What Happens If a President Defies the Courts?

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n his first month back in the White House, President Donald Trump and his allies have intervened in almost every corner of the federal government.

As Trump has sought to freeze billions of dollars in federal funding through executive orders, billionaire Elon Musk — who by all appearances has been tasked with leading the informal “Department of Government Efficiency” — has overseen thousands of layoffs at different government offices. And newly appointed agency heads are scrubbing away federal initiatives related to transgender people, climate justice or diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).

In response, Democrat-led states and civil rights groups are pushing back against these sweeping moves by suing the administration.

In many of these lawsuits, the courts are ruling against Trump, arguing that his plans go against the Constitution of the United States — the 237-year-old document that establishes how the American government works and lays out the relationship between the president, Congress and the courts.

Several federal judges, for example, have already frozen Trump’s executive order that would end birthright citizenship for children born in the U.S. to parents without a permanent immigration status on the grounds that it defies the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment.

A ‘constitutional crisis’?

The White House has responded to unfavorable court decisions by attacking the authority of judges. “If a judge tried to tell a general how to conduct a military operation, that would be illegal,” Vice President J.D. Vance said on social media platform X earlier this month. “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

And Trump himself has gone even further: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump posted on social media, referencing a quote frequently attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte.

U.S. history is full of instances where one branch of government disagrees with another. However, both historians and legal experts note that when these disagreements happen, the branches do not question — or defy — the others’ authority. As the White House doubles down on its anti-court rhetoric, more news outlets and constitutional scholars have started to use the term “constitutional crisis” to emphasize the seriousness of the situation.

But what does this term actually mean? And what could happen in the coming weeks and months if the White House potentially defies the judicial branch altogether?

How the Constitution allows the courts to challenge the other branches

In 1787, dozens of men, including George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, gathered in Philadelphia to design a new system of government for the United States, then barely four years old with a weak central government that was struggling to respond to the nation’s problems. One question they faced was: how do you create a central government that possessed enough authority but could not abuse its power?

Their solution was splitting the power of the central government between three branches: the executive, legislative and judicial. Each branch has tools to preserve its own authority and limit the actions of the other two, known as the system of checks and balances.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” future president James Madison (or Hamilton) said in a 1788 essay explaining the system of checks and balances. “It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government.”

A president can veto legislation from Congress; Congress can impeach and remove a president; a president can appoint judges; and Congress can remove them. But how would the judiciary, led by the Supreme Court, check the other two branches?

“Some of the framers called the judiciary the weakest branch because it wouldn’t be able to enforce its decisions other than through institutional respect for it,” said Bernadette Meyler, a professor at Stanford Law School who specializes in constitutional law and history.

However, soon after the Constitution was adopted as the “supreme Law of the Land,” the Supreme Court soon began to flex its muscles. In an 1803 case, the court affirmed — for the very first time — its power to review acts of Congress and strike down those acts it finds to be unconstitutional. And in the 200 years since then, Congress has respected the court’s judicial review process.

In the 20th Century, the court also began to check the president. In 1952, the Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional for President Harry Truman to seize private steel mills for the Korean War effort, and despite disagreeing with the decision, Truman obeyed the court. Decades later, the Supreme Court successfully ordered President Richard Nixon to hand over tapes of conversations with his associates, who were accused of being involved in the Watergate scandal.

But if the Supreme Court has no military or budget at its command, why do the other branches listen to it? Its authority comes from historical precedent, said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the School of Law at UC Berkeley.

“Throughout American history, presidents — Democrats and Republicans — adhered to court orders even when they disagreed with them,” Chemerinsky said.

If the president abandons this precedent and instead disobeys the courts, it would put the U.S. in completely uncharted territory, Chemerinsky said. “Then we really have a constitutional crisis unlike what we’ve seen before,” he said.

What could happen if a president defies the courts

A month into Trump’s second term, no case against his administration has been heard by the Supreme Court.

However, federal judges at the lower levels of the judiciary have already pushed back against the White House. Besides freezing Trump’s birthright citizenship order, judges across the country have halted orders that would have ended federal funding to medical institutions providing gender-affirming care for transgender youth, rejected the White House’s plan to freeze millions of dollars for scientific research and prevented the administration from firing officials at certain independent agencies.

But what can the courts do if the White House, which insists its authority is being unfairly limited, ultimately disobeys their rulings? Then, the courts could “hold the government officials who carry out the president’s policies in contempt of court,” Chemerinsky said, adding that it’s unlikely for a sitting president to be held in contempt.

There are two different types of punishments for disobeying a court: civil contempt and criminal contempt.

“In civil contempt, someone is fined or put in jail until they comply with the court order,” Chemerinsky said.

Criminal contempt, however, is a punishment that can also include either jail time or hefty fines.

The president can pardon someone who has been convicted of criminal contempt but not civil contempt.

“The contempt power can theoretically be used to put [executive officials] in jail until they comply,” said Pamela Karlan, who teaches at Stanford Law School and helps lead the institution’s Supreme Court Litigation Clinic. “If it comes to that, we are going to be beyond the constitutional crisis. At that point, our government is falling apart.”

The courts also have the power to order “remedies,” Stanford Law’s Meyler said, actions to make up for the harm or unlawful action someone has experienced. One common example of this is when a judge finds that an employee was wrongfully terminated by their employer, the court can either order that the employee get their job back or receive compensation for damages.

“If the court held that a removal of a particular officer was unconstitutional, there might be some way in which the courts, through their equitable power of crafting remedies, could have some effect,” Meyler said.

How Trump has been able to enact his plans so far — even when legal experts say they’re unlawful

Ahead of Trump’s inauguration, KQED spoke to multiple legal experts to ask if his campaign promise to end birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants would go against established law. All of them said yes and went as far as to say that doing so would violate the Constitution and decades of judicial precedent.

But Trump still went ahead and, on his first day back in office, signed an executive order limiting birthright citizenship.

When Trump enacts executive orders that go against established law or longstanding judicial decisions, Meyler said his ultimate intention could be to reopen these policy questions through court decisions. In other situations, she said, the White House may be getting its way for now — dismissing thousands of federal employees, for example — because the courts simply move slowly.

“There’s a gap in time between when the executive fails to comply with law and when the court’s finally adjudicated,” she said.

It’s also important to remember that in certain instances, the courts may actually side with Trump — even if their decisions run contrary to public opinion.

“A lot of people are counting on the courts to jump in and save us from this person that we elected, and our Constitution just may not be up to the task of doing that,” said Jodi Short, professor at UC Law San Francisco, who focuses on constitutional law.

Another reason Trump is able to further his agenda so quickly and forcefully in his first month: Congress, where Trump-friendly Republicans control both the House and the Senate, has so far shown little interest in reining in the White House.

Throughout the nation’s history, Congress has used a variety of tools — legislation, censures (a formal condemnation of an official) and even impeachment — to stop presidents who have acted against established law. But so far into this administration, Republican Congressional leaders have not utilized these tools.

What the consequences of a constitutional crisis could look like

For Chemerinsky, Trump’s threats against the courts signal the president’s belief that he is ultimately above the law.

“The core of the rule of law is that no one, not even the president, is above the law,” he said. But if the president doesn’t have to comply with the Constitution, federal laws and court orders, “then he’s truly above and outside the law,” said Chemerinsky.

“We call a ruler like that a dictator,” he said.

When the framers of the Constitution headed back home from Philadelphia in 1787, many promised the public that the purpose of the document was to prevent one branch of government from reaching unlimited power. Ultimately, the Constitution is a promise from the government to the American people of how it will behave and “envisions a system where our elected officials are also supposed to be acting within the bounds of the law,” UC Law’s Short said.

“When the government works, it often works in ways that are invisible,” she said, providing an example of how Americans expect to receive clean water when they turn on their taps. “That’s occurring because of layers and layers of government regulation, but you never think about it until it doesn’t work.”

In its search for government “waste,” the Trump administration has fired thousands of highly trained career officials who had direct roles in ensuring the safety of the public, including inspectors at the Federal Aviation Administration, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pest control experts at the Department of Agriculture, among many more.

“People love to focus on the way that the government intrudes into their lives in negative ways, but the government supports our ability to exist in a highly developed and privileged society,” Short said. “[When] the agencies supporting all of that get gutted and politicized, I think it’s a huge threat to our everyday standard of living.”