Lawsuits, at this stage, have slowed Trump’s firehose of executive actions, which have included reimagining a 150-year-old citizenship amendment and freezing trillions of dollars in federal spending.

But as restraining orders and injunctions abound, the judges who issue them are prompting suggestions of defiance from Trump’s top deputies, including Vice President JD Vance and billionaire tech CEO Elon Musk.

The conflict between the two branches of government has left many of Trump’s critics warning of a looming “constitutional crisis,” a phrase South Texas College of Law professor Joshua Blackman dismissed as alarmism.

“I think that is an overblown term,” Blackman told the Washington Examiner. “This term doesn’t have a fixed meaning. I think if it gets to the point where Trump says, ‘I’m not going to follow a court order because I don’t want to,’ then maybe we go into a crisis, but we’re nowhere near that now.”

Judges’ orders draw ire

Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, a New York-based judge appointed by former President Barack Obama, sparked the suggestions of judicial defiance over the weekend by issuing an order that temporarily blocked Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency team from accessing Treasury Department records that contained sensitive data, such as Social Security numbers and bank account information.

Some Republicans interpreted the order to mean Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent would also be locked out of the system he was appointed to oversee, though a subsequent ruling clarified that was not the case.

Vance called the ruling “illegal,” writing on X that “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”

Musk, the owner of X, wrote on his platform that Engelmayer “needs to be impeached NOW” and shared a post floating the idea of ignoring the order.

“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,” the post reads.

Trump’s bid to end birthright citizenship, his federal employee deferred resignation offer, and his fight to resume his massive spending freeze are among several of his other efforts that have come to a halt in the courts, for now.

Thomas Moukawsher, a retired judge, called the idea of the Trump administration flouting court orders “worrying” in an op-ed.

Attorney Norm Eisen, one of Trump’s top legal nemeses and a driving force behind several of the lawsuits against the current administration, explained why he thought the country was already in the “first stage” of a “constitutional crisis.”

Trump’s executive actions are “illegal,” Eisen told the Washington Examiner, pointing to the “extraordinary volume of litigation and so many courts enjoining so many major initiatives in the past few days alone.”

‘I always abide by the courts’

Trump tempered anxieties on Tuesday about a forthcoming crisis, telling reporters he plans to follow judges’ rulings.

“I always abide by the courts, and then I’ll have to appeal it, but then what [a judge has] done is he’s slowed down the momentum,” Trump said.

Eisen said Trump’s multiple gag order violations during Trump’s criminal and civil proceedings were evidence that Trump is willing to disobey the courts.

“I know Donald Trump is perfectly capable of violating court orders, but the consequences if he does it are going to be calamitous,” Eisen said, predicting Trump would not want to “take a chance on the backlash” that would arise.

How the courts could respond

On Monday, the White House got a taste of how a judge would react if it failed to follow a court order.

Judge John McConnell, an Obama appointee based in Rhode Island, found the Trump administration had violated the “plain text” of a temporary restraining order by failing to restore some funding it had previously frozen as part of its broader funding pause.

The judge noted that the move “generally [risks] criminal contempt” and ordered the Trump administration to comply with the order immediately.

Blackman said civil or criminal contempt findings were a possible next step, and they would likely be directed at specific officials, rather than the president himself.

If contempt is found against a Trump administration official, a judge could “impose a monetary fine. It could be incarceration. You can lock up officials, saying, ‘If you don’t comply, we will order the marshal to arrest you.’”

Blackman noted, though, that violations at this stage could be “more incompetence than malfeasance” because of the sheer volume and quick pace of the developments.

“I think so long as there is good faith efforts to comply in a short period of time, I think there’s a lot of grace that can happen,” Blackman said.

Defying the Supreme Court

Many of the lawsuits jamming up Trump’s agenda appear on track to land in front of the Supreme Court in the coming months and years.

Trump, known for bucking norms, could refuse to abide by the high court’s decisions if they are unfavorable to him, and there is little precedent for what would happen next.

“I think, at that point, the Supreme Court can’t force him to do it,” Blackman said. “They don’t have an army. They don’t have a militia. I don’t feel like people like thinking about this scenario. I think it’s not only unlikely, but it’s probably almost impossible for it to actually happen.”

President Andrew Jackson took a famously defiant tone with Chief Justice John Marshall in the 1830s following the Supreme Court’s ruling over a state law about Georgia’s seizure of Cherokee lands.

“John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it,” Jackson said, according to legend.

Historians say Jackson did not, in practice, outright defy the high court, despite taking no action to enforce its ruling before he left office.

Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer, two former senior attorneys in the federal government, wrote that if the Trump administration were to flout the Supreme Court, the move would involve a swath of prominent lawyers putting their legal careers in jeopardy. That scenario, however, amounted to “histrionics” at this stage, they said.

“In the days, weeks, and months ahead, the White House counsel and his staff, the attorney general, the head of [the Office of Legal Counsel] and his or her team, and many other lawyers in this administration will have choices to make in meeting the president’s expectations and demands,” the pair said. “They all understand that they have professional ethical obligations independent of whatever loyalty they owe to the president and the administration.”

Biden-era court criticism

The Biden administration, by comparison, did little to rattle the judiciary branch, but it desperately searched for loopholes to overcome the Supreme Court’s ruling that canceling college debt for tens of millions of people was unconstitutional.

President Joe Biden attempted to erase about $430 billion of debt, but the high court found he had overplayed his hand.

“Our precedent—old and new—requires that Congress speak clearly before a Department Secretary can unilaterally alter large sections of the American economy,” Justice John Roberts wrote in 2023.

The Biden administration did not defy the order and instead took a scalpel to existing debt relief programs, leading to the cancelation of about $188 billion in student debt.

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), meanwhile, voiced criticisms similar to that of some current Republicans over an abortion-related ruling during Biden’s presidency.

In April 2023, Judge Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed judge in Texas whom Republicans have turned to in hopes of seeing success with long-shot cases, invalidated the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the abortion pill mifepristone. The Supreme Court unanimously overturned Kacsmaryk’s decision, but not before Ocasio-Cortez suggested the Biden administration should not enforce Kacsmaryk’s order.

“I believe that the Biden administration should ignore this ruling,” Ocasio-Cortez told CNN at the time. “What they are currently doing is engaged in an unprecedented and dramatic erosion of the legitimacy of the courts.”

When the show host asked Ocasio-Cortez to clarify if she supported the government ignoring a federal court ruling, Ocasio-Cortez reversed course and said no, but she added, “I do think that it raises these important questions.”