'No One's Going to Get Out of This Moment Intact by Keeping Their Head Down'

At a nondescript building not far from the White House, Skye Perryman recently convened a call with a group of seasoned lawyers. The purpose? To work through particularly thorny questions about an array of legal challenges they had launched to try to thwart President Donald Trump.

These were the senior litigators of Democracy Forward, a progressive legal advocacy group that Perryman leads, and which has been battling the Trump administration in the courts all year. But in the middle of the call, the group was abruptly reminded of two of the biggest difficulties they face — not just the relentless pace but the administration’s incessant efforts to quickly move cases to a friendly Supreme Court.

Lawyers for Democracy Forward had previously won a round against Trump when they obtained a lower court ruling in September that blocked the administration from another high-level firing in the executive branch (this time, the director of the U.S. Copyright Office). But now, they had just learned, the Trump administration had gone to the Supreme Court to stay the ruling and proceed with the firing.

Welcome to the legal resistance to Trump 2.0, where the onslaught of controversial executive actions has far outpaced that of the president’s first term and a series of battles in the courts will determine the shape and scope of presidential power for decades to come.



https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/11/24/democracy-forward-skye-perryman-legal-resistance-trump-00651457