It’s quite a split screen: The president, vice president, White House deputy chief of staff and unelected co-president publicly goad each other on to ignore a judge’s order, which would usher in a full-blown constitutional crisis.
Meanwhile, the Trump Justice Department on Sunday took up nearly a whole page in a short filing to assure a federal judge that it’s in full compliance with that same order, despite vehemently disagreeing with it.
This divide is a newer, darker iteration of something Donald Trump and his team have been doing for years now: siloing off their most outrageous bombast from the courtroom, with its risk of perjury and contempt charges. But this time, it’s even more dangerous than Trump’s lawyers watering down his constant, false refrain that the 2020 election was stolen in court filings.
That’s particularly so if the administration is acting more in accordance with the Twitter rants than the DOJ’s vow of compliance — a reality indicated by a federal judge in Rhode Island on Monday finding that, in a separate case, the administration was, in fact, violating a temporary restraining order he had issued.
Softening The Ground
After a federal judge in New York blocked Musk and DOGE from interfering with the Treasury Department’s payment system Saturday, Trump, J.D. Vance, Stephen Miller and Elon Musk all publicly expressed the conviction that the judge had done something illegal, seemingly fabricating grounds to ignore his orders, or another unfavorable one down the road.
Trump told reporters on his way to the Super Bowl that “no judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of a decision.”
The other three were even less constrained.
“If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal. If a judge tried to command the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor, that’s also illegal,” Vance tweeted. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
Vance has a long, chilling history of dismissing the validity of judicial orders that would stop an all-powerful executive from hollowing out the federal government to staff it with partisan stooges.
“And when the courts — because you will get taken to court — and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it,’” Vance said in 2021 on a podcast while running for Senate.
He reiterated his position in a 2024 ABC interview, when asked specifically about a president defying a Supreme Court order.
Musk, who has amassed an enormous amount of power in Trump’s administration, tweeted: “A corrupt judge protecting corruption. He needs to be impeached NOW!” He also retweeted an account called “Insurrection Barbie” that mused: “I don’t like the precedent it sets when you defy a judicial ruling, but I’m just wondering what other options are these judges leaving us if they’re going to blatantly disregard the constitution for their own partisan political goals?”
Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff, aired his views on Fox News.
“So, as you’re aware, a radical left judge said that the Secretary of the Treasury cannot access the Treasury computer system,” Miller said. “This isn’t just unconstitutional. That ruling is an assault on the very idea of democracy itself.”
Tiptoeing Up To The Bright Line
The judiciary has no means of enforcing its own decisions; to this point, the separation of powers has been so sacrosanct that presidents (largely) abide by court orders they don’t like, even when they do so grudgingly. For Trump to flatly ignore a court order, for him to openly dare the judge to enforce it, would put the country and democracy in uncharted waters. It’s the bright line that many in Washington fear as the tipping point from Trump’s seizing of extraconstitutional power to ignoring the Constitution altogether.
In a surreal twist, Trump isn’t going to such lengths to act unilaterally because the opposition party controls Congress; his own party does. He wouldn’t run afoul of the law if he directed his Republican majorities to change spending priorities or wind down federal agencies. But his seeming disregard for his allies in Congress, layered on a projected feeling of invulnerability drawn from a very narrow election win, have led him to do nearly everything from the executive branch.
Given congressional Republicans’ professed indifference to his and Musk’s power grab, the judiciary is the only institution willing and powerful enough to counter him.
That makes that dividing line between what the DOJ says in court filings and what Trump’s coterie fires off on social media critically important. If there’s a blurring of that line, if the rhetoric of the latter becomes action unconstrained by the former, Trump has brought us to full-on crisis.
The court order by a federal judge in Rhode Island handed down Monday may indicate which way the winds are blowing — or, at least, that the administration is too incompetent to fully comply with court orders as it takes a sledgehammer to the federal government: The judge found that the Trump administration is not abiding by his decision to block the federal funding freeze.
“Consistent with the United States Constitution, United States statutes, United States Supreme Court precedent, and the [temporary restraining order],” the judge wrote, the administration must restore withheld funds and continue the regular flow of funding, at least while the restraining order is in place.
Hours later, the American Foreign Service Association filed an emergency motion in federal court. The complaint? That the Trump administration is keeping its members on administrative leave — in violation of the judge’s order.
