The United States Department of Justice has filed a court motion so stylistically unorthodox that legal observers are comparing it to asocial media post, deploying the phrases 'Trump Derangement Syndrome,' 'FAKE,' and a string of capitalised insults against a historic preservation charity in a formal bid to dissolve a judicial injunction.
Filed on 27 April 2026 in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, thenine-page motiontargets the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the nonprofit suing to halt construction of a planned £317 million ($400 million) White House ballroom.
The filing invokesSaturday's shooting at the White House Correspondents' Dinneras grounds for urgency, arguing that the existing injunction on construction must be immediately dissolved on national security grounds. The National Trust has refused to drop its lawsuit, and its chief executive released a statement accusing the DOJ of mischaracterising the case.
Legal filings have style conventions. They cite precedent, address the court formally, and ground arguments in statutory and constitutional law. Document 79 in Case No. 1:25-cv-04316-RJL does all of those things, but it opens with a passage that bears no resemblance to standard legal drafting. The motion begins by attacking the plaintiff before making a single legal argument.
'The National Trust for Historic Preservation is a beautiful name, but even their name is FAKE,' thefiling states, 'because when they add the words "in the United States" to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, it makes it sound like a Governmental Agency, which it is not.'
The Trust was in factchartered by Congress in 1949as a private nonprofit and has operated as such ever since. It is not a government agency and has never claimed to be one.
The filing then asserts that the Trust 'suffer[s] from Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly referred to as TDS, as noted by Democrat Senator John Fetterman, of Pennsylvania.' Senator Fetterman did post on X on 26 April 2026: 'drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom,' a reference to Saturday's shooting. The DOJ filing converts a senator's social media quip into what is styled as a medical-grade diagnosis of a plaintiff litigant in active federal court proceedings.
We were there front and center.That venue wasn’t built to accommodate an event with the line of succession for the U.S. government.After witnessing last night, drop the TDS and build the White House ballroom for events exactly like these.pic.twitter.com/eeUBnlSe5y
The motion further attacks the Trust's legal representation, describing it as being 'represented by the lawyer for Barack Hussein Obama, Gregory Craig.' Craig was indeed White House Counsel under President Obama from 2009 to 2010. He responded to the DOJ's demand to withdraw the lawsuit in a letter on 27 April, writing: 'Your assertion that this lawsuit puts the President's life at "grave risk" is incorrect and irresponsible,' as reported byCNBC.
Stripped of its polemical language, the filing does make a substantive legal argument. It invokes Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 62.1, which allows a district court to issue an 'indicative ruling' when it would otherwise lack jurisdiction due to a pending appeal. The DOJ is asking the court to signal that it would dissolve the injunction if the Court of Appeals remands the case for that purpose.
Source: International Business Times UK
