“We had a very smooth roll out of the travel ban, but we had a bad court. We’ve had a bad decision.” That was Donald Trump at his White House press conference after the ninth circuit court of appeals restrained his executive order affecting seven Muslim countries.

For good measure, the president added that the ninth circuit “is in chaos ... that circuit is frankly in turmoil”.

When federal “so-called” Judge James Robart made the initial order to block Trump’s executive ban, the president tweeted: “Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!”

Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump)

Just cannot believe a judge would put our country in such peril. If something happens blame him and court system. People pouring in. Bad!

February 5, 2017

On Thursday, an appeals court refused to reinstate Trump’s travel ban.

When another judge blocked the president’s order to withhold funding from cities and towns that refuse to cooperate with immigration authorities, the White House put out a statement that read:

The San Francisco judge’s erroneous ruling is a gift to the criminal gang and cartel element in our country ... This case is yet one more example of egregious overreach by a single, unelected district judge.

Judges get no respect from this president, unless they are a hand-picked “originalist” like Neil Gorsuch, his supreme court appointment. The White House ceremony announcing his nominee to a bunch of claqueurs was a sight for sore eyes. Like a sideshow barker, Trump introduced Gorsuch and “his wonderful wife Louise ... Here they come. So was that a surprise – was it?”

This was the appointment that had been stolen from the Democrats because the Senate refused to consider President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, to replace the recently departed Antonin Scalia.

The New York Times commented: “The presumption should be that Gorsuch does not deserve confirmation, because the process that led to his nomination was illegitimate.”

Judges who don’t toe the line are bad judges in bad courts. Illegitimate appointments of judges who are died-in-the-wool conservatives are “brilliant”.

This is the world of a president who has a distorted grasp of the constitutional construct and his place in it. Little wonder that he wants to be judge and executioner.

One of his many obsessions during the election campaign was the US soldier Sgt Bowe Bergdhal who went missing from his unit in Afghanistan and was captured by the Taliban, until released in a swap with Guantanamo prisoners.

Bergdhal now faces a court martial, but as far as Trump is concerned he’s already been found guilty. He told a slathering mod of supporters: “He deserted. Remember the old days? A deserter, what happened? Bang. Twenty years ago it was bang,” and just to ram it home he gave us a rifle-shooting gesture.

We also saw this failure to grasp constitutional niceties and the separation of powers when he sought to fix the FBI’s investigation into the role Russia played in the US elections. Maybe it also slipped his mind that the first article of Richard Nixon’s impeachment was “obstruction of justice”.

We saw it too with his less than perfect grasp of the first amendment: “I’m going to open up our libel laws so when they write purposely negative and horrible and false articles, we can sue them and win lots of money.”

Clearly, he hadn’t factored in whether the supreme court might have other ideas about the freedom of the press and how much money could be won.

Then we have Article 1, section 9, clause 8 of the US Constitution, about which Trump seems quite oblivious. This is the “emoluments” clause, which Harvard law professors believe the president is violating, largely because he is a beneficiary of potentates, diplomats and other foreign emissaries paying to stay at his over-gilded hotels and clubs.

Quite apart from constitutional requirements there is his flagrant breach of decency by retaining ownership of the Trump organisation, now run by his gormless sons. The potential for corruption is also ably assisted by the fact the the log book of visitors to the White House is now under lock and key or has disappeared entirely.

It is evident that great danger is posed to our powerful ally by a president who doesn’t understand his constitutional duty, the separation of powers and and the limits of his remit. It’s as though he’s still running his companies, where he can bark orders at people and they jump. You wonder how long it takes to sink in that barking orders at Congress, the courts and the media does not produce the same response.

No wonder people have unearthed the 25th amendment to the US constitution and are examining it with fresh eyes. It deals with “presidential vacancy, disability and inability”.

Where a president is emotionally and intellectually ill-equipped for the job and raddled by delusions, the courts and a truth-seeking media become even more important.

In Australia, the immigration minister, Peter Dutton, who carries a field marshal’s baton in his knapsack, is on a mission to bring the courts and the media into line.

The ABC’s Q&A program is never far from the top of the minister’s pet obsessions.

Last week’s instalment of the program got right up his nostril, apparently because physicist Lawrence Krauss said Americans and others are more likely to be killed by a falling refrigerator than a terrorist.

Dutton declared the ABC has a “cultural problem”, Q&A is a “waste of taxpayers’ money” and the board “needs to deal with it”.

He didn’t cite any statistics to rebut Krauss’s assertion about fridges, but maybe he’d be happier if the fridge-to-terror death ratio was a little less uneven.

He was beating the same drum following Zaky Mallah’s appearance on the program almost two years ago. Q&A had “lost the plot, ABC journalists are running a “protection racket”, etc, etc.

If the minister as editor-in-chief is not daunting enough he also seeks to set the agenda for judges and magistrates.

He’s ably assisted in his mission of whack-a-judge by the Murdoch press and, because judges are not permitted to speak up for themselves, the Judicial Conference of Australia has to do it for them.

Most recently he turned on Justice Duncan Kerr, the president of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and a former Labor minister for justice. Without being troubled by the notions like the separation of powers, Dutton weighed in:

When you look at some of the judgments that are made, the sentences that are handed down ... [it’s] always interesting to go back and look at the appointment of the particular Labor government of the day.

The minister provided no evidence about decisions of Justice Kerr that had been infected by Labor party policies while the Judicial Conference of Australia had to point out that the president of the tribunal cannot direct the findings and decisions of other members and in any event the AAT does not hand down “sentences”. As it’s name suggests, it reviews “administrative” decisions.

In February, in the wake of a bail decision that saw a killer released from custody, Dutton declared that Queensland magistrates were “leftwing softies ... [and] hopeless”.

“If you appoint civil libertarians to court benches ... you will get soft sentences and that’s exactly what’s happened here.”

We are living in troubled times. When politicians with a imperfect grasp of propriety are bullying the judiciary and the media, more than ever those two institutions need to hold their ground.