July 1 came and went, and the new secretary of defense, Mattis, delayed implementing Carter’s order. Then came Trump’s July tweets. A few weeks after the tweets, Trump issued a memorandum to the Defense Department. The Obama Administration had “failed to identify a sufficient basis” for lifting the transgender ban, the memo said. It ordered both DoD and Homeland Security (which operates the Coast Guard) to return to the old policy and to halt payment for sex-reassignment surgery for serving transgender personnel. Defense Secretary James Mattis issued “interim guidance” protecting serving personnel from adverse action until the plan to implement Trump’s memo was completed in February 2018.

A group of serving personnel fearing discharge (under pseudonyms such as “Jane Doe 1”) and named civilians who had made concrete plans to join the military (one such plaintiff, for example, is on medical leave from the Naval Academy in order to receive gender reassignment surgery) went to court, asking for a permanent injunction against the change in policy. On Tuesday, they won an initial victory—an injunction pending a full trial on the merits.

The case involves complex questions about civilian control of the military and judicial deference to Congress and the executive. Right now, though, it’s worth looking at the way Trump’s undisciplined style and statements have swayed yet another court against his administration.

Confronted with Trump’s statements, the government sought refuge in the emerging doctrine of “Oh, That’s Just the President”; that is, it argued, the president may have tweeted or said all kinds of silly stuff—but courts shouldn’t step in until the grownups have a chance to clean up after him. Judge Kollar-Kotelly summed up the argument thus:

the Presidential Memorandum merely commissioned an additional policy review; that review is underway; nothing is set in stone, and what policy may come about is unknown; and regardless, Plaintiffs are protected by the Interim Guidance.

Kollar-Kotelly dismissed this as a “red herring”; she felt constrained to remind the government that the “President controls the United States military … To the extent there is ambiguity about the meaning of the Presidential Memorandum, the best guidance is the President’s own statements regarding his intentions.” Thus, absent an unforeseen turnabout by Trump, the current service members will be discharged next year, often with loss of pension rights and family medical benefits, and the would-be service members will lose their chance for a military career.

She found it significant that the original decision to lift the transgender ban involved several high-level reviews and a RAND study—while the decision to reverse it, as near as the record shows, involved Donald Trump waking up with itchy thumbs. The 2016 policy change, promising the freedom to serve openly, induced transgender service members to come out to their commanders and comrades. Then, Kollar-Kotelly wrote:

The President abruptly announced, via Twitter—without any of the formality or deliberative processes that generally accompany the development and announcement of major policy changes that will gravely affect the lives of many Americans—that all transgender individuals would be precluded from participating in the military in any capacity. These circumstances provide additional support for Plaintiffs’ claim that the decision to exclude transgender individuals was not driven by genuine concerns regarding military efficacy.

In fact, she added, “all of the reasons proffered by the president for excluding transgender individuals from the military in this case were not merely unsupported, but were actually contradicted by the studies, conclusions, and judgments of the military itself” and “had been studied and rejected by the military itself.”