President Donald Trump’s allies have openly attacked the federal court system as judges weigh the legality of the torrent of executive actions he’s taken during his first weeks in office—raising questions about what might happen if the Trump administration defies a judicial order.
Vice President JD Vance takes the podium from President Donald Trump as they speak to reporters ... [+]
Elon Musk and Vice President JD Vance have both questioned the courts’ power over Trump in recent days: Vance wrote on X Sunday that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” while Musk called a judge who blocked his Department of Government Efficiency from accessing Treasury records “corrupt” and said he “needs to be impeached NOW!”
Trump is facing dozens of lawsuits challenging his executive orders, including a federal buyout offer for millions of civilian government employees, restrictions on birthright citizenship and a federal grant freeze.
While statements from Musk and Vance have raised speculation about what might happen if Trump refuses to follow opposing court orders, Georgetown Law Professor and former American Civil Liberties Union National Legal Director David Cole predicts Trump won’t defy hundreds of years of precedent set by previous presidents, including Trump during his first term, when “he had the worse won/lost record in the federal courts of any president since FDR, and he followed all the orders against him.”
Vance and Musk are more likely attempting to “bully the courts into not ruling against them,” Cole said, noting Vance’s tweet referring to the president’s “legitimate power” appears to be carefully worded: “the courts have the final say on whether the president’s actions are legitimate or illegitimate, and if they say they’re illegitimate, unconstitutional or contrary to statute, he has to forgo them,” Cole said.
If Trump were to break precedent and create a "constitutional crisis” by defying the courts, Cole said he foresees significant political ramifications, including Republican losses in the next election and intraparty backlash.
The courts could also impose civil penalties against the federal government for refusing to follow its orders or hold Trump officials who defy them in criminal contempt—an unlikely scenario considering Trump’s Justice Department would need to bring the contempt charges, Cole said.
“The fact that lots of presidents have lost on things they deeply care about, including in wartime, including the Civil War, and not defied the courts orders, should not be lost sight of because JD Vance sent out a tweet that could be construed in that way,” Cole said.
The Supreme Court is likely to have the final say on many of Trump’s executive orders working their way through the lower courts, and while its conservative majority leans in Trump’s favor, Cole said it’s unlikely “the Supreme Court will be hesitant” to rule in Trump’s favor “if a case comes forward in which the President has violated the Constitution.” For example, Cole predicted “there’s about a 1% chance that he prevails in the Supreme Court” in seeking to block birthright citizenship, which guarantees citizenship protections to anyone born in the U.S. under the 14th Amendment. A Seattle judge earlier this month paused Trump’s order seeking to rescind birthright citizenship, writing “the president cannot change, limit or qualify this Constitutional right via an executive order.”
Vance, a Yale law school graduate, likened the courts’ attempts to exert power over Trump to a judge trying “to tell a general how to conduct a military operation” or commanding “the attorney general in how to use her discretion as a prosecutor,” he wrote over the weekend on X. In a 2021 podcast interview, Vance said Trump, if re-elected, should “fire every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people” and “when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made this ruling. Now let him enforce it.’” In a February 2024 interview on ABC News, Vance referenced a hypothetical scenario in which he suggested the president should defy the Supreme Court, if it were to rule he couldn’t fire a general, what Vance said would be “an illegitimate ruling.” Vance reiterated the position in a subsequent interview with Politico, telling the magazine “when the Supreme Court tells the president he can’t control the government anymore, we need to be honest about what’s actually going on.”
Trump wrote Tuesday on Truth Social that “certain activists and highly political judges want to…slow down, or stop” DOGE from its “investigation of our incompetently run Government,” a possible reference to U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer’s order barring political appointees from accessing the Treasury Department’s system. Trump called the ruling a “disgrace” on Sunday, telling reporters “no judge should, frankly, be allowed to make that kind of decision.” Trump has a long history of criticizing judges who rule against him: he repeatedly attacked district judges who blocked executive actions during his first term, and he slammed trial court judges overseeing his personal civil and criminal cases.
JD Vance Suggests Judges ‘Aren't Allowed’ To Control Trump After Courts Block His Policies (Forbes)