What did Donald Trump do today?

He tried to make it harder to sue his adminstration.

Trump has been in office for just over six weeks, but it is already almost impossible to keep track of the number of lawsuits filed against his administration. Most of these have to do with the extraordinary new powers Trump is trying to grant to himself to ignore budgetary laws, punish people he thinks are his enemies, redefine words in the Constitution, fire government workers without due process, or interfere in state and local government.

Even more remarkable than the number of lawsuits is how many have resulted in victories for the plaintiffs. Few of these cases are fully resolved, but judges have issued a steady stream of defeats for Trump in the form of restraining orders or emergency orders to comply with existing law. (Whether or not Trump is actually obeying these orders is another question.) Judges have issued utterly scathing rulings about Trump's illegal overreaches, in some cases bluntly accusing him of trying to take on the role of a king. 

The plaintiffs in these cases must pay for court fees and legal representation as they go, and may not be reimbursed for their legal costs even when they win. 

Today, the Trump administration told its lawyers to invoke a rarely-used federal court rule that would force plaintiffs to post an additional bond up front. The memo said that Americans who took the Trump administration to court to defend their rights were wasting its time with "frivolous" matters and that their "antics" and "misrepresentations" were somehow endangering the country. 

Judges will still need to grant the motion, which they are not obliged to do, and could set token amounts that would not deter Americans from holding the Trump administration to the law. But legal experts agreed that even the threat might be enough to deter plaintiffs who lacked the effectively infinite resources of the federal government from trying.

Why does this matter?

• An administration that obeys the laws of the United States and respects its courts has nothing to fear from the legal process.

• American citizens have a right to defend their rights in court, even if the president doesn't want them to.

• The president is not a king, and it shouldn't take a federal judge to point that out.