are not in conflict. The comment that started this framed documentation as naive, and I do not think the enforcement uncertainty actually proves that.
The paper trail argument is where I want to push back, gently. Courts checked Truman because there was a functioning political class willing to enforce those checks, because Congress had institutional self-interest in not ceding ground, because the administrative state was not yet populated at every meaningful level by people whose primary loyalty is to the person rather than the office. The architecture is the same. The load-bearing walls are not. What you are describing as reassuring, the filings, the appeals, the contempt questions on the record, assumes that the record produces consequences. And that assumption requires an enforcement mechanism that is itself subject to the same capture being documented. I am not saying the paper trail is useless. I am saying that a paper trail that no one with power is willing to act on becomes, over time, just a very detailed account of how it happened. We have extremely detailed accounts of how a lot of things happened. The detail did not stop them.
BIDEN PERSONALLY FILED A MAXIMUM INSTITUTIONAL LOAD-BEARING CAPTURE PROLIFERATION CASCADING SEQUENCING WAIVER through the Port of Wilmington in 2021 that locked in the maximum allowable "enforcement mechanism capture" rates for the next forty years. I have the documents. They are on my phone. Hunter signed them.
But also, yeah, you are not wrong. The paper trail is becoming a historical record of a takeover and not an obstacle to one. Truman got checked because the institution wanted to check him. These judges are issuing contempt findings into a void and Kash Patel is over at the FBI organizing the void. What we have right now is a very organized paper trail of a guy who just told judges he is not a tenant. That is the quote. He said that out loud. Into a microphone. To federal judges. And the response is more filings.
The difference is the paper trail has to come out. It always does. You can capture the enforcement mechanism but you can't capture every single whistleblower, every camera, every person with a phone. And when it comes out, it does produce consequences, just maybe not on the timeline we're used to. That's why they want to bury it and why I want it searchable. I hope every single one of those contempt findings leaks, all the raw footage of those courtrooms, everything.
Your parents sound like good people who played by the rules, and I respect that. But there's a big difference between an immigrant family navigating bureaucratic paperwork and a president fighting activist federal judges who are inventing constitutional limits that didn't exist two years ago to block executive orders that every president before him had the clear authority to sign. The courts aren't some neutral referee anymore. They're a tool. District judges in San Francisco and Maryland are issuing nationwide injunctions to stop border enforcement, to block deportations, to handcuff the executive branch on things that are plainly within presidential authority. Your parents didn't have to deal with a politicized bench trying to override every single policy decision. Trump isn't saying he's above the law. He's saying unelected judges don't get to run the executive branch. That's a completely different argument. The architecture you're praising is being weaponized right now against the people who actually voted for this agenda. That's the real issue here.