What Happens If Trump Defies Court Orders?

By Matt Cohen

Since the minute President Donald Trump returned to the White House, his actions have been met with a litany of lawsuits. There’s currently numerous legal battles challenging executive orders Trump signed on day one: an end to birthright citizenship, the freezing of government agency funding to crucial programs and services and gutting of the federal work force — the first step in the grand plan to remake the American government into an authoritarian regime. 

And, so far, the courts have consistently ruled against the Trump administration. Federal judges have blocked the White House’s federal funding freeze, the birthright citizenship executive order and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE)’s access to sensitive information in several key agencies. It’s a win not just for democracy but for the constitutional laws that established the system of checks and balances that ensure the executive branch doesn’t take over with impunity.

But these series of court orders have clearly irked Trump and his administration. After the Office of Management and Budget rescinded its initial memo indicating a freeze in federal funds — following a pair of lawsuits — White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tried to assert otherwise, in a post on X that spectacularly backfired. And after a federal judge blocked DOGE’s access to sensitive Treasury information, Elon Musk fumed on X: “A corrupt judge protecting corruption,” he wrote. “He needs to be impeached NOW!”

Even Vice President JD Vance chimed in on X, posting an inaccurate, yet ominous, statement about the court orders. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” he said.

All of this is teeing up what some legal experts worry could be a constitutional crisis. Or, to put it simply: what happens when the Trump administration blatantly defies the courts? 

A constitutional crisis looms

Whether or not the Trump administration knows that these executives are unlawful is beside the point. It’s clear that — court order or not— the White House is going to fight to keep these policies in place. But if the administration chooses to defy court orders in order to protect their policies, what happens next? 

“I think the fundamental answer is that we don’t know,” Aziz Huq, a constitutional law scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, told Democracy Docket. “There have been moments where there have been some level of defiance on nonconformities to judicial orders in the past.” He points to the aftermath of Brown v. Board of Education, which integrated schools and which many states, for years, defied the ruling. But even then, that was a case of the state opposing the federal government, rather than the federal government defying the courts. 

There’s mechanisms in place for defying a court order — like fines and holding the offending parties in contempt. But because of the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark ruling last year, the president is likely immune from criminal prosecution for official acts. 

But despite some legal scholars calling the current legal saga a constitutional crisis, others are cautioning that it’s not quite at that level yet. Speaking to NPR, Kristin Hickman, a professor of administrative law at the University of Minnesota Law School, said that, “we’re not there yet and we have no guarantee we’re ever going to get there. It is not healthy for our body politic for us to overreact and roll around a lot of overheated rhetoric.”

And yet, on the other side, the White House itself is calling the situation a constitutional crisis because judges are ruling against the administration. “We believe these judges are acting as judicial activists rather than honest arbiters of the law,” Leavitt said in a press conference Wednesday. 

Huq is also cautious about calling the current situation a constitutional crisis. For starters, the matter has yet to reach the Supreme Court, which would have the final word on the constitutionality of the Trump administration’s executive orders. Should Trump defy the Supreme Court, that could create something of a constitutional crisis — and one that could have a chilling ripple effect. 

“Once you have the President saying, “Well, I don’t need to follow a court order. What about governance? What about sheriffs? What about state legislatures or state judges? Why do they need to?” Huq said. “As with many things that the Trump administration does, I don’t think they thought through their actions and the way that it opens the door to a lot more. And it’s really not clear how that plays out.”

From the get go of the second Trump administration, it was clear that the president would try to pass a bunch of executive orders without any clear indication that he, or his trusted advisors, actually knew if it was legal. 

“Repeatedly throughout the Project 2025 chapters, they say to just move forward, go ahead and implement and worry about defending it in court later,” Jacqueline Simon, the public policy director of the American Federation of Government Employees (AFGE), told Democracy Docket in November. “Expect legal challenges, because they know what they’re doing is unlawful.”

And what’s happening now is exactly that, according to Huq. “One of the problems is that no one knows exactly what they’re doing, exactly what the legal basis is and whether they have a legal justification for it,” he said.

The best example is the actions of DOGE and the mounting legal challenges against the faux-agency. DOGE isn’t actually a new government agency — it takes an act of Congress to make that happen — and thus it doesn’t exercise the authority that a federal agency should have, like seeking access to sensitive data and systems. So then what authority does DOGE and Musk even have? And who enforces that authority?

“It’s not clear that they’re asking those questions,” Huq said. “It’s not clear what legal authority Musk has for doing any of this. If somebody exercises substantial authority of the United States, they have to do so because they were made an officer of the United States. And under the Constitution, an officer has to be nominated and confirmed by the Senate to a position that’s created by statute.”

Huq also pointed to the administration’s bungling of its order to freeze federal funds as evidence that it isn’t thinking about the legality of its actions. “There doesn’t appear to be a lawful basis for withholding the funds,” Huq explained. “Because these are grants that are issued under the different federal statutes — and the federal statutes say different things. If a federal statute requires that the money be spent, then withholding the money or ending the program is unlawful.”