It’s easy to miss – but lower courts are actually doing their job in restraining Trump

‘At a moment when the guardrails of democracy have proven to be made of papier mache, these judges are the rare exception.’ Photograph: Jonathan Ernst/Reuters

Cast your mind back to the American south in the late 1950s, when federal trial court judges were called upon to do a herculean job – enforce the supreme court’s titanic decision in Brown v Board of Education, which struck down the “separate but equal” school segregation regime.

Bear with me for a brief history lesson, because it resonates today.